Building Adoption into Your Services Procurement Strategy

Disconnected systems create friction that kills adoption. Without integration and clarity between tools, workflows break, duplication creeps in, adoption becomes stalled, and value gets lost.

To fix it, you need clarity on what each system does, where overlaps and gaps exist, and how to build a tech stack that works for the business and the end user.

With Mickey Pelletier, Co Founder of Emberpath and Founder of CWM Strategies.

00:07:14 - Curiosity keeps companies competitive

00:26:24 - Even the best-designed programs fail when your tools don’t work together

00:35:59 - Process friction is killing adoption

00:39:08 - Successful implementation starts with change management, not after it

01:05:36 - Services problems are only as powerful as your commitment to change them

Episode Highlights

Transcript

Auto-generated. Please excuse any minor errors.

00;00;00;00 - 00;00;05;25

Jonny Dunning

Let's go. Mickey, great to be chatting again. How are you doing? You alright?

00;00;05;28 - 00;00;27;09

Mickey Pelletier

Jonny, it is our third time getting together doing this. I'm glad to be back. Always happy to chat with you. Yeah. Doing well. Summer's kicking on here. Good times all around. And, always happy to continue the services procurement conversation. Even in the midst of, the summer here. Always happy to make time for this.

00;00;27;11 - 00;00;45;18

Jonny Dunning

Good man, I appreciate it. I appreciate the content you create, the stuff you putting out there. And as we come on to. In a minute. The reason we're having this conversation is because of an article you wrote on LinkedIn. And I was like, oh, I want to reply to this, but there's just too much to say. And I was like, let's just have a conversation.

00;00;45;21 - 00;00;54;22

Jonny Dunning

So I imagine will probably be seeing each other in a month or so's time in Dallas anyway, but it's good to just get together and have this chat. Yeah.

00;00;54;24 - 00;00;55;22

Mickey Pelletier

Yeah.

00;00;55;25 - 00;01;05;14

Jonny Dunning

But there's always so much going on. You got so much going on at the moment. What's so loving? Be quick with Mick This is obviously a different format. How's how's that going?

00;01;05;16 - 00;01;29;07

Mickey Pelletier

Well, yeah I mean, for a very quick, formatted show. Yeah, it's it's fine. It's quick. I'm coming up on season two here. I'm revamping the show, bringing it from about five minutes down to about 3.5 minutes, trying to make it just even quicker. New questions, new games. I think it's just it's just a fun way to connect and relate with people in the industry in a very digestible way.

00;01;29;09 - 00;01;54;13

Mickey Pelletier

We're all very short of attention, and we're trying to do a million things to try to put something out there that is easily consumable and in a short amount of time as, as possible, and, and bring a little bit of personality to the people that join the show and, shed a little light on the industry and what people are up to and, add a little personality to, to the faces that you see around the industry.

00;01;54;15 - 00;02;17;23

Jonny Dunning

Yeah. Totally agree. I think it's great, as you say, adding a bit of, humor, a bit personality, you know, bringing, other people feel like they're coming into the conversation because it's a bit more kind of personable than, like, a formal interview. Right. Yeah, it's interesting because it's kind of it's the flip reverse of some of the podcasting stuff, such as what I do, which is very much long form.

00;02;17;26 - 00;02;38;08

Jonny Dunning

I tend to think this stuff like a detailed topic like services procurement or statement of work type conversations, there's quite a lot to it, and there's not that many people talking about it. So I feel like the kind of the world needs to build up some decent content to build up some decent conversation, but obviously like doing a long form podcast.

00;02;38;08 - 00;02;54;16

Jonny Dunning

One of the things that, we find works quite well is just chopping up the clips. You know, people can transcribe it, people can zoom to a point they want to check out. Or if you, sorry, if you time stamp, if you can do that when you transcribe, people can read it. If you've got clips, people can jump in and out.

00;02;54;16 - 00;03;05;29

Jonny Dunning

But yeah, I still like the flow, the conversation. You've got loads of other stuff going on though. What else is happening in your world in terms of the kind of projects and stuff that you're focusing on?

