By Jon W. Hansen | Procurement Insights | March 2026
It is a fair question. And it deserves a direct answer.
Gartner has thousands of analysts. Hackett has decades of benchmarking data. Spend Matters has deep vendor coverage. KPMG and Deloitte have global consulting armies. If organizational readiness is the missing variable in procurement technology success — and the 75-year reversion record confirms it is — why hasn’t one of them built Phase 0™? Why hasn’t one of them developed a longitudinal behavioral assessment framework like the Hansen Fit Score™?
The answer is not that they haven’t thought of it.
In fact, there is evidence that at least one of them has come very close to saying it out loud.
The Executive Who Almost Said It
In the spirit of recent Gartner commentary — specifically the pattern of public statements from late 2025 in which senior Gartner leadership acknowledged widening AI adoption gaps and pointed to practitioner execution as the primary failure variable — something revealing is happening at the highest level of the analyst world.
Read that framing carefully. A senior executive at the world’s most influential analyst firm is publicly acknowledging that organizations are failing to implement the technology his firm recommended. He is describing an adoption gap — a visible, documented distance between what technology can do and what organizations are actually achieving with it. He is, in other words, describing the readiness problem precisely.
I said so directly at the time: Is Gartner Blaming Practitioners for Following Gartner’s Advice?
What the commentary cannot say — and this is the key — is that the readiness problem exists before the technology decision, not after it. It cannot say that the frameworks being published are being applied to organizations that were never structurally ready to receive them. It cannot say that the adoption gap is not a failure of execution but a failure of pre-deployment diagnosis.
It cannot say that, because saying it would mean acknowledging the constraints of the economic model under which the firm operates — not because the diagnosis is wrong, but because the model doesn’t allow it to be fully stated.
So the commentary comes very close. And then stops.
That is not dishonesty. That is structural constraint. And understanding that distinction is what separates a critique of Gartner from an accurate analysis of why the readiness diagnostic has never been built by the firms best positioned to build it.
What the Big Firms Are Built to Produce
Analyst firms and major consultancies produce work that operates inside a set of constraints most people don’t think about explicitly.
Limited incentive to indict organizational design. The most direct implication of the reversion data is that organizations keep failing not because they chose the wrong technology, but because they never built the governance conditions required to receive it. That is an uncomfortable finding for firms whose revenue model depends on those same organizations continuing to select, implement, and re-implement technology. Everything else follows from this constraint.
Client-safe language. When your revenue depends on relationships with the vendors you assess and the enterprises that implement them, the sharpest arguments get softened. Saying “the organization was structurally unready before the implementation began” is an indictment of the decision-making process — and sometimes of the consulting firm that advised it.
Market-facing neutrality. Magic Quadrants, Waves, and Solution Maps rank vendors against each other. They are designed to help buyers choose between options, not to question whether the buyer is ready to succeed with any of them.
Shorter time horizons. Longitudinal behavioral arc analysis requires 18 years of continuous, independent documentation. Most analyst research cycles operate on 12-month snapshots. You cannot see a reversion pattern in a single year’s data.
So they stop one step short. They say adoption is hard. Change management matters. Governance is important. Execution is the challenge. All true. None of it names the structural root cause. And as the Gartner executive demonstrated in November 2025, even when the diagnosis is visible at the senior level, the business model prevents it from being stated directly.
What That Leaves Out
The 75-year crisis reversion dataset — 23 documented events across energy, financial, pandemic, operational, and geopolitical domains — shows that 75% of measures implemented under urgency revert within two to seven years. The only measures that held were structural and institutional. Everything dependent on behavioral change alone reverted.
The procurement technology parallel is exact. The implementations that survived were the ones where governance architecture was built before the technology deployed. The ones that failed — the 75 to 85 percent — arrived into organizations that had never done that diagnostic work.
That finding requires someone willing to say, plainly, that the technology did not fail procurement. Procurement failed the technology.
That is not a sentence a vendor-sponsored analyst firm publishes easily. It is, however, the sentence the archive has been documenting for 18 years.
Why Independence Is the Methodology, Not Just the Positioning
The Procurement Insights archive exists because it was never built for a client. It was built to document what was actually happening — vendor by vendor, implementation by implementation, crisis by crisis — over 18 years and 3,300+ published documents, with minimal vendor sponsorships and no referral revenue.
The archive is not a research product. It is a contemporaneous record — 3,300+ documents captured at the time of the events they describe, not reconstructed through retrospective surveys or vendor-provided data. That distinction matters more than any methodology claim. A contemporaneous record of 18 years of vendor behavioral arcs, implementation outcomes, and organizational failure mechanics cannot be built today. The window closed in real time. Every year Gartner published a snapshot, this archive was recording what actually happened — and that gap is now structurally irreversible. It is not a competitive advantage. It is a moat that cannot be crossed because it cannot be built from where anyone else currently stands.
