THE SHORT VERSION FOR BUSY EXECUTIVES
Between 2007 and 2011, I taught procurement readiness across North America through PMAC’s national seminar series. The thesis was simple: implementations fail because of organizational readiness gaps, not technology gaps. The 75–80% failure rate has not changed in 25 years.
In 2023, credentialed professionals independently reviewed my 2011 material and confirmed its predictive accuracy. That methodology is now formalized into an operable diagnostic standard — and, for the first time, structured as a certification.
In the AI era, with EU AI Act deployer accountability requiring auditable decision validation, readiness is no longer professional development.
It is operational infrastructure.
In 2008, I stood in front of a room full of procurement professionals and told them that 75% of their technology implementations would fail.
They didn’t throw me out. They asked me to come back.
For four years, I traveled across Canada delivering two seminar series through PMAC — “Dangerous Supply Chain Myths” and “The Changing Face of Procurement.” I didn’t promote vendors. I didn’t sell software. I showed practitioners the evidence that the industry they worked in was failing at rates nobody wanted to measure — and I challenged them to understand why.
The why was never technology. It was organizational readiness. Or more precisely, the absence of it.
The current CTO of McDonald’s Canada attended one of those sessions in 2008. So did practitioners from John Deere, WorleyParsons, IKO Industries, and dozens of other organizations. The PMAC program coordinator told me students “often travel out of their zones to attend my sessions.”
One participant — Dianne Mowat from the Society of Energy Professionals — said something I’ve never forgotten: “He didn’t promote the latest flavour of procurement… instead he asked us to use common-sense and not allow technology to define our business process.”
That was 2008. That was the thesis. And here’s what happened to that thesis over the next 18 years:
Nothing changed.
The failure rate I documented in 2008 — sourced from Dale Neef (2001), the Wall Street Journal (2005), the Journal of Information Technology (2007) — is the same failure rate Gartner documented in 2019 and 2023. Twenty-five years. Same number. Same causes. Same refusal to measure outcomes.
In September 2023, Sam Bhaskar — MCIPS, CMILT — looked back at my 2011 presentation and wrote: “Your insights were ahead of the curve, much like the evolution we’ve seen in procurement. Your foresight set the stage for this transformation.”
Tom Napier co-signed it: “Jon Hansen was well ahead of this part of the supply chain well over ten years ago.”
Those aren’t testimonials I asked for. Those are credentialed professionals reviewing 12-year-old content and confirming it predicted exactly what happened.
So what did I do with 25 years of evidence that the industry refuses to fix its own problem?
I built the diagnostic instrument.
The Hansen Fit Score. Phase 0 Readiness Assessment. The AGR Index. The Capability-to-Outcome Gap. Five Critical Questions. These aren’t consulting frameworks dressed up in new language. They’re scoring methodologies built on 3,500+ documented observations spanning 2007 to 2025 — the largest independent longitudinal dataset in procurement technology.
And now I’m doing something I should have done years ago.
I’m teaching it.
Today I’m announcing the Hansen Readiness Practitioner (HRP) Certification — a 4-week professional development program that teaches procurement leaders, transformation managers, IT governance leads, and advisory consultants how to independently assess whether their organization is ready to deploy procurement technology. Before committing budget. Before selecting a vendor. Before becoming another statistic in the 80% failure rate.
And here’s what’s different in 2026: we’re no longer just talking about implementation failure. The EU AI Act now requires deployer accountability — meaning organizations using AI-enabled procurement tools must demonstrate that their decisions are auditable, their governance is documented, and their validation is independent. General Counsel is now a procurement technology stakeholder whether procurement leaders realize it or not. The question is no longer just “are we ready to deploy?” It’s “can we prove to a regulator, a board, and an auditor that we validated this decision before we made it?”
This isn’t a webinar series. It’s a certification with a capstone diagnostic, peer review, evidence standards, and a credential that signals to boards and audit committees that the holder can independently assess organizational readiness using a methodology with a 25-year evidence trail.
Alongside the certification, I’m launching the ProcureTech Vendor Assessment Review Series — 90-minute deep dives into each vendor assessment I’ve published. SAP Ariba. Coupa. JAGGAER. Zycus. Ivalua. Every pillar score explained. Every evidence source cited. Every Capability-to-Outcome Gap calculated in front of you.
