A victory for transparency...and a warning for public sector procurement?

"Organisations tend to be less stupid when they know the public can see how stupid they are." - Nick Booth, Podnosh

Four years ago I was part of an HMG team trying to persuade 43,000 UK public sector organisations to save vast sums of money through buying collaboratively.   Our crusade wasn't exactly an enormous success: simply because back in 2007 saving money wasn't even in the top fifty list of Government priorities. A less sexy agenda it's hard to imagine: back then, noone really gave a fig how money was being spent in the nooks and crannies of the wider public sector: not the media, nor the public, nor local authorities and nor even, frankly, our own Treasury ministers.

Fast forward four years past the financial crisis, the MPs expenses scandal, a general election and Eric Pickles.  Saving money  - or at least, spending money responsibly and accountably - is now top of everyone's agenda. And with the help of the Coalition Government's transparency and open data policy and the huge power of new social media tools and platforms, it has never been easier for the curious or the crusading to find out how much is being spent, and what on.   Today, an ordinary member of the public probably has access to more and better spend information than a senior civil servant sitting in the Office of Government Commerce would have done just a year or two ago.

Whether or not this new transparency is a good thing, however, all depends on who you are and what kind of procurement crimes you may have committed in the last few years.  

As the London Borough of Barnet Council recently discovered...when a group of dogged local "citizen" bloggers managed to unearth evidence  - through FOI requests and Companies House searches - of Barnet Council's rather dodgy "relationship" with a security firm called MetPro (now out of business).  Last week the findings of an internal audit were announced:  including the troubling revelation that the council had spent £1.3 million with MetPro with no tendering exercise, no written contract or SLA, no formal authorisation, no proper invoicing... thus violating just about every CPR that Barnet had.  


Cue some serious questions about Barnet's finance, audit and procurement processes, and some serious embarrassment for the cabinet and senior officers of this so-called "flagship council: especially so given Barnet is one of the councils planning mass outsourcing of services imminently. 

My hunch is that there are two reasons this happened. One, Barnet's service teams and procurement teams aren't talking to each other.  Two, Barnet's procurement team made classic mistakes that could easily have been avoided with a proper central contracts register (which Barnet doesn't have) and some basic supplier intelligence homework (which many local authorities skip through "lack of time"). Barnet didn't do even the most basic of checks before engaging MetPro: financial, criminal, health and safety, nada.  Noone ever picked up that services procured locally with 3 different MetPro trading names were actually all with the same vendor. And corporate procurement only kept a list of the top ten vendor names by spend for each category, not all vendors over tender limits

In the bigger picture, however, this is a wake up call for procurement everywhere. Organisations need to be constantly vigilant that their procurement processess are both A) appropriate and B) being followed - because if they are not, someone else is going to point it out for them, potentially causing huge damage to corporate, political and personal reputations.  There are many communities of developers and digital activists making huge progress cleaning, sorting and making sense of the spend data tsunami coming out of central and local government: such as LinkedGov and Openly Local . For journalists (whether professional or citizen), this stuff is a hundred Christmases come at once. Ominously for Barnet,  the call has already gone out via Twitter for more developers, researchers and digital campaigners to help examine the rest of the council's spending to see if there are any more MetPros on the books.

And just in case you're reading this blog from an ivory tower in the private sector, thanking your lucky stars no FOI requests will be coming your way, think again.  As outsourcing of public services accelerates, the Government is clearly hoping that greater transparency will protect the public against poor value, ill thought through contracts with private sector firms (PFI, anyone?) It is only a matter of time (one more Southern Cross?) before transparency requirements are extended in some shape or form to private firms which provide public services.



PS The final irony of the Barnet case is that one of the duties MetPro performed for Barnet was secretly (or so they thought) filming residents who attended council meetings, and monitoring the blogs of those who wrote about them.  If MetPro had not been as inept and Keystone Cop-pish in their efforts as Barnet were in commissioning them, this particular procurement crime might never have come to light.

How many years of your life have you wasted....

... on boring, mostly useless awaydays, conferences and management team retreats?

