They Don’t. But don’t stop reading today’s post.
Look at any major procurement technology framework — Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, Spend Matters’ SolutionMap, Kearney’s Modern Procurement Platform Stack, Dr. Elouise Epstein’s Spider Maps — and ask yourself one question:
What do these tools actually measure?
The answer is consistent across all of them: vendor capability.
What they don’t measure — what none of them even attempt to assess — is organizational readiness.
And that gap is where 80% of implementations go to die.
What Each Framework Actually Measures
Gartner Magic Quadrant
Plots vendors on “Completeness of Vision” vs. “Ability to Execute.” Coupa sits in the Leader quadrant. SAP moves up. Jaggaer holds position.
What it measures: Vendor capability — features, market presence, product roadmap, analyst perception.
What it ignores: Whether your organization can absorb, adopt, or sustain the platform. Coupa’s Leader status tells you nothing about whether an organization scoring 58/100 on readiness can successfully implement it.
Solution Maps and Feature Matrices
Rows of vendors. Columns of capabilities. Yellow boxes and X marks showing who covers ePro, AP/I2P, P2P, Sourcing, Contract Management.
What it measures: Feature coverage. Functional checkboxes.
What it ignores: Fit. A vendor that covers every box but doesn’t match your organizational maturity, process complexity, or behavioral readiness will still fail. The matrix assumes the organization is a neutral recipient of capability. It isn’t.
Kearney’s Modern Procurement Platform Stack
A sprawling ecosystem of 150+ vendors across every conceivable category — from cyber risk to carbon calculation, from contract intelligence to commodity indices.
What it measures: Market landscape. Who exists. What they claim to do.
What it ignores: Everything about the organization deploying these tools. It’s a menu, not a diagnostic. Handing this to a CPO is like handing someone a phone book and saying “pick a contractor” — without asking if they have a building permit, a foundation, or a budget.
Enterprise Architecture Models
Gartner’s “New Enterprise Architecture Operating Models” shows three paradigms: Decentralized IT, Centralized IT, and Business-Outcome-Aligned IT.
What it measures: Structural options for how IT can be organized.
What it ignores: Whether the organization has the maturity, governance, or behavioral alignment to operate any of these models effectively. You can draw the “Business-Outcome-Aligned” box all day — if your cognitive load is at 75% and your execution capacity scores 56/100, the architecture is irrelevant.
STOP IN YOUR TRACK FACT #1:
Estimated Collective Revenue Base (2025 Figures)
The total annual revenue for the companies most closely associated with the proprietary reports is in the tens of billions:
The Common Thread
Every single one of these frameworks answers the question: “What can vendors do?”
None of them answer the question: “What can your organization absorb?”
They measure supply (technology capability).
They ignore demand (organizational readiness).
And the 80% failure rate is the direct result of that asymmetry.
STOP IN YOUR TRACK FACT #2
While the financial cost of failed digital transformation programs is in the trillions of dollars globally, the cost to individual practitioners is immense and often non-quantifiable, primarily manifesting as professional and personal damage.
Based on industry research regarding IT and ERP project failures, here is an assessment of the most significant costs borne by practitioners during the same period:
1. Professional and Career Costs (Quantifiable)
Failed projects directly impact the career trajectory and compensation of the practitioners and leaders most heavily involved.
- Career Stalling/Damage: Leaders (like the CPO, CIO, or Director of Procurement) associated with multi-million dollar failures face stalled careers and reduced future hiring prospects. This applies even if they successfully identified risks but were overruled by leadership (the G&H Abdication Pattern).
- Scapegoating and Termination: Practitioners and middle managers often become scapegoats for executive failure to manage organizational change, leading to involuntary turnover. This is most acute among IT and finance personnel tasked with salvaging the implementation.
- Reputational Damage: Failure can publicly damage the practitioner’s reputation with vendors, partners, and even within the industry. This is particularly true in high-profile legal disputes over failed ERP rollouts.
- Lost Opportunities: Time spent salvaging a failed project is time not spent on growth activities, hindering both individual skill development and career advancement.
2. Emotional and Organizational Costs (Non-Quantifiable)
The non-quantifiable costs often inflict the deepest personal and organizational damage.