Here’s why this matters beyond the obvious:
You know the Autodesk story. They put AutoCAD in every architecture and engineering classroom in the world — for free. Graduates walked into firms already fluent in AutoCAD. Firms standardized on it because that’s what their workforce knew. Autodesk didn’t sell to firms. They trained the workforce, and the workforce sold for them. Today Autodesk is a $6 billion company.
The HRP certification is my version of that play. Every certified practitioner returns to their organization fluent in Phase 0, Hansen Fit Scores, and the Five Critical Questions. When their organization faces a procurement technology decision, they don’t call Gartner. They run the diagnostic they were trained to run. And when they need the formal external assessment — the one that’s defensible to the board — they know exactly who to call.
I’m not building a training business. I’m seeding the industry with a measurement standard.
To every practitioner who sat in one of my PMAC sessions between 2007 and 2011 — where are you now? Some of you are CPOs. Some of you are VPs of Supply Chain. Some of you are sitting on transformation committees right now, watching your organization prepare to spend millions on technology it may not be ready to deploy.
You already know the methodology works. You experienced it before it had a scoring framework. Come see what it’s become.
HRP Certification details and Vendor Assessment Review Series schedule coming soon.
Want a head start? Our library of independent vendor assessments and intelligence reports is available now:
🔍 SAP / SAP Ariba — Consolidated Assessment Report 🔍 Coupa Software — Consolidated Assessment Report 🔍 SAP Ariba v. Coupa — Comparative Assessment 🔍 Zycus — Consolidated Assessment Report 🔍 Gartner — Consolidated Assessment Report 📊 AGR Index — AI Governance Readiness Intelligence Report
Each report includes Hansen Fit Score pillar ratings, Capability-to-Outcome Gap analysis, ownership stability assessment, and Five Critical Questions for your organization.
The 80% failure rate has been documented for 25 years. It’s time to stop documenting it and start preventing it.
-30-
Procurement Insights
How Many of Yesterday’s Procurement Professionals Are Today’s Leaders — How Many Will Lead in the AI Era?
Posted on February 11, 2026
0
THE SHORT VERSION FOR BUSY EXECUTIVES
Between 2007 and 2011, I taught procurement readiness across North America through PMAC’s national seminar series. The thesis was simple: implementations fail because of organizational readiness gaps, not technology gaps. The 75–80% failure rate has not changed in 25 years.
In 2023, credentialed professionals independently reviewed my 2011 material and confirmed its predictive accuracy. That methodology is now formalized into an operable diagnostic standard — and, for the first time, structured as a certification.
In the AI era, with EU AI Act deployer accountability requiring auditable decision validation, readiness is no longer professional development.
It is operational infrastructure.
In 2008, I stood in front of a room full of procurement professionals and told them that 75% of their technology implementations would fail.
They didn’t throw me out. They asked me to come back.
For four years, I traveled across Canada delivering two seminar series through PMAC — “Dangerous Supply Chain Myths” and “The Changing Face of Procurement.” I didn’t promote vendors. I didn’t sell software. I showed practitioners the evidence that the industry they worked in was failing at rates nobody wanted to measure — and I challenged them to understand why.
The why was never technology. It was organizational readiness. Or more precisely, the absence of it.
The current CTO of McDonald’s Canada attended one of those sessions in 2008. So did practitioners from John Deere, WorleyParsons, IKO Industries, and dozens of other organizations. The PMAC program coordinator told me students “often travel out of their zones to attend my sessions.”
One participant — Dianne Mowat from the Society of Energy Professionals — said something I’ve never forgotten: “He didn’t promote the latest flavour of procurement… instead he asked us to use common-sense and not allow technology to define our business process.”
That was 2008. That was the thesis. And here’s what happened to that thesis over the next 18 years:
Nothing changed.
The failure rate I documented in 2008 — sourced from Dale Neef (2001), the Wall Street Journal (2005), the Journal of Information Technology (2007) — is the same failure rate Gartner documented in 2019 and 2023. Twenty-five years. Same number. Same causes. Same refusal to measure outcomes.