Be honest.

Over the years I've been to a fair few. Whether it's a concrete Hilton in Baltimore or a country house hotel in Bath: whether we're sitting on beanbags in a wacky Clerkenwell "design space", old tyres in a muddy field, or hard backed chairs in a windowless Helsinki basement, I feel like I've seen it all... and it's rarely much good.

Yes, some conferences are lavish.  One of my former employers hired out the whole of Beijing's Forbidden City for a conference closing party for its top 400 global managers. Cost millions.  Another time, we ended up down a salt mine in Krakow.


Some are impressive merely by who else is present. I've never been to Davos, but I imagine when you've paid $150,000 to attend, you're going to come home raving about it whether or not you shared a ski lift with Angelina Jolie.

But for me, all these fancy trimmings are just sugar to help some seriously nasty conference medicine go down.
Is there a universal rule that the bigger the title the keynote speaker has, the duller his or her speech will be?
Or that you must get yourself stuck in plenary sessions dominated by sponsors' agenda, not your agenda? Or trapped in a neverending panel session that bears no resemblance to the topic advertised, where audience questions are taken in threes so they don't have to be answered properly?
Or worst of all, get involved in a brainstorm where lots of good intentions and ideas are generated that everyone knows will never make it out of the break-out room?

 There's something both inspiring and depressing about being asked to organise an internal conference or awayday. You start with a blank sheet of paper, full of possibility and potential.  Then before you know it, you've got an agenda of information-heavy powerpoint presentations that are "vital" for various, mainly political, reasons and you're wondering how you're going to fit in time to let the attendees go to the loo.

Or at least, all that was what I thought it had to be before I came across the "Unconference".

Unconferences take everything you thought you knew about conferences and turn it on its head.

1) The object of an unconference is not to make money. They are cheap to organise and even cheaper to attend. The most I've ever paid to attend one is £5. Many are free.  There are no money-spinning exhibition halls. There may be a few sponsors to help pay for the room hire, but they keep a low profile: definitely no overt selling or hogging of agendas.

2) Due to 1), they usually aren't in glamorous occasions. Less Honolulu, more Birmingham. A students' union building out of term time, not a five star hotel.

3) Due to 1), there are no glossy delegate packs or goody bags.  Registration at an unconference consists of handing over your fiver and writing your name and Twitter name on a sticker. If they've found an extra sponsor, you may also get a raffle ticket that doubles as a beer token.

4) Most importantly of all, there's rarely an agenda. And there are NEVER any keynote speakers or plenary sessions.  Usually what happens is this:

The unconference leaders invite everyone to gather around - standing up, ideally - and introduce themselves.  Name, where you're from, and the answer to a random question like "what word best summarises you or why you're here?" (Last week I went to an Unconference where 120 people took less than half an hour total to introduce themselves. The week before I went to a conventional leadership retreat where 30 people took more than an hour to introduce themselves....)

Then come the session pitches.  Attendees take it in turns to go to the front and pitch an idea for a 40 minute session they'd like to lead.  Unless the rest of the attendees *really* don't like the idea (last week a man pitching something about Sharepoint, for example, got soundly booed), the session idea gets written onto a post it and stuck on a white board.

Once the crowd has run out of ideas, the Unconference leaders take a few minutes to sort the ideas out into a schedule for the day for each of the available meeting rooms.  Pitchers who've suggested similiar ideas may be asked to share a session, and if the Unconference leaders are sensible they'll make sure that sessions on similar themes won't be scheduled at the same time.  Once that's done, there's some brief chaos as attendees study the whiteboard and scribble down times and locations of the sessions they're interested in, and the Unconference is properly underway.

One other great characteristic of an Unconference is that attendees are encouraged to vote with their feet. If you find yourself in a session that turns out to be less than relevant or interesting, it's entirely OK to leave and find another more up your street. And knowing that, most session leaders try very hard to keep things entertaining.  Audience interaction is strongly encouraged: most Unconference sessions turn into an open discussion in which anyone can venture an opinion, ask a question,  share a story or offer a solution. 

