Scoring the Scorers: The Advisory Ecosystem’s Authority Paradox
By Jon W. Hansen | Procurement Insights
For 27 years, I have documented a pattern that the industry’s dominant advisory firms have never addressed: the gap between what they observe and what practitioners actually achieve.
The chart below is the first public visualization of that gap applied to the advisory ecosystem itself — using the same Hansen Fit Score™ methodology we apply to every ProcureTech vendor in our assessment series.
The finding is straightforward. Every major advisory firm scores above 7.0 on Technology Capability — market observation, vendor categorization, trend identification. None score above 5.5 on Service Delivery Capacity — the measure of whether their guidance translates to practitioner implementation success.
That distance is the Authority Paradox.
Industry implementation failure rates have remained in the 50–80% band for three decades. The dominant advisory model has operated across that entire period. If advisory authority improved outcomes, the failure rate would be declining. It is not.
The question the chart poses is one that no advisory firm has answered publicly: how can an organization with a 4.8 capability-to-outcome gap improve a client’s gap beyond that threshold?
What Makes This Different
There is no shortage of commentary repackaging analyst data — tracking vendor movement within the Magic Quadrant, visualizing who moved up and who moved down, mapping trajectories across quadrant boundaries. Some of it is well-crafted and genuinely creative. But it all shares the same structural limitation: it accepts the framework as given and analyzes performance within it.
The Hansen Fit Score™ doesn’t track movement within an analyst framework. We measure whether the framework itself improves real-world outcomes.
That distinction is not cosmetic. It is the difference between asking “where did Coupa move on the grid?” and asking “did the grid predict whether your Coupa implementation would succeed?” The first question has a hundred answers. The second has never been publicly addressed — by any analyst firm, for any vendor, in any cycle.
The evidence base behind this assessment is not three years of quadrant data. It is the Procurement Insights archive — 3,386 posts spanning 2007 to 2026, including 391 documenting Gartner’s influence on procurement technology outcomes — and the RAM SR&ED research dating to 1998. That is 27 years of independently verified, longitudinal documentation. It is the only evidence base of its kind in the industry, and it is the reason these scores are defensible.
The Gartner Assessment: First in the Series
The Gartner Consolidated Assessment Report is the first published entry in our “Score the Scorers” series. It is a 17-page multimodel validated analysis examining Gartner’s self-designation as “the world authority on AI” against documented practitioner outcomes.
The assessment finds a Technology Capability score of 8.8 and a Service Delivery Capacity score of 4.0 — a 4.8-point gap that we have named the Authority Paradox. Gartner excels at observing the market. There is no publicly available evidence that following Gartner guidance improves implementation outcomes above industry baseline rates.
This is not an attack. It is a measurement. The same measurement we apply to every vendor and advisory firm we assess.
What Comes Next
Preliminary Hansen Fit Score™ estimates for McKinsey & Company, The Hackett Group, Spend Matters, and IDC are reflected in the chart above. Full consolidated assessment reports for each firm are in development and will be published as they are completed.
When the series is finished, practitioners will have — for the first time — an independently scored, longitudinally verified comparison of the advisory ecosystem using a methodology that measures outcome influence, not market presence.
Access
Current subscribers: The Gartner assessment and the entire library of ProcureTech vendor assessments and papers are available now — included in your subscription at no additional cost.
Not yet a subscriber? Click here for details.
The annual All-Access subscription is $3,000 US and includes:
- Quarterly Virtual Briefings
- Monthly Insight Memos
- Guided Archive Access
- Cross-Series Risk Mapping
Not ready for an annual subscription? No problem — you can purchase the single Gartner assessment for $1,750 US using this link.
Hansen Fit Score™ Vendor Assessment Series | Hansen Models™ | Procurement Insights
Gartner scores: Published (February 2026). McKinsey, Hackett, Spend Matters, IDC scores: Preliminary — subject to full assessment validation.
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Procurement Insights
Posted on February 22, 2026
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Scoring the Scorers: The Advisory Ecosystem’s Authority Paradox
By Jon W. Hansen | Procurement Insights
For 27 years, I have documented a pattern that the industry’s dominant advisory firms have never addressed: the gap between what they observe and what practitioners actually achieve.
The chart below is the first public visualization of that gap applied to the advisory ecosystem itself — using the same Hansen Fit Score™ methodology we apply to every ProcureTech vendor in our assessment series.
The finding is straightforward. Every major advisory firm scores above 7.0 on Technology Capability — market observation, vendor categorization, trend identification. None score above 5.5 on Service Delivery Capacity — the measure of whether their guidance translates to practitioner implementation success.
That distance is the Authority Paradox.
Industry implementation failure rates have remained in the 50–80% band for three decades. The dominant advisory model has operated across that entire period. If advisory authority improved outcomes, the failure rate would be declining. It is not.
The question the chart poses is one that no advisory firm has answered publicly: how can an organization with a 4.8 capability-to-outcome gap improve a client’s gap beyond that threshold?
What Makes This Different
There is no shortage of commentary repackaging analyst data — tracking vendor movement within the Magic Quadrant, visualizing who moved up and who moved down, mapping trajectories across quadrant boundaries. Some of it is well-crafted and genuinely creative. But it all shares the same structural limitation: it accepts the framework as given and analyzes performance within it.
The Hansen Fit Score™ doesn’t track movement within an analyst framework. We measure whether the framework itself improves real-world outcomes.
That distinction is not cosmetic. It is the difference between asking “where did Coupa move on the grid?” and asking “did the grid predict whether your Coupa implementation would succeed?” The first question has a hundred answers. The second has never been publicly addressed — by any analyst firm, for any vendor, in any cycle.
The evidence base behind this assessment is not three years of quadrant data. It is the Procurement Insights archive — 3,386 posts spanning 2007 to 2026, including 391 documenting Gartner’s influence on procurement technology outcomes — and the RAM SR&ED research dating to 1998. That is 27 years of independently verified, longitudinal documentation. It is the only evidence base of its kind in the industry, and it is the reason these scores are defensible.
The Gartner Assessment: First in the Series
The Gartner Consolidated Assessment Report is the first published entry in our “Score the Scorers” series. It is a 17-page multimodel validated analysis examining Gartner’s self-designation as “the world authority on AI” against documented practitioner outcomes.
The assessment finds a Technology Capability score of 8.8 and a Service Delivery Capacity score of 4.0 — a 4.8-point gap that we have named the Authority Paradox. Gartner excels at observing the market. There is no publicly available evidence that following Gartner guidance improves implementation outcomes above industry baseline rates.
This is not an attack. It is a measurement. The same measurement we apply to every vendor and advisory firm we assess.
What Comes Next
Preliminary Hansen Fit Score™ estimates for McKinsey & Company, The Hackett Group, Spend Matters, and IDC are reflected in the chart above. Full consolidated assessment reports for each firm are in development and will be published as they are completed.
When the series is finished, practitioners will have — for the first time — an independently scored, longitudinally verified comparison of the advisory ecosystem using a methodology that measures outcome influence, not market presence.
Access
Current subscribers: The Gartner assessment and the entire library of ProcureTech vendor assessments and papers are available now — included in your subscription at no additional cost.
Not yet a subscriber? Click here for details.
The annual All-Access subscription is $3,000 US and includes:
Not ready for an annual subscription? No problem — you can purchase the single Gartner assessment for $1,750 US using this link.
Hansen Fit Score™ Vendor Assessment Series | Hansen Models™ | Procurement Insights
Gartner scores: Published (February 2026). McKinsey, Hackett, Spend Matters, IDC scores: Preliminary — subject to full assessment validation.
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