00;03;06;02 - 00;03;22;24

Mickey Pelletier

Yeah, I mean, working with client side leaders to, you know, help them figure out what they want to be when they grow up when it comes to contingent workforce. So that can span a couple different things that can be just baseline. We need to get a program going. Do we do an MSP Who should that MSP be?

00;03;22;24 - 00;03;45;12

Mickey Pelletier

We want to do it internally? Things like that. And also working with clients that are a little bit further along in the, you know, maturity, of their contingent workforce that are talking about more sophisticated things such as services, procurement and so services there and direct sourcing and what a freelance model could look like for them if they bring that into their ecosystem as well.

00;03;45;12 - 00;04;06;03

Mickey Pelletier

So, that's going on still continuing to build Ember Path, which is our AI workforce strategy technology. And that's been a lot of fun, but also challenging to build because AI is evolving so quickly and so many companies are just coming out of the woodwork of of we do this, we do that, and it is really cool and it's really exciting.

00;04;06;03 - 00;04;27;25

Mickey Pelletier

But man, to stay ahead and, continue to build can be challenging just because there's so much going on. But there's a lot of cool things that we're doing. We're in the middle of of building and testing and getting folks into the tool. And that's been really exciting to see this actually come to life and have a product to say, hey, go in and to the sandbox and play around and see if this fits your needs.

00;04;27;25 - 00;05;10;22

Mickey Pelletier

And then reiterating, getting feedback and going back. And I mean, you know, as building a technology yourself, getting people in there, getting that feedback and then making the tweaks and things along the way, it can be very rewarding to see that, that happen. Also working, in Gig Matters, which is a company I started up with a few other fine folks really focused on, delivering digital assets, for, for companies, particularly providers of contingent workforce services, helping them find their brand and their voice acting as an extension of their marketing team, putting together video content, webinars, client communities and an off site events, things like that, that tie into

00;05;10;22 - 00;05;33;13

Mickey Pelletier

a lot of the, the media that I, things that I've done over the past few years and and being able to, help companies with that. So that's been a lot of fun. But yeah. Busy. And then, you know, obviously always doing the consulting and then creating content and just, trying to stay relevant in a very, busy and saturated space.

00;05;33;16 - 00;05;53;14

Jonny Dunning

I think you do stay relevant. You know, you've always got something interesting to say. You know, you you do cover a fairly broad range of topics across the whole contingent workflow span, which I imagine is quite a lot to stay on top of. But, you know, you've got the knowledge and experience to back it up. And, you know, I like the thing I like about your content.

00;05;53;16 - 00;06;09;23

Jonny Dunning

One of the things I like about your content is, you know, kind of just saying, hey, I'm right, and I've got all the answers. You're asking the questions, you're putting forward opinions using examples and stuff like that, which I think is more useful for people than an approach that just says, hey, this is the way to do everything.

00;06;09;23 - 00;06;15;13

Jonny Dunning

And it's I sometimes like the way you posed tricky questions.

00;06;15;16 - 00;06;33;00

Mickey Pelletier

Well, yeah, because I mean, if if somebody had it all figured out, we would just be doing what they're doing, right? And I don't know that there's one answer for a lot of the things that we do. There are leading practices, things that have worked well for others. But sometimes it doesn't always work well for, some others.

00;06;33;00 - 00;06;53;07

Mickey Pelletier

Right. And I think you're asking the right questions, I think is the, is is a really important skill. I think I'm actually in the middle of writing an article about, should you be, what's more challenging, making decisions or asking the right questions and, and and where I'm going with that is, we we just need to think openly about this.

00;06;53;07 - 00;07;13;00

Mickey Pelletier

And not everybody has one right answer. And I'm, I'm sometimes wrong. And I always love being challenged and seeing people saying, hey, think about it this way, or this worked for us because it just opens our eyes to new ways of thinking. Or maybe things that we've cut ourselves off from, diving into, you know, from whatever predisposition we had.

