Every year, it feels as if the average project is becoming more complicated. As clients look to take advantage of new technology and new services, they find themselves increasingly having to run complex programmes that draw on the expertise of multiple different third-party providers. This creates a whole new set of challenges not only for project managers, but also for client procurement teams.
So, it is hardly surprising that there is interest from clients in intelligent platforms that can help them streamline the complex task of buying professional services. Since launching in 2015, Globality has been helping clients make sense of the complex landscape of service providers. We spoke to their CCO, Diego Barillà, and Ashutosh Parande, VP for Provider Success, about what their platform could mean for what the project of the future could look like.
Can you tell me a little about how Globality works? What problem are you setting out to solve?
Diego: Globality is, to date, the only sourcing solution specifically designed to cater to the buying and selling of complex services. By complex services, we mean primarily consulting and technology services, but also marketing, HR and legal services.
Our platform uses natural language processing to understand the intent of our clients and help them scope their needs. With services like consulting, there's no ready-made template you can use to define your buying requirements—it's not like buying goods. So, our platform asks the user highly tailored questions in order to compile a brief on their behalf. Then, it identifies the service providers best placed to respond to that brief, with the ultimate aim of ensuring the client finds the best possible provider for their requirements.
I've been in the procurement space for 20 years; there's a playbook for almost everything these days. But the one place where that playbook is basically just a couple of blank pages is complex services. The buying of consulting services, for example, is still driven primarily by relationships—clients aren't basing their buying decisions on data, or on an informed sense of how well they'll be able to work with a potential provider. That's why Globality has focused on this space.
How do you cultivate the supplier network that Globality draws on to find service providers for your clients?
Ashutosh: To grow our supplier networks, we have dedicated teams made up of sector experts. For consulting, for example, our sector team created a taxonomy of service offerings—then mapped our existing network against that taxonomy. That allowed us to see where we needed to find more providers, and where there were services clients were asking for that weren't represented in our network. Once we understand that gap, we then use the same team of experts to find new suppliers and classify and vet them before incorporating them into our network.
When we look at new suppliers to potentially add to our network, our focus is on expertise: We want to make sure that our clients are working with providers who are true experts in their field. And normally, those providers also have something on top of that expertise that helps distinguish them from the competition and gives clients a reason to work with them over some of the larger firms—for example, they might have a specific methodology they've developed.
Diego: Our platform operates in an open environment: It will look at the providers that the client is already using, and then augment those providers with a network that we have developed. For example, if a client is already working with a Big Four firm, our platform can identify when their needs are best met by that firm—or even a specific area of competence by a subsidiary within that firm. But it can also offer alternatives from our network of independent firms, when one of those firms might be best placed, in terms of cost and quality, to deliver a piece of work.
If platforms like Globality become more common, what impact will that have on how providers find clients and sell their services?
Ashutosh: Our platform makes life a lot easier for service providers; it takes away a lot of the work you'd otherwise have to do finding clients and explaining to them exactly what it is that you do. We think of ourselves as, effectively, a business development partner for many of the providers we work with.
Platforms like Globality can enable more complex, multistakeholder relationships between clients and service providers. For example, a client might select a provider through our network, and agree that they use the platform to select further partners downstream. And because it's all going through the same portal, the original client has visibility into what vendors are being brought into the process and how they are performing.
Diego: Even if you're a larger service provider—a McKinsey, say—it's unlikely that your average client will understand the full range of services that you offer. Platforms like Globality can help expose your clients to areas of your business that they may not have previously worked with.
Small service providers don't have the person-hours to spend months or years walking the corridors of their clients, developing relationships and explaining who they are and what they're good at. But those activities will be less important in the future: platforms like Globality will allow service providers to immediately get in front of clients who have a need for their services.
When an organisation starts using Globality, does that change the way they need to think about their procurement teams?
Diego: We often talk about how our platform enables clients to shift to a ‘self-service’ procurement model. What that means is that a lot of the actions that surround buying decisions can be taken directly by the people who will be the final recipients of the service being purchased. It doesn't mean that there's no room for procurement teams; in fact, it often means that there's a much closer level of collaboration between procurement and the rest of the business.
Most procurement people we talk to about Globality are excited about the impact it will have on their workload. Because what Globality removes is a lot of the tedious research work—the repetitive back and forth on redline excel documents between stakeholders and providers and procurement teams. At the same time, it expands the breadth of their reach in an unprecedented way.
One of the chronic challenges for procurement teams is that, often, the business stakeholders don’t bring them into buying decisions until the very end of the process, when decisions have already been made and all that’s left is pushing paperwork around. But through Globality, those procurement teams can have visibility much earlier in the process—and can start acting as strategic advisers to the rest of the business. That not only creates value for the organisation, it also makes the job much more attractive in terms of development opportunities.
Ashutosh: One thing we hear a lot from our clients is that Globality helped them to reduce friction within their organisation. It allows for much easier collaboration across geographies, or between business stakeholders and procurement teams.
What do you think will be the key drivers of growth for the Globality platform over the next few years?
Diego: Right now, our focus is on the most complex services. But we believe that wherever clients need to define a scope of work and select the right supplier, there will be opportunities to create value by using artificial intelligence and natural language processing to help interpret client needs and identify the right providers. That’s why, in the future, we see ourselves as expanding into other service categories, such as R&D, engineering, facility management, cybersecurity services, and so on.
We expect that part of our future growth will be driven by new functionality. A lot of it is a function of the data we can accumulate and the machine learning tools we can apply to it; the more that we can recognise patterns in supplier data, the more that we can start providing next generation guidance and support to stakeholders and procurement professionals. We want to be able to give them more guidance on pricing ranges, and to help them identify provider best practices. And we want to understand the factors that correlate with winning bids so that we can apply that learning to help clients and providers optimise their practices.
