There are many reasons why the Commonwealth of Virginia’s eVA initiative has been enduringly successful these past 25 years. The following is one of the most important reasons:
Performance-Based Vendor Compensation
Virginia negotiated an innovative arrangement where “CGI accepted the Commonwealth’s offer to be paid a percentage based on the volume of orders processed through the system.” This alignment meant “CGI had the necessary impetus to ensure that eVA became ‘effectively’ operational as quickly as possible,” while Virginia avoided focusing “exclusively on cost justification whereby the ROI would have been years down the road.”
The question this raises is why Virginia’s success continues to be the exception rather than the rule.
Today’s post exposes a fundamental conflict of interest that undermines the entire ProcureTech selection ecosystem. Most solution providers have powerful financial incentives to avoid or suppress poor Hansen Fit Scores, creating a systematic bias against honest readiness assessment.
The Revenue Imperative vs. Implementation Success
ProcureTech vendors face quarterly revenue targets, sales compensation structures, and investor growth expectations that directly conflict with honest fit assessment. A poor Hansen Fit Score means lost deals, missed quotas, and difficult conversations with prospects about their organizational shortcomings. Sales teams are rewarded for closing contracts, not for ensuring successful implementations.
Consider the economic reality: if a vendor’s Hansen Fit Score analysis reveals that a prospect has low transformation readiness, the ethical response would be recommending a simpler solution or suggesting organizational development before technology deployment. However, this advice often means directing the prospect toward a competitor’s less sophisticated (and less expensive) platform, or delaying the sale indefinitely.
Information Asymmetry and Selective Disclosure
The evidence suggests most vendors would strategically suppress or reframe poor Hansen Fit Scores. They might:
- Emphasize the technical aspects where they score well while downplaying organizational readiness gaps
- Position low scores as “opportunities for improvement” rather than red flags
- Suggest their platform will solve organizational problems rather than acknowledging it might exacerbate them
- Offer additional consulting services to address gaps (creating revenue opportunities from poor fit)
This creates an information asymmetry where vendors possess critical implementation predictors but have financial incentives to withhold or distort that information.
The Consulting vs. Sales Tension
Hansen’s methodology requires vendors to act as organizational consultants rather than product salespeople. This role conflict is particularly problematic for publicly traded companies with fiduciary duties to shareholders. Recommending against a sale based on poor organizational fit could be viewed as failing to maximize shareholder value, even if it serves the prospect’s long-term interests.
“We have knowingly taken on clients who we knew were clearly not ready, and the likelihood of success would be low. However, we have quarterly targets to meet, so we pushed ahead. Our reasoning was that if we didn’t take it, someone else would, so we convinced ourselves that we were their best chance for success.” – Senior Executive, ProcureTech Solution Provider ($300 million annual revenue and market cap over $1 billion)
Had the assessment revealed poor alignment, would SAP have recommended against their own solution?
Structural Market Failures
This creates several market failures:
Adverse Selection: Vendors with the most sophisticated (and expensive) platforms have the strongest incentives to suppress poor fit scores, leading prospects toward solutions they can’t successfully implement.
Moral Hazard: Knowing that implementation failure risk is hidden from prospects, vendors may oversell capabilities or minimize implementation complexity.
Principal-Agent Problem: Vendor sales teams optimize for their compensation rather than customer success, creating misaligned incentives throughout the sales process.
Potential Solutions and Their Limitations
Independent Assessment: Third-party Hansen Fit Score evaluation could remove vendor bias, but adds cost and complexity that many organizations would resist.
Post-Implementation Penalties: Contracts could include success-based compensation, but defining “success” in procurement transformation is subjective and politically charged.
Regulatory Disclosure: Requiring vendors to disclose fit scores would face fierce industry resistance and enforcement challenges.
The uncomfortable reality is that honest Hansen Fit Score implementation threatens the current ProcureTech business model. Until vendor compensation structures align with implementation success rather than deal closure, most solution providers will have overwhelming incentives to suppress or manipulate readiness assessments, regardless of their stated commitment to customer success.
This suggests that organizations serious about transformation readiness may need to conduct Hansen Fit Score assessments independently, treating vendor-provided evaluations with appropriate skepticism about potential conflicts of interest.
The Uncomfortable Reality
Hansen’s 18-year institutional memory documents an industry that has largely professionalized poor-fit engagement. The development of extensive implementation services, change management consulting, and “transformation” methodologies represents infrastructure built around the assumption that most clients aren’t ready for the technology they’re purchasing.
This suggests the 85-90% figure may actually be conservative – the entire industry architecture appears designed to monetize organizational unreadiness rather than prevent it.
The Hansen Fit Score methodology challenges this fundamental business model, which explains why adoption remains limited despite its apparent utility. Most vendors recognize that an honest fit assessment would eliminate the majority of their addressable market.
TODAY’S TAKEAWAY
The following are the ProcureTech solution providers who have voluntarily allowed us to provide a Hansen Fit Score measuring both their and prospective practitioner client readiness:
30
Procurement Insights Archives: The Janus Project
Janus serves as a powerful symbol for the Procurement Insights Archives because the Roman god’s dual-faced nature perfectly captures Hansen’s unique analytical approach – simultaneously looking backward to understand historical patterns while projecting forward to predict industry evolution.