Traditional Powerpoint presentations are almost unheard of, although screenshots are sometimes shown on a big screen, or websites mentioned in the discussion will be brought up.  Social media plays a big part too: some in the room will invariably be sending tweets with the session hashtag - allowing people who can't be in the room to join in the conversation.  Others might be liveblogging or livestreaming: literally recording the highlights and learnings of the discussion as it happens, so there's no danger of anything being lost.

It's hard to convey the experience of an Unconference until you've tried one.  They leave you feeling inspired, informed, engaged, and better connected.  Try one for yourself and see.

If you build it, they won't necessarily come

I’ve been meaning for a while to write something on a subject dear to all procurement managers’ hearts:  how to use the wonders of social media to exchange gossip – sorry, valuable market and supplier intelligence – with peers and colleagues in reasonable privacy and security.

And I still am planning to write about that – it’s just going to have to wait for next time.  Because this week I want to pick up on Steve Hall’s recent Procurement Leaders blog, in which he got straight to it and argued that social media isn’t catching on in Procurementsville because it’s pretty useless to non-marketers.

Now, I don’t blame the more hardened cynical brethren among you in the procurement jury for being… well, cynical about social media.  It’s new, young people like doing it, and it’s on TV all the time.  Sounds dodgy already.

But let’s look at Steve’s case for the prosecution, which is:

a) a witness (a friend who apparently knows a lot about social media) who has tried several new tools and then stopped using them after a couple of weeks because they don’t generate enough value.

b) a claim that suppliers and buyers already have adequate tools to communicate – social media doesn’t offer anything new

c) an argument that social media ROI is too hard to calculate unless it’s directly linked to sales

d) the concern that social media isn’t interesting or powerful unless it’s open to all-comers (which would make closed loop or internal-only tools pretty pointless)

(Is that a fair summary, m’lud?)

First off, the defence is quite worried about Steve’s witness – his social media friend.  You MUST have a strategy before you rush off adopting any tools.  What (and whose) problem are you trying to address? Is social media the answer to the problem? Then decide which tool would be the best solution. And finally – what’s your implementation plan? Who will participate? Do you need a facilitator, manager or moderator? How will you sell it in? What management support/internal policy do you need to encourage participation? How can you integrate it with offline and face-to-face communications? Is training required?

Without any of this, I am not altogether surprised that Steve’s friend had a rather lonely and unsatisfying experience trying out some of his new playthings.  Social media is by its nature social – you need other people to come and play. And two weeks is not nearly long enough to lure sufficient people to play with you to make it interesting – let alone to know whether it’s going to be useful.

Secondly, I am far from being sure that suppliers and buyers already have adequate tools to communicate.  Just ask any supplier who’s wrestled with entering data into a screwed-up  (insert name of most hated software here) RFP template whose fields are completely inappropriate for his industry at 11pm the night before submission deadline.  Or a buyer sick of answering the same questions about the screwed up RFP template 12 times from 12 different bidders.

Or a buyer in one small part of the public sector who has no way of knowing whether anyone else in the public sector is experiencing the same problems with sourcing an item/dealing with supplier X/adapting that template.   Social media tools can offer solutions to all these common problems and more.

And how do you know if it’s working?  You’ll know.  But if you need to prove it, which often you do, ask.  Collect feedback through the social media channels themselves. Add a question to 360° CAFs and feedback surveys on communication, information accessibility and relationship quality: has it improved since the introduction of social media tools?  Look at the data, too: sign up and participation rates, both to the tools themselves and also to the initiatives, meetings, conferences, collaborative deals, white papers they promote and develop.

And there, because this is only a blog for the defence, my case must rest for now.  I’d love to know what you, the jury think.

(Some will notice I haven’t tackled Steve’s final point: can and should social media ever be private? I’ll be addressing that in my next post, I promise.)

Faddish CEOs and hulahooping apps: how procurement can dodge common social media bullets

BAM!   A BA Highlife magazine lands on your keyboard.  You eye it warily…it’s rather dog-eared and you don’t even want to think about whose sticky, germ-ridden in flight fingers have handled it for the whole month of February….