- Burnout and Turnover: Projects that drag on without resolution due to poor governance or inadequate change management lead directly to burnout and high voluntary turnover, particularly among key employees who invested significant time and effort. Losing high-performing individuals significantly impacts organizational productivity.
- Erosion of Trust and Morale: Employees’ morale and engagement are severely affected by failure, particularly those most involved. Failed initiatives erode trust in leadership, making future initiatives even harder due to deep-seated cynicism and resistance.
- Loss of Organizational Knowledge: Employee turnover due to failed projects results in the loss of organizational knowledge and skills, which is often overlooked but carries an economic cost of thousands of dollars to more than double the employee’s salary per departing high-performing employee.
- Cognitive Burden: Employees are left disengaged, feeling blindsided, unsupported, and disengaged as system benefits never materialize.
The Hierarchy Problem
The industry treats these frameworks as Layer 1 decision drivers — the starting point for technology selection.
They’re not. They’re Layer 3 inputs.
Here’s how the hierarchy should work.
When you invert this — starting with Layer 3 — you get the industry default:
- Start with the quadrant (“Who’s a Leader?”)
- Select and implement (vendor-led process)
- Discover — too late — that you weren’t ready
- Engage change management rescue
- Join the 80% failure statistics
The Irony of the Arrows
Look at the Magic Quadrant again. Notice the arrows showing vendors moving year over year — Coupa rising, SAP shifting, Ivalua progressing.
The quadrant treats this as progress. Vendors are getting better. Technology is advancing.
But if 80% of implementations fail, those arrows represent capability gains that organizations can’t capture.
The technology is ready. The organizations aren’t.
Gartner said it themselves in November 2025: “Technology is more ready than humans are.”
The quadrant measures the ready part. Nothing measures the unready part.
What Would Actually Help Practitioners?
A framework that answers different questions:
- What’s your behavioral alignment score?
- What’s your execution capacity?
- What’s your process maturity?
- What’s your practitioner cognitive load?
- Is your organization ready to absorb transformation — or will it reject the implant?
Those aren’t vendor questions. They’re organizational questions.
And until the industry starts measuring organizational readiness with the same rigor it applies to vendor capability, the 80% failure rate will persist.
The quadrants will keep publishing. The arrows will keep moving. The vendors will keep landing in the Leader box.
And practitioners will keep implementing technology their organizations can’t absorb.
The Counter-Framework
If you’re a CPO looking at a Magic Quadrant or Solution Map, here’s the question to ask before you engage:
What’s your organization’s readiness score — and does anyone in the room know how to measure it?
If the answer is “we don’t have one,” you’re not ready to select a platform.
You’re ready for Phase 0.
Technology evolves. Organizational dynamics don’t.
References:
- Gartner Magic Quadrant for Procure-to-Pay Suites (August 2021)
- Gartner ThinkCast: “AI Readiness” (November 2025)
- Kearney: “The Modern Procurement Platform Stack”
- The Hackett Group: “What’s failing is tactical adoption instead of organizational readiness” (April 2025)
- Procurement Insights Archive: 180+ transformation cases, 1998-2025
The BIGGEST QUESTION That Needs To Be Answered
Why does the ProcureTech solution side of the table make billions, while the practitioner side loses trillions (and more)?
Procurement Insights
How Do Solution Maps and Quadrants Help Reverse the 80% Failure Rate?
Posted on November 25, 2025
0
They Don’t. But don’t stop reading today’s post.
Look at any major procurement technology framework — Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, Spend Matters’ SolutionMap, Kearney’s Modern Procurement Platform Stack, Dr. Elouise Epstein’s Spider Maps — and ask yourself one question:
What do these tools actually measure?
The answer is consistent across all of them: vendor capability.
What they don’t measure — what none of them even attempt to assess — is organizational readiness.
And that gap is where 80% of implementations go to die.
What Each Framework Actually Measures
Gartner Magic Quadrant
Plots vendors on “Completeness of Vision” vs. “Ability to Execute.” Coupa sits in the Leader quadrant. SAP moves up. Jaggaer holds position.
What it measures: Vendor capability — features, market presence, product roadmap, analyst perception.
What it ignores: Whether your organization can absorb, adopt, or sustain the platform. Coupa’s Leader status tells you nothing about whether an organization scoring 58/100 on readiness can successfully implement it.
