In the first part of this post, I linked to a column that examined how social media is already starting to transform aspects of HR applications at the core, not at the periphery. I firmly believe that social media and social interaction can transform procurement as well, even though it faces a number of challenges in our neck of the universe relative to HR (the most important to overcome will be the generally less social, less interactive side of procurement and operations types relative to bubbly HR folks). But if we can overcome the initial hurdle of showing the power of social interaction within procurement, I have no doubt that social media capabilities will eventually catch hole permanently, and transform the collaboration capabilities of many of the applications we already work with going forward.
What are use cases for social media and social interaction in procurement? One that is quite clear and valuable is in the area of supplier qualification, discovery, risk and performance management. Rather than simply request periodic qualitative comments and quantitative scorecard metrics, I could see a dynamic application that includes both inter- and intra-enterprise data — aggregate information in the case of the latter — that lets users share information and ask questions. For example, a user might post an update such as: “I’m going to supplier XYZ tomorrow for a visit and site audit — anything to look out for, and questions worth asking that might be out of the ordinary?” which in turn would be posted both internally, to peers, but potentially externally as well, to a private group of colleagues (potentially blinded and aggregated)…