That independence is not a marketing claim. It is the structural condition that makes the Hansen Fit Score™ and Phase 0™ possible. You cannot produce a longitudinal behavioral arc assessment of a vendor if that vendor is funding your research. You cannot name the governance gap if your consulting revenue depends on the organization that has the gap.
The Gartner executive in November 2025 could see the gap. He described it with enough precision that practitioners reading carefully would recognize it. What he could not do was name its origin — because naming it would require explaining why 26 years of framework deployment had not closed it.
That is the sentence independence allows. And it is the sentence the archive was built to support.
The Question That Goes Unasked
Every Magic Quadrant, every Wave, every Solution Map answers the same question: which vendor has the best capability for your requirements?
Not one of them asks the prior question: is your organization ready to succeed with any of them?
Phase 0™ asks that question. The Hansen Fit Score™ measures the gap between what a vendor can deliver and what an organization is structurally positioned to absorb. These are not supplements to analyst frameworks. They are the diagnostic layer that precedes them — the step that the 75-year reversion record shows has always been missing from the failure cases.
The cost of the unasked question is not paid by the analyst firm. It is paid by the procurement organization that implemented on their recommendation, hit the reversion curve at 18 months, and entered the next technology era in the same structural position as before — aware of what went wrong, carrying the institutional memory of the failure, and no better equipped to receive the next generation of technology than it was the last time.
If the big firms wrote about it, they would have to explain why they didn’t write about it sooner.
That is a difficult paragraph to publish when you are Gartner.
It is a straightforward one when you are independent.
Jon W. Hansen is the founder of Hansen Models™ and Procurement Insights, an 18-year independent procurement technology research and advisory platform built on a living archive of 3,300+ published documents. The Hansen Fit Score™ (HFS™), Phase 0™, and RAM 2025™ are proprietary frameworks developed and maintained with zero vendor sponsorships.
Ready to ask the question the big firms don’t? Book a 30-Minute Readiness Conversation: calendly.com/jon-toq/30min
© 2026 Jon W. Hansen | Procurement Insights | procureinsights.com | hpt@hansenprocurement.com
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Procurement Insights 
If Phase 0™ and the Hansen Fit Score™ Are the Right Approach, Why Don’t the Big Firms Write About It?
Posted on March 23, 2026
0
By Jon W. Hansen | Procurement Insights | March 2026
It is a fair question. And it deserves a direct answer.
Gartner has thousands of analysts. Hackett has decades of benchmarking data. Spend Matters has deep vendor coverage. KPMG and Deloitte have global consulting armies. If organizational readiness is the missing variable in procurement technology success — and the 75-year reversion record confirms it is — why hasn’t one of them built Phase 0™? Why hasn’t one of them developed a longitudinal behavioral assessment framework like the Hansen Fit Score™?
The answer is not that they haven’t thought of it.
In fact, there is evidence that at least one of them has come very close to saying it out loud.
The Executive Who Almost Said It
In the spirit of recent Gartner commentary — specifically the pattern of public statements from late 2025 in which senior Gartner leadership acknowledged widening AI adoption gaps and pointed to practitioner execution as the primary failure variable — something revealing is happening at the highest level of the analyst world.
Read that framing carefully. A senior executive at the world’s most influential analyst firm is publicly acknowledging that organizations are failing to implement the technology his firm recommended. He is describing an adoption gap — a visible, documented distance between what technology can do and what organizations are actually achieving with it. He is, in other words, describing the readiness problem precisely.
I said so directly at the time: Is Gartner Blaming Practitioners for Following Gartner’s Advice?
What the commentary cannot say — and this is the key — is that the readiness problem exists before the technology decision, not after it. It cannot say that the frameworks being published are being applied to organizations that were never structurally ready to receive them. It cannot say that the adoption gap is not a failure of execution but a failure of pre-deployment diagnosis.
It cannot say that, because saying it would mean acknowledging the constraints of the economic model under which the firm operates — not because the diagnosis is wrong, but because the model doesn’t allow it to be fully stated.
So the commentary comes very close. And then stops.
That is not dishonesty. That is structural constraint. And understanding that distinction is what separates a critique of Gartner from an accurate analysis of why the readiness diagnostic has never been built by the firms best positioned to build it.
What the Big Firms Are Built to Produce
Analyst firms and major consultancies produce work that operates inside a set of constraints most people don’t think about explicitly.
Limited incentive to indict organizational design. The most direct implication of the reversion data is that organizations keep failing not because they chose the wrong technology, but because they never built the governance conditions required to receive it. That is an uncomfortable finding for firms whose revenue model depends on those same organizations continuing to select, implement, and re-implement technology. Everything else follows from this constraint.