00;07;13;00 - 00;07;28;15

Mickey Pelletier

And, so I think there's just lots of viewpoints and it's always good to have an open mind, just to know what other people are doing, what's working from them, and, you know, sharpening our own tools as we continue to advance ourselves while, trying to help clients.

00;07;28;18 - 00;07;54;19

Jonny Dunning

Yeah, I think there's there's not always one path to where you want to get to, and, you know, it's it's that kind of open viewpoint, that you're kind of espousing that I think is the essential thing. People need to be curious. People need to find out what's going on, listen to what others are saying. But I think the most important thing is the desire to achieve results is the most critical thing.

00;07;54;19 - 00;08;20;11

Jonny Dunning

And if you just look at today's, kind of global economic climate, what companies, the challenges they face when trying to stay competitive in the market, there's there's no room for slouches. You know, people are just going to get caught out and it happens faster and faster. You know, you talk about AI, innovation, all that sort of stuff moving rapidly.

00;08;20;13 - 00;08;59;12

Jonny Dunning

There's just you can't afford to, you know, take a break on the side. Right. You got to keep moving forward. And and that's the thing to me is it's all about how do organizations remain competitive. Because when you drill it down, whether you like whatever kind of workforce challenge you're looking to solve, it's about that organization getting stuff done and delivering results for their customers and doing things in the market and being competitive and maybe competing for the best employees and maybe competing for the best contractors, and maybe competing to the best gig workers, the most certainly competing for some of the kind of niche suppliers that they might be working with on an

00;08;59;12 - 00;09;25;18

Jonny Dunning

absolute basis. But ultimately, all of it comes down to, how effective is the organization at doing the work it needs to do to be successful and competitive in the market? And that's that's the crux of it. When you when you break it down and people worry about risks or they worry about, you know, missed savings or costs or things like that, ultimately all comes back to is your business going to be successful and how does it utilize resources.

00;09;25;20 - 00;09;55;13

Jonny Dunning

So I think yeah, like so that open minded approach, there's not one answer. Let's get the debate going. There might be multiple routes to victory. Not one size fits all. Probably a little bit more of the technical discussion. I'm going to get into it, shortly. But, you know, the desire to solve problems is people like yourselves, from a consultancy point of view, strategically approaching this with, with organizations, people like myself working in, you know, software, technical organizations trying to solve problems from a tech point of view.

00;09;55;16 - 00;10;21;19

Jonny Dunning

It's all about all these resources coming together. And there's there's just there's so much opportunity out there in terms of potential for improvement. When you look at things like going to CWS Dallas, some of the massive companies there, a lot of the conversations that are going on there, the amount of spending that there is that organizations spend on work, getting work done through whatever channel that might be, it's an exciting time, and it's an interesting conversation.

00;10;21;21 - 00;10;59;24

Mickey Pelletier

And it it never stops. It always evolves to what we thought we knew five years ago, you know, has as evolved and changed to what it is now. And the same thing will have happen over the next five, ten years. And, you know, not to take it back to AI, but, you know, I don't think I've ever seen anything grow and evolve as quickly as we've seen AI, particularly in these past three years with the advances in the Gen AI and where that has taken, the rest of the AI world, because AI been around, you know, for, for a long time, you know, dating back to the 50s, you know, so

00;10;59;26 - 00;11;21;13

Mickey Pelletier

the idea of this advancement and trying to solve problems, it's it's just a funny thing to how see how these things evolve and grow. And the challenge is always there. And it's, you know, our industry is is about putting people to work to help companies solve problems for their clients. And it's, you know, companies helping clients, helping clients.

00;11;21;13 - 00;11;47;02

Mickey Pelletier

And it's I don't know, it's always fascinating when you when you zoom out and look at it and the world that we live in because contingent workforce to the extended workforce is just, you know, a subset of this workforce management world. But it's, you know, taking up 30 to 50% of a company's, headcount and spend and I always go back to the fact, the fact that it deserves a lot more love and attention than it typically gets.