Solution Maps and Feature Matrices
Rows of vendors. Columns of capabilities. Yellow boxes and X marks showing who covers ePro, AP/I2P, P2P, Sourcing, Contract Management.
What it measures: Feature coverage. Functional checkboxes.
What it ignores: Fit. A vendor that covers every box but doesn’t match your organizational maturity, process complexity, or behavioral readiness will still fail. The matrix assumes the organization is a neutral recipient of capability. It isn’t.
Kearney’s Modern Procurement Platform Stack
A sprawling ecosystem of 150+ vendors across every conceivable category — from cyber risk to carbon calculation, from contract intelligence to commodity indices.
What it measures: Market landscape. Who exists. What they claim to do.
What it ignores: Everything about the organization deploying these tools. It’s a menu, not a diagnostic. Handing this to a CPO is like handing someone a phone book and saying “pick a contractor” — without asking if they have a building permit, a foundation, or a budget.
Enterprise Architecture Models
Gartner’s “New Enterprise Architecture Operating Models” shows three paradigms: Decentralized IT, Centralized IT, and Business-Outcome-Aligned IT.
What it measures: Structural options for how IT can be organized.
What it ignores: Whether the organization has the maturity, governance, or behavioral alignment to operate any of these models effectively. You can draw the “Business-Outcome-Aligned” box all day — if your cognitive load is at 75% and your execution capacity scores 56/100, the architecture is irrelevant.
STOP IN YOUR TRACK FACT #1:
Estimated Collective Revenue Base (2025 Figures)
The total annual revenue for the companies most closely associated with the proprietary reports is in the tens of billions:
The Common Thread
Every single one of these frameworks answers the question: “What can vendors do?”
None of them answer the question: “What can your organization absorb?”
They measure supply (technology capability).
They ignore demand (organizational readiness).
And the 80% failure rate is the direct result of that asymmetry.
STOP IN YOUR TRACK FACT #2
While the financial cost of failed digital transformation programs is in the trillions of dollars globally, the cost to individual practitioners is immense and often non-quantifiable, primarily manifesting as professional and personal damage.
Based on industry research regarding IT and ERP project failures, here is an assessment of the most significant costs borne by practitioners during the same period:
1. Professional and Career Costs (Quantifiable)
Failed projects directly impact the career trajectory and compensation of the practitioners and leaders most heavily involved.
2. Emotional and Organizational Costs (Non-Quantifiable)
The non-quantifiable costs often inflict the deepest personal and organizational damage.
The Hierarchy Problem
The industry treats these frameworks as Layer 1 decision drivers — the starting point for technology selection.
They’re not. They’re Layer 3 inputs.
Here’s how the hierarchy should work.
When you invert this — starting with Layer 3 — you get the industry default:
The Irony of the Arrows
Look at the Magic Quadrant again. Notice the arrows showing vendors moving year over year — Coupa rising, SAP shifting, Ivalua progressing.
The quadrant treats this as progress. Vendors are getting better. Technology is advancing.
But if 80% of implementations fail, those arrows represent capability gains that organizations can’t capture.
The technology is ready. The organizations aren’t.
Gartner said it themselves in November 2025: “Technology is more ready than humans are.”
The quadrant measures the ready part. Nothing measures the unready part.
What Would Actually Help Practitioners?
A framework that answers different questions:
Those aren’t vendor questions. They’re organizational questions.
And until the industry starts measuring organizational readiness with the same rigor it applies to vendor capability, the 80% failure rate will persist.
The quadrants will keep publishing. The arrows will keep moving. The vendors will keep landing in the Leader box.
And practitioners will keep implementing technology their organizations can’t absorb.
The Counter-Framework
If you’re a CPO looking at a Magic Quadrant or Solution Map, here’s the question to ask before you engage:
What’s your organization’s readiness score — and does anyone in the room know how to measure it?
If the answer is “we don’t have one,” you’re not ready to select a platform.
You’re ready for Phase 0.
Technology evolves. Organizational dynamics don’t.
References:
The BIGGEST QUESTION That Needs To Be Answered
Why does the ProcureTech solution side of the table make billions, while the practitioner side loses trillions (and more)?
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