Welcome to another episode of The Procuretech Podcast!

We're continuing our third series of conversations with industry leaders, which now releases twice a week.
Procurement Media through the Years - Jon Hansen from Procurement Insights
 

This episode, we've got a guest who's been talking about procurement for decades. With a long-standing blog and a podcast that goes all the way back to 2009, it's Jon Hansen of Procurement Insights – the original procurement podcaster.

We're going to talk about everything that's changed in the world of procurement over the course of Jon's long-standing career.

 
Jon's career as a long-standing procurement commentator
Jon's been in the tech industry for more than 40 years, and procurement for almost as long. This has given him experience both as a practitioner and provider.

One of his first business ventures was to start a company with funding from the government. It leveraged algorithms that allowed the Department of National Defence to procure indirect materials for their entire nationwide military installation base. He later moved to doing the same thing for the New York City Transit Authority.

Jon sold that company in 2000, and that's when he began to shift towards blogging.

He'd already had a lot of media experience from interviews in his role as a company founder. When someone in the media world said “why don't you start a blog?”, his first thought was “what's a blog?”.

This was around 2007. By 2009, Block Talk Radio was launched in New York City. With guests from the world of business and procurement, it broadcast a deeper understanding of procurement to an entirely new audience, through an entirely new medium.

Jon jokes that he's always had a face for radio, but he clearly had the talent to match: Some 900 episodes later, the monthly listener base was up to 15,000 a month.

And that eventually dovetailed into where Jon is today with Procurement Insights.

 
Was digital transformation a hot topic back then compared to what it is today?
While it wasn't called transformation back then, it's interesting that a lot of the same issues were still being talked about 20 or 30 years ago.

One of the biggest challenges in the procurement world was that the earlier platforms were ERP based. Procurement personnel and professionals weren't involved in the selection process of that technology. That was a Finance decision.

So there was a great deal of frustration with the majority of ERP implementations. Not that ERP doesn't have a vital role to play. But back then the majority of e-procurement initiatives would fail miserably, costing 10s of millions of dollars.

The emergence of the on demand or SaaS software was exciting. Because that started a shift away from a centralised, monolithic approach to automation, to one that was strategically effective and geared towards the procurement people.

The interesting point, as we track this story over the last 10 or 20 years, is the value of human experience. In 2019, a Deloitte CPOE global survey indicated that the majority of CEOs were dissatisfied with the results of their initiative.

Of course, their ERP technology was...