Procurement Insights
The Uncomfortable Reality: Why Practitioner Readiness And Success Continues To Be SecondaryTo Many ProcureTech Solution Providers
Posted on August 26, 2025
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There are many reasons why the Commonwealth of Virginia’s eVA initiative has been enduringly successful these past 25 years. The following is one of the most important reasons:
Performance-Based Vendor Compensation
Virginia negotiated an innovative arrangement where “CGI accepted the Commonwealth’s offer to be paid a percentage based on the volume of orders processed through the system.” This alignment meant “CGI had the necessary impetus to ensure that eVA became ‘effectively’ operational as quickly as possible,” while Virginia avoided focusing “exclusively on cost justification whereby the ROI would have been years down the road.”
The question this raises is why Virginia’s success continues to be the exception rather than the rule.
Today’s post exposes a fundamental conflict of interest that undermines the entire ProcureTech selection ecosystem. Most solution providers have powerful financial incentives to avoid or suppress poor Hansen Fit Scores, creating a systematic bias against honest readiness assessment.
The Revenue Imperative vs. Implementation Success
ProcureTech vendors face quarterly revenue targets, sales compensation structures, and investor growth expectations that directly conflict with honest fit assessment. A poor Hansen Fit Score means lost deals, missed quotas, and difficult conversations with prospects about their organizational shortcomings. Sales teams are rewarded for closing contracts, not for ensuring successful implementations.
Consider the economic reality: if a vendor’s Hansen Fit Score analysis reveals that a prospect has low transformation readiness, the ethical response would be recommending a simpler solution or suggesting organizational development before technology deployment. However, this advice often means directing the prospect toward a competitor’s less sophisticated (and less expensive) platform, or delaying the sale indefinitely.
Information Asymmetry and Selective Disclosure
The evidence suggests most vendors would strategically suppress or reframe poor Hansen Fit Scores. They might:
This creates an information asymmetry where vendors possess critical implementation predictors but have financial incentives to withhold or distort that information.
The Consulting vs. Sales Tension
Hansen’s methodology requires vendors to act as organizational consultants rather than product salespeople. This role conflict is particularly problematic for publicly traded companies with fiduciary duties to shareholders. Recommending against a sale based on poor organizational fit could be viewed as failing to maximize shareholder value, even if it serves the prospect’s long-term interests.
“We have knowingly taken on clients who we knew were clearly not ready, and the likelihood of success would be low. However, we have quarterly targets to meet, so we pushed ahead. Our reasoning was that if we didn’t take it, someone else would, so we convinced ourselves that we were their best chance for success.” – Senior Executive, ProcureTech Solution Provider ($300 million annual revenue and market cap over $1 billion)
Had the assessment revealed poor alignment, would SAP have recommended against their own solution?
Structural Market Failures
This creates several market failures:
Adverse Selection: Vendors with the most sophisticated (and expensive) platforms have the strongest incentives to suppress poor fit scores, leading prospects toward solutions they can’t successfully implement.
Moral Hazard: Knowing that implementation failure risk is hidden from prospects, vendors may oversell capabilities or minimize implementation complexity.
Principal-Agent Problem: Vendor sales teams optimize for their compensation rather than customer success, creating misaligned incentives throughout the sales process.
Potential Solutions and Their Limitations
Independent Assessment: Third-party Hansen Fit Score evaluation could remove vendor bias, but adds cost and complexity that many organizations would resist.
Post-Implementation Penalties: Contracts could include success-based compensation, but defining “success” in procurement transformation is subjective and politically charged.
Regulatory Disclosure: Requiring vendors to disclose fit scores would face fierce industry resistance and enforcement challenges.
The uncomfortable reality is that honest Hansen Fit Score implementation threatens the current ProcureTech business model. Until vendor compensation structures align with implementation success rather than deal closure, most solution providers will have overwhelming incentives to suppress or manipulate readiness assessments, regardless of their stated commitment to customer success.
This suggests that organizations serious about transformation readiness may need to conduct Hansen Fit Score assessments independently, treating vendor-provided evaluations with appropriate skepticism about potential conflicts of interest.
The Uncomfortable Reality
Hansen’s 18-year institutional memory documents an industry that has largely professionalized poor-fit engagement. The development of extensive implementation services, change management consulting, and “transformation” methodologies represents infrastructure built around the assumption that most clients aren’t ready for the technology they’re purchasing.
This suggests the 85-90% figure may actually be conservative – the entire industry architecture appears designed to monetize organizational unreadiness rather than prevent it.
The Hansen Fit Score methodology challenges this fundamental business model, which explains why adoption remains limited despite its apparent utility. Most vendors recognize that an honest fit assessment would eliminate the majority of their addressable market.
TODAY’S TAKEAWAY
The following are the ProcureTech solution providers who have voluntarily allowed us to provide a Hansen Fit Score measuring both their and prospective practitioner client readiness:
30
Procurement Insights Archives: The Janus Project
Janus serves as a powerful symbol for the Procurement Insights Archives because the Roman god’s dual-faced nature perfectly captures Hansen’s unique analytical approach – simultaneously looking backward to understand historical patterns while projecting forward to predict industry evolution.
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