“I was reading about this social media stuff on the plane back from Belarus/Brussels/Bogota,” says your Highlife-lobbing CEO over her shoulder, as she heads into her office in a whirl of Burberry trench coat and cabin baggage.

“ Tweeting.  Yammering.  Or is it Hullabalooing?  Anyway… it seems to be huge. What are we doing about it?  And ‘apps’, for instance: it sounds like we should definitely have some of those.   Sort it out, would you, old chap – sounds like an IT sourcing one! ”

Your heart sinks.  As if you didn’t have enough on your plate already. You haven’t got a clue what yammering is, but you’re pretty certain it isn’t included in scope of your current exhaustive and exhausting negotiations with your biggest software provider.  You consider the odds that your boss will have forgotten all about hulahooping apps by the time your team has researched them and identified some potential suppliers… but you have a sneaking feeling that it’s just the sort of “innovative” thing she likes to mention in quarterly results calls ….

In just about any other category of spend, such a random, unstrategic nightmare would be unthinkable in a professional self-respecting organisation.   But when it comes to social media, this scenario is played out every day in corporate HQs across Europe.   An unholy mixture of media hype, peer-envy, panic and a huge dose of blind ignorance in the C-Suite can conspire to trigger investment in social media “initiatives” which never really catch on.   Eighteen months and significant sums of time, money and credibility expended later, it’s tempting for exasperated CIOs, CPOs and CMOs to mutter under their breaths, “Well it wasn’t MY idea…”

But it doesn’t have to be this way.    Don’t be discouraged by your apparent ignorance of social media. Regardless of whether you know what yammering is at the start of the process (see below if you are curious to find out!), insist that your organisation applies strategic, rigorous discipline to these decisions.  What business problem are we really trying to solve, and for whom?  What are the strategic options?  Is a social networking or social media approach one of them?  (Beware of social media agencies telling you that social media is always the answer – when you are a hammer, after all, everything looks like a nail).

What criteria will we use to evaluate these options?  And then – and only then – which social media tool/s might help us deliver, and how do we evaluate these?   This involves, very simply, a crystal clear understanding of the end user’s real needs and very firm discipline when it comes to value for money, total cost of ownership, ROI measurement and risk management: habits which should be second nature for any good procurement manager.   Do you really need to build or buy an expensive customised enterprise platform, when a Google product provides the same benefits instantly, more simply, more accessibly, and for free?


**Jargon guide**
Twitter:  free micro blogging service, open to all to “tweet” on it .  Extremely interactive and flexible: great for real time news, external and internal comms, customer service, feedback, research, content sharing.  Capability limited for highly confidential information exchanges.

Yammer:   micro blogging service designed for internal corporate use.   Offers more security than Twitter.   Freemium model (monthly fee per user charged for full service).

Audioboo (referred to by Peter Smith as “Hullabaloo”):   Mobile app and website which allows very easy recording, posting and sharing of audio files.  Freemium model.

App:  piece of software, often designed for a smartphone, which helps someone achieve a specific task, eg check-in for a flight or scan groceries to a list.

It’s a revolution, Jim, but not as we know it; social media makes a difference

Last Friday evening,  I was at the gym, half watching CNN’s coverage of the Mubarak resignation, when a local pundit came on air tearfully to thank Mark Zuckerberg – founder of Facebook – for making the Egyptian revolution happen.

Other than our emotional Egyptian pundit, perhaps, no one else is arguing that social media was the cause of the deep public dissatisfaction in Egypt and Tunisia which ultimately forced their Presidents to step down.   (While Zuckerberg has never seemed the most modest of men, I suspect even he would feel a little sheepish about taking all the credit for that one.)  There is a little more debate over how far social media activity materially influenced the coverage of the uprisings in the traditional media such as newspapers, radio and TV…although as virtually all newspapers, radio and TV in north Africa and the Middle East are censored, and one could argue that the UK media is pretty irrelevant to the outcome, that seems a bit of a moot point.