00;11;47;02 - 00;12;19;19

Mickey Pelletier

And so I think a podcasts like this and things and with with content in our space generating more knowledge around, generating more knowledge and awareness around this space, I think is just a big thing that is needed. But anyways, it's easy to go down the these tangents here. Eventually we got to segue into the whole SOW services procurement piece, which is a vitally important piece that I don't think it's the love and attention it deserves generally.

00;12;19;19 - 00;12;51;06

Jonny Dunning

Yeah, I mean that that's why that's why these conversations need to happen. Because I work specifically in that space. I'm talking to people in that space within organizations, within intermediaries that are absolutely at the front end of it. They're absolutely the tip of the spear. So I can put forward, some experiences, maybe some of my own opinions, some of the things that I'm seeing, I'm people saying in the market that might help other people who are just at the beginning of this journey or halfway through this journey that haven't come across these concepts or particular solutions that people are putting in place.

00;12;51;11 - 00;13;21;17

Jonny Dunning

And I see lots of different things going on. So I do think it's important to get that out there. You know, you're asking important questions and sometimes quite difficult questions around this sort of stuff and posing it to the market. Which is exactly where this article came in. So your article was the one for anyone who is a meme follower of yours with the, looking slightly confused little dog sitting there in a room that is, basically on fire with, unique expectations, no shared goals and different processes.

00;13;21;19 - 00;14;06;16

Jonny Dunning

And they’re sitting there with the room on fire saying, this this is fine. Having a cup of tea. Which is your meme saying whenever you department managers use SOWs their own way, but you call it a program. So your article was titled Gaining Adoption for SOW Services Management in Contingent Workforce programs. And so it's broken into two great sections which which all had some really interesting value to them in the sense that you were talking about, you know, the executive sponsorship alignment of that executive level, having a clear operating model, managing organizational consistency, putting your supplier relationships in the right place for this type of program, a really important one that

00;14;06;16 - 00;14;28;27

Jonny Dunning

I want to come on to, which is user experience, end user experience. Then you talked about tech and then talked about like center of excellence intake process and kind of concluded that the thing that I really want to talk about was the tech part of it, which I think is, is there was so much to dissect in that because obviously I understand that in a lot of depth.

00;14;29;03 - 00;14;32;16

Mickey Pelletier

Right. You have a vested interest in that space for sure.

00;14;32;19 - 00;14;53;26

Jonny Dunning

100%. I have a vested interest in it. But also it's like it's like the terminology. Okay. So so people will talk about but we used to talk about SOW spend management, partly because that was certainly within like contingent workforce circles. That was more what people needed to hear to go out there to try and put it in a box.

00;14;53;29 - 00;15;18;26

Jonny Dunning

But that's probably, I'd say to two plus years ago now we only really talk about services procurement because it's very much a procurement led part of the problem. And obviously in different organizations, we all know, you know, who looks after services procurement. Sometimes it falls in the gaps. Sometimes it sits with procurement very clearly and is, you know, a key stakeholder.

00;15;18;28 - 00;15;45;16

Jonny Dunning

Sometimes it might cross over with a contingent workforce, category manager, sometimes some of it might kind of bleed into H.R and talent acquisition and all sorts of things. But ultimately, when organizations are outsourcing work to external third party suppliers on an output or outcome basis with some kind of deliverables around it, that is an extremely important area of, organizational spend and work capacity.

00;15;45;18 - 00;16;11;03

Jonny Dunning

So, so when you get into the terminology of it, even that is, something that people debate and they get confused about. It's nice to hear, like I just talked about services procurement. Peter Regan at the London CWS summit. He was talking about services procurement liking that Peter, that's that's, that and that's what that's what most big organizations which large companies will talk about.

00;16;11;03 - 00;16;29;14

Jonny Dunning

It is the procurement of services ultimately. So you can kind of break these things down different ways. But what I was going to say is there was previously quite a bit of confusion around that different terminology used by different people. And what does this mean. It's it's forming more of a shape and you've got more people now. Who’ve got services, procurement in their job title.

