Last week marked a milestone in Spend Matters' five-year history: We hired our first full-time editorial and marketing resource, Sheena Moore. Sheena, who has a background in advertising and copyediting, will be contributing her skills in a variety of ways to both Spend Matters and our sister publication, MetalMiner, as we continue to scale and grow our business models. Having survived (and sometimes even thrived!) in a large advertising agency earlier in her career, we have no doubt she'll be right at home in the chaos that often is procurement (and most certainly the environment of two fast-growing blogs and research sites covering the subject). After a few days on the job, I asked Sheena to share a few thoughts on her maiden experience with our content corner of the enterprise universe. Here’s what she had to say:

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A fundamental challenge of indirect and services procurement is that we’re often asked to make sourcing decisions -- not to mention negotiating with and managing suppliers -- based on historic data that may or may not reflect future demands and requirements. Travel procurement is the spend poster child for this kind of challenge today. Might the evolution in travel procurement that we’re seeing today represent an even larger paradigm shift that will permanently reshape the function? Perhaps, especially if you believe some of the key tenets presented in a February Wall Street Journal article. According to the story, “Historically, business travelers have accounted for half the customer base of major carriers and an even bigger chunk of their revenue. But even as the airline industry reports that corporate travel has begun to bounce back, many U.S. companies are keeping a tight leash on travel expenses.” From a travel-sourcing perspective, it's more than just volume levers that may be changing permanently.

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This morning, we’d like to welcome back Ryder Daniels to Spend Matters. Ryder is Spend Matters resident tech-ed columnist.

We all know by now that Al Gore invented the Internet and President Bush summarily renamed Google "The Google." Now that that’s out of the way, let's talk about a few simple Google search tricks.

Google can be used as a no-cost method to do lots of interesting things. We'll touch on a few tips today:

• How to use Google to do some competitive intelligence research using the "filetype:ppt" technique
• How to use Google to see if suppliers might be advertising or referencing my company as a client using the "site" technique
• How to look for RFPs to examine questions, strategies, etc.

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Psst. I'm about to let you in on one the most secretive elements of services procurement (let alone regular procurement) success when it comes to identifying, implementing and sustaining results. This cloak-and-dagger subject has nothing to do with hiring the right team, using the best technology or getting the best support through a consulting or managed services provider (MSP). Nor is this secret particularly deep -- it's about as superficial as it gets. What is it? It's specific tips and tactics for marketing services procurement inside your organization. In our jobs, it's important not to underestimate the challenges we face in convincing multiple services spend stakeholders that change is a positive thing. Effecting positive change requires thinking through all of the political, emotional, technical, economic, organizational and power challenges that may disrupt the status quo through procurement's involvement. Overcoming these hurdles requires not just empathy, but also the ability to lead with a clear vision and inspire others to join your cause, bringing them into a success story before the plot has completely unfolded (and allowing them to take credit for results).

What are the best ways to winover spend stakeholders and make them part of your team (versus adversaries) on the path to savings and compliance? Read the latest Spend Matters Compass series research brief to find out. Spend Matters Compass is a free research series aimed at going high and low to answer procurement questions that practitioners need information on. In this latest research, we provide context and concrete tactics to successfully market and evangelize procurement to your broader organization. Our research and fieldwork suggests that procurement organizations who market themselves effectively to the business drive greater identified and implemented savings across both simple and complex services categories.

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This afternoon, Spend Matters would like to welcome back our UK and European Correspondent, Peter Smith.

I had the pleasure of meeting Jason for the first time on his recent trip to the UK, and I was trying to explain to him our rather strange UK political process, which means we know there will be an election before the middle of June -- but we don't know when as of yet.

"Why don't you just have a set date for it?" he asked, and I admit I struggled for an answer. Everybody always gets into a state of over-excitement until the announcement finally comes, and then a sense of anti-climax dawns.

We have had a rash of policy announcements from the opposition Conservative party over the last couple of weeks in readiness for the event. And strangely, virtually every one had a significant procurement / supply chain connection or implication.

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Even though I can think of a million ways to divide the time in my day between different initiatives, the area that's been capturing the highest amount of my attention recently falls into the research arena. Indeed, Spend Matters Compass, our new research offering, is helping establish Spend Matters as more than just a blog or research site -- we're becoming a new type of analyst research house in our own right. In fact, I spent part of the weekend looking at the editorial calendars of other analyst and advisory shops and realized our comparative research agenda was even more ambitious than I realized. Alas, we'll see how much of it we get to by the end of the year, but already, just a few weeks into the program, we will have launched four separate research briefs. This week we're announcing the availability of the third research brief in Compass Series 1 on services procurement, as well as the initial brief for Compass Series 2, a collection of research labeled: Spend Visibility and Beyond -- Analytics Broader Role in Procurement, Risk Management and the Supply Chain (for the high-level planned research calendar for the year, please click here).

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Earlier today, Oracle announced the formal launch of its On Demand suite of procurement products. These solutions, which Oracle labels as Oracle Procurement On Demand should be no surprise to Spend Matters readers (check our recent coverage here and here.) When Oracle actually launched its On Demand procurement capability at OpenWorld last year, I noted: "The full range of Oracle's procurement products are now available in an On Demand delivery format including supplier management, spend analysis, strategic sourcing, contract management, requisitioning and procurement (both buy and settlement). In Oracle's words, what they've essentially done is 'to allow customers to deploy strategic procurement on the cloud with payment options that can still leverage behind-the-firewall ERP.' To support this vision, Oracle continues to plan to deliver hosting capabilities both internally and through partners (their internal delivery capability is limited to a single tenant format which is not true SaaS as others define it)."

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A couple of weeks ago, I re-introduced Spend Matters readers to Supplierforce, a Dublin-based Spend Management software/SaaS suite provider and consultancy with particular strengths in the area of supplier information management. Today I'll conclude my analysis by walking through some of Supplierforce's functional capabilities and its overall solution philosophy and approach. When considering what Supplierforce is trying to do with its platform, it's most important to remember they started by intending to make up for the shortcomings of procurement and supplier management in existing user ERP systems. In this regard, Supplierforce provides a virtual vendor master that allows users to push and pull data from multiple back-end sources to create a unified view of who their company is doing business with, in a way that is nuanced relative to other solutions.

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An upside of crisis can be the inevitable deep analyses that tend to follow. And the recent financial turmoil is no exception -- likely keeping the world's economists at near full employment. An adjunct phenomenon resulting from this process is that many of us have become Monday morning macroeconomic quarterbacks, playing with a minefield of data. In reporting on Federal Reserve figures released yesterday, this morning's WSJ has offered up a trove of new data and interpretation that would have seemed preposterous -- and may still be -- just a short time ago.

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There's been a lot of chatter in the market these past few weeks about acquisitions. Some larger players are clearly headed to Costco to look for warehouse bargains (smaller formats and Ma and Pop shops aren't worth the time for these larger players, it seems). As someone pointed out to me the other day, Ariba has clearly spent quite some time attempting to clean up its top line to show higher-quality SaaS revenues--perhaps to argue for a higher valuation in the SaaS multiple range--while quietly pushing increased CD upgrades in Q1 to show the installed base is still alive. Might Ariba be on the shopping list for these larger players? I'd be surprised if wasn't, but then again, it has been for some time. It's just a question of valuation.

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