In September 2023, Sam Bhaskar — MCIPS, CMILT — looked back at my 2011 presentation and wrote: “Your insights were ahead of the curve, much like the evolution we’ve seen in procurement. Your foresight set the stage for this transformation.”
Tom Napier co-signed it: “Jon Hansen was well ahead of this part of the supply chain well over ten years ago.”
Those aren’t testimonials I asked for. Those are credentialed professionals reviewing 12-year-old content and confirming it predicted exactly what happened.
So what did I do with 25 years of evidence that the industry refuses to fix its own problem?
I built the diagnostic instrument.
The Hansen Fit Score. Phase 0 Readiness Assessment. The AGR Index. The Capability-to-Outcome Gap. Five Critical Questions. These aren’t consulting frameworks dressed up in new language. They’re scoring methodologies built on 3,500+ documented observations spanning 2007 to 2025 — the largest independent longitudinal dataset in procurement technology.
And now I’m doing something I should have done years ago.
I’m teaching it.
Today I’m announcing the Hansen Readiness Practitioner (HRP) Certification — a 4-week professional development program that teaches procurement leaders, transformation managers, IT governance leads, and advisory consultants how to independently assess whether their organization is ready to deploy procurement technology. Before committing budget. Before selecting a vendor. Before becoming another statistic in the 80% failure rate.
And here’s what’s different in 2026: we’re no longer just talking about implementation failure. The EU AI Act now requires deployer accountability — meaning organizations using AI-enabled procurement tools must demonstrate that their decisions are auditable, their governance is documented, and their validation is independent. General Counsel is now a procurement technology stakeholder whether procurement leaders realize it or not. The question is no longer just “are we ready to deploy?” It’s “can we prove to a regulator, a board, and an auditor that we validated this decision before we made it?”
This isn’t a webinar series. It’s a certification with a capstone diagnostic, peer review, evidence standards, and a credential that signals to boards and audit committees that the holder can independently assess organizational readiness using a methodology with a 25-year evidence trail.
Alongside the certification, I’m launching the ProcureTech Vendor Assessment Review Series — 90-minute deep dives into each vendor assessment I’ve published. SAP Ariba. Coupa. JAGGAER. Zycus. Ivalua. Every pillar score explained. Every evidence source cited. Every Capability-to-Outcome Gap calculated in front of you.
Here’s why this matters beyond the obvious:
You know the Autodesk story. They put AutoCAD in every architecture and engineering classroom in the world — for free. Graduates walked into firms already fluent in AutoCAD. Firms standardized on it because that’s what their workforce knew. Autodesk didn’t sell to firms. They trained the workforce, and the workforce sold for them. Today Autodesk is a $6 billion company.
The HRP certification is my version of that play. Every certified practitioner returns to their organization fluent in Phase 0, Hansen Fit Scores, and the Five Critical Questions. When their organization faces a procurement technology decision, they don’t call Gartner. They run the diagnostic they were trained to run. And when they need the formal external assessment — the one that’s defensible to the board — they know exactly who to call.
I’m not building a training business. I’m seeding the industry with a measurement standard.
To every practitioner who sat in one of my PMAC sessions between 2007 and 2011 — where are you now? Some of you are CPOs. Some of you are VPs of Supply Chain. Some of you are sitting on transformation committees right now, watching your organization prepare to spend millions on technology it may not be ready to deploy.
You already know the methodology works. You experienced it before it had a scoring framework. Come see what it’s become.
HRP Certification details and Vendor Assessment Review Series schedule coming soon.
Want a head start? Our library of independent vendor assessments and intelligence reports is available now:
🔍 SAP / SAP Ariba — Consolidated Assessment Report 🔍 Coupa Software — Consolidated Assessment Report 🔍 SAP Ariba v. Coupa — Comparative Assessment 🔍 Zycus — Consolidated Assessment Report 🔍 Gartner — Consolidated Assessment Report 📊 AGR Index — AI Governance Readiness Intelligence Report
Each report includes Hansen Fit Score pillar ratings, Capability-to-Outcome Gap analysis, ownership stability assessment, and Five Critical Questions for your organization.
The 80% failure rate has been documented for 25 years. It’s time to stop documenting it and start preventing it.
-30-
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