00;16;29;16 - 00;17;06;11

Jonny Dunning

You know, they all the head of services procurement, you know, global director of services procurement, whatever it may be within an MSP. And so within organizations you're seeing more departments, focused around specifically the procurement of services. The technology side of it is exactly the same. There's a lot of confusion. People talk about like, it's like if you try and, if you try and break everything down to product features, if you look at across the contingent workforce landscape, across the procurement landscape, you you can get very easily confused when you take a feature and product point of view on the world.

00;17;06;13 - 00;17;26;29

Jonny Dunning

Just like going, well, that's got a contract module, but I've got a contract module in this, does that mean I don't need that? And people get very confused. Whereas actually it's all about what's the problem you're solving with a particular technology. So so that was why this part of the article, I found it very interesting. And I'll just say I wanted to kind of get the debate going with you.

00;17;26;29 - 00;17;40;27

Jonny Dunning

And I'd put a comment out there on LinkedIn. I would like LinkedIn comments don't have enough room for this. So, but you know what I mean? I think there's a there's a lot there's a lot of, misunderstanding in that, in that space.

00;17;40;29 - 00;18;08;14

Mickey Pelletier

Absolutely. Yeah. Because I think I refer to it as SOW services management services procurement. Right. It is the and I call it services management because it's not just the procurement of that, but it's the ongoing management, you know, of that, of that SOW and the work that is being done underneath it, the invoicing, the payment, the eventually the off boarding and termination of that original statement of work and all the work that went underneath that.

00;18;08;14 - 00;18;28;05

Mickey Pelletier

So I think that's what I refer to it. And I think from an industry perspective that we've struggled with that to land on. What's the one term that means this one thing where we have a way of bastardizing these, these things into six different terms, and it can vary by geography, by company, of, of what they're calling things.

00;18;28;05 - 00;18;52;25

Mickey Pelletier

We unfortunately see companies going and saying, well, we're going to call it this. And it's like, well, only so many people are doing that. I get it's great to build your own brand and the terminology around it, but geez, as an industry, we need to consistently move to the beat of one drum. So when Zivio walks into a client, when you say services procurement, you know the client on the other end says, yes, I know what you're talking about.

00;18;52;27 - 00;19;08;22

Mickey Pelletier

I mean, the one thing I found is, is often times is going into meet with clients is like, hey, I want to level set expectations on what the hell we're even talking about. So here's a couple of terms we're going to use. And this is what we're mean by that. Are we all agreed on that? Does anybody understand it different.

00;19;08;22 - 00;19;38;06

Mickey Pelletier

Because a majority of the folks we talk to in our contingent workforce base, they get it right. They do that. The contingent workforce program owners, they get it. But you start talking to their manager or maybe their colleague that doesn't work in the space. They don't get this. And so we need to ground them on what it is we're talking about and make it relatable to them, so that they can just abstract the information we're trying to, you know, get out there faster.

00;19;38;09 - 00;20;05;23

Mickey Pelletier

And that's the thing I think we struggle with additionally, as an industry is we forget that a lot of the people we're talking to don't get it. They don't understand. They don't get it, like in a bad way. It's just it's not their daily life. It's not their daily jargon and language. So for us to make sense of it, for them, we need to level set on on what some definitions are here and, and even just the definition of, you know, service procurement versus services management.

00;20;05;25 - 00;20;25;02

Mickey Pelletier

Some people just call it SOW. there's there's some few folks out there I won't name names that are very adamant about it's not SOW SOW is a document, and I wholeheartedly agree with that. But then we try to abbreviate what we're even talking about. And meanwhile, we haven't even kicked off the conversation because we can't even agree on a definition.

00;20;25;02 - 00;20;47;06

Mickey Pelletier

So I think all of that can become quite counter to the idea of, hey, we have this great product that's going to simplify the way that you engage workers that are coming through an SOW here, take a look. And that's what this is all about. You have a problem with that. We have a solution. And and that's a fascinating part of our industry.

00;20;47;08 - 00;20;50;18

Mickey Pelletier

Love it or like it. It's it's part of it.

00;20;50;20 - 00;21;19;03

Jonny Dunning

Yeah. I mean, you know, from from a point of view of introducing clients to or potential clients to a technology solution like Zivio, you know, the worst thing you can do is try and sell it to people or sell it, sell at people. Ultimately, it's about understanding the problem. And it's very much, you know, our approach is let's address the problem and let's let's outline the way that we see the world.

00;21;19;03 - 00;21;43;29

Jonny Dunning

And the reason we exist is to solve this specific problem. Let's talk you through how we see that problem and see what resonates. I've got some great slides on the other really, you know, like identify things that people genuinely go now that resonates, I get that. Oh yeah, we got that happening. The best thing we got is our Wheel of pain, which is basically comes like it's about 15 things of like, what would you what would you most like to improve on?

00;21;43;29 - 00;22;04;15

Jonny Dunning

What problems do you recognize? For a lot of companies, all of them will be true. Like whether it's, you know, I've got a problem with rogue spend and lack of visibility, or I've got a misclassification issue or I need to use AI within my services procurement, or I need to avoid just doing everything as a direct award. You need competitive bidding, whatever it might be.

00;22;04;15 - 00;22;24;26

Jonny Dunning

There's like 15 of them. Different companies will be focused on different areas and different things will be more important to them. So from our point of view, we find it's you can't be prescriptive in a market that is evolving, and the right that the services procurement market is the management of services procurement. So so it's really about understanding that problem.

00;22;24;26 - 00;22;44;11

Jonny Dunning

That's that's where you have to start. And that's certainly the approach we've taken. And I think that's the thing that's useful in broader conversations where you get like peer to peer conversations, roundtables and things like that. You know, it's discussing the problem because then people can kind of, you know, align on it and say, oh, it's really interesting to know that you have that problem because we have that as well.

00;22;44;13 - 00;22;49;17

Jonny Dunning

And otherwise people feel isolated and think, oh, we're the only guys that are doing this in this way.

00;22;49;19 - 00;23;09;13

Mickey Pelletier

And you start talking to people and you talked about your wheel of Pain of 15 things. Yeah, we have these usual suspects of problems that, you know, these buckets that everyone mostly falls into at some point in their maturity of trying to evolve, the management of these things. Right. And I think that's sort of the funny thing is like, oh, well, we're unique.

00;23;09;13 - 00;23;29;00

Mickey Pelletier

We have this problem. It's like, you do, you're unique. Like, that problem is yours. But everyone else has a very similar problem. But the way the problem is sort of articulated from your side of the business is what makes it unique. And the people that it impacts and the way that they're trying to complete their book of business.

00;23;29;05 - 00;23;56;15

Mickey Pelletier

That's where the uniqueness comes in. And so we have these generalized buckets of problems. But then when you get in specifically in a, in an unravel the pain and the issues behind it, and you get to the root cause you they are fairly unique. But then the solution usually ties back to that original bucket. But it's it's making it feel customized and and very adaptable to, to their specific needs because they don't know what everybody else is doing.

00;23;56;15 - 00;24;23;25

Mickey Pelletier

And then generally they they don't care. Although the relatability of oh yes, we're not the only one struggling with this, you know, could can make you feel a little bit better. But, I think that's sort of an interesting thing about when you're going in to solve that, solve that pain and solve those problems that, that there are these generalized usual suspects of, of problems that majority of companies face with underlying unique values that tie back to those.

00;24;23;27 - 00;24;49;17

Jonny Dunning

Yeah, exactly. Because, you know, go back to what you were saying about SOW or statement of work, if you're procuring something under a statement of work style contract, whether you call it a statement of work, a work order or task order, whatever it is, it's outputs deliverables against a third party supplier delivering some sort of service. The fundamental mechanics of that, that contractual vehicle are basically the same.

00;24;49;19 - 00;25;08;05

Jonny Dunning

So, so the fundamental mechanics of the process you're trying to achieve are going to be basically the same across organizations. Right? All of the nuance comes in. How are they set up from a technical perspective. Goes back to why this article I found particularly interesting, this paragraph around the technology side of it. What's the operational set up?

00;25;08;07 - 00;25;28;