But one thing is very clear about the last few weeks in Egypt and Tunisia.  Social media tools can play huge role in accelerating change.
-          We saw incredibly fast information sharing: real time casualty figures from streets and hospitals posted on Twitter, a set of Flickr photos showing minutes-old propaganda SMS messages sent by the Egyptian government, and hours- old YouTube video footage of the military clashing with protesters.
-          We also saw information reaching far more people.  While much was still shared by word of mouth on the streets of Tunisian and Egyptian cities, social media played a crucial role in keeping the people in remoter locations and overseas up to date on what was going on.   New stats from Chartbeat show that 71% of the huge traffic to Al Jazeera’s English language site immediately following Mubarak’s resignation announcement was coming from social media sites – the vast majority from Twitter.
-          We also saw networking and coordination taking place through social media.   Grass roots activists, who had never before met, found each other through Facebook and Twitter.  New leaders emerged, and demonstrations and protests began to be organised – far faster and more efficiently than if people had relied on leaflets, noticeboards, face to face meetings or even just phone calls and emails.
-          And it seems there was one final accelerating effect of social media during the protests: that of mobilizing ordinary people to act, by giving everyone a voice, making them feel informed and involved and crucially, not alone but part of something much bigger.

I wouldn’t presume to liken even the most burning corporate platform (no, not even Nokia’s) to the Tunisian or Egyptian regimes, nor the most radical internal change programme to the subsequent revolutions.  But it is impossible not to be inspired by the way we’ve all seen social media tools help to bring about previously unthinkable change so quickly, simply and cheaply.   Could it do the same in your organisation?

Social media – it’s here and it ain’t going anywhere

The man seated next to me, whose eyes were already wandering towards the buffet table even though the social media training session had only been in progress for six minutes, could contain himself no longer:

“No disrespect, but I work in PROCUREMENT!  I don’t have time for all this social media marketing nonsense,” he snapped.  “I couldn’t care less about the minutiae of teenagers’ tedious lives,  I’m quite sure they don’t want to hear about mine, and I certainly don’t want my team wasting company time on gimmicky fads – we’re hard pressed enough as it is.  Now can we please have a drink?”
“Rupert” (let’s call him), the man in question, was an intelligent, very successful head of procurement in his forties who’d had a long, tiring day and needed a beer.   I – a social media strategist – was trying to show him and his colleagues how social media can be used to help tackle real business challenges.   It wasn’t an ideal scenario.

“Rupert, I think I love you.” I replied. “You couldn’t have captured more perfectly in one sentence every myth going about social media if you’d tried.  Let me get you a cold beer, then let’s tackle these myths one by one.”

1)      Social media is all about connecting people who care about the same things that you do.  Yes, you work in procurement. But you also work for a company or organisation trying to achieve complex goals in an increasingly interconnected world, where information exchanges are now taking place through social media rather than newspapers, TV or even email.  The question should be: how can you afford to ignore or isolate your team from this critical information in a highly competitive marketplace?
2)      Social media isn’t a fad, and won’t disappear.  It is only going to become more prevalent.  Everyone your organisation recruits who is born after 1985 (known as “Millenials”), and all of your Millenial customers or service users, will have grown up with a socially-connected, digitally-oriented mind set and capability: it is as deeply ingrained as their first language.
3)      Social media is not about marketing.   Big consumer brands with big marketing budgets were among the early adopters of social media tools, networks and spaces, and still tend to grab all the headlines. But social media has a huge amount to offer disciplines like procurement in terms of more effective, more cost- and time- efficient collaboration, communication, creativity, customer service, market and supplier research.
4)      Social media ≠ “wasting time on Facebook”.   Yes, Facebook has half a billion users.  But there are many other more useful and appropriate networks and social tools that you’d probably choose ahead of Facebook to help you serve your internal customers in remote locations better, for example, or to pre-qualify potential suppliers.

PS: I’m happy to report that with a beer in his hand, and reassurance that no one was asking him to post photos of his last stag ski trip to St Anton on the company intranet, Rupert was a lot more receptive to hearing about how social media could help make his life easier.

This blog was originally written for and published on Spend Matters UK.