Client-safe language. When your revenue depends on relationships with the vendors you assess and the enterprises that implement them, the sharpest arguments get softened. Saying “the organization was structurally unready before the implementation began” is an indictment of the decision-making process — and sometimes of the consulting firm that advised it.
Market-facing neutrality. Magic Quadrants, Waves, and Solution Maps rank vendors against each other. They are designed to help buyers choose between options, not to question whether the buyer is ready to succeed with any of them.
Shorter time horizons. Longitudinal behavioral arc analysis requires 18 years of continuous, independent documentation. Most analyst research cycles operate on 12-month snapshots. You cannot see a reversion pattern in a single year’s data.
So they stop one step short. They say adoption is hard. Change management matters. Governance is important. Execution is the challenge. All true. None of it names the structural root cause. And as the Gartner executive demonstrated in November 2025, even when the diagnosis is visible at the senior level, the business model prevents it from being stated directly.
What That Leaves Out
The 75-year crisis reversion dataset — 23 documented events across energy, financial, pandemic, operational, and geopolitical domains — shows that 75% of measures implemented under urgency revert within two to seven years. The only measures that held were structural and institutional. Everything dependent on behavioral change alone reverted.
The procurement technology parallel is exact. The implementations that survived were the ones where governance architecture was built before the technology deployed. The ones that failed — the 75 to 85 percent — arrived into organizations that had never done that diagnostic work.
That finding requires someone willing to say, plainly, that the technology did not fail procurement. Procurement failed the technology.
That is not a sentence a vendor-sponsored analyst firm publishes easily. It is, however, the sentence the archive has been documenting for 18 years.
Why Independence Is the Methodology, Not Just the Positioning
The Procurement Insights archive exists because it was never built for a client. It was built to document what was actually happening — vendor by vendor, implementation by implementation, crisis by crisis — over 18 years and 3,300+ published documents, with minimal vendor sponsorships and no referral revenue.
The archive is not a research product. It is a contemporaneous record — 3,300+ documents captured at the time of the events they describe, not reconstructed through retrospective surveys or vendor-provided data. That distinction matters more than any methodology claim. A contemporaneous record of 18 years of vendor behavioral arcs, implementation outcomes, and organizational failure mechanics cannot be built today. The window closed in real time. Every year Gartner published a snapshot, this archive was recording what actually happened — and that gap is now structurally irreversible. It is not a competitive advantage. It is a moat that cannot be crossed because it cannot be built from where anyone else currently stands.
That independence is not a marketing claim. It is the structural condition that makes the Hansen Fit Score™ and Phase 0™ possible. You cannot produce a longitudinal behavioral arc assessment of a vendor if that vendor is funding your research. You cannot name the governance gap if your consulting revenue depends on the organization that has the gap.
The Gartner executive in November 2025 could see the gap. He described it with enough precision that practitioners reading carefully would recognize it. What he could not do was name its origin — because naming it would require explaining why 26 years of framework deployment had not closed it.
That is the sentence independence allows. And it is the sentence the archive was built to support.
The Question That Goes Unasked
Every Magic Quadrant, every Wave, every Solution Map answers the same question: which vendor has the best capability for your requirements?
Not one of them asks the prior question: is your organization ready to succeed with any of them?
Phase 0™ asks that question. The Hansen Fit Score™ measures the gap between what a vendor can deliver and what an organization is structurally positioned to absorb. These are not supplements to analyst frameworks. They are the diagnostic layer that precedes them — the step that the 75-year reversion record shows has always been missing from the failure cases.
The cost of the unasked question is not paid by the analyst firm. It is paid by the procurement organization that implemented on their recommendation, hit the reversion curve at 18 months, and entered the next technology era in the same structural position as before — aware of what went wrong, carrying the institutional memory of the failure, and no better equipped to receive the next generation of technology than it was the last time.
If the big firms wrote about it, they would have to explain why they didn’t write about it sooner.
That is a difficult paragraph to publish when you are Gartner.
It is a straightforward one when you are independent.
Jon W. Hansen is the founder of Hansen Models™ and Procurement Insights, an 18-year independent procurement technology research and advisory platform built on a living archive of 3,300+ published documents. The Hansen Fit Score™ (HFS™), Phase 0™, and RAM 2025™ are proprietary frameworks developed and maintained with zero vendor sponsorships.
Ready to ask the question the big firms don’t? Book a 30-Minute Readiness Conversation: calendly.com/jon-toq/30min
© 2026 Jon W. Hansen | Procurement Insights | procureinsights.com | hpt@hansenprocurement.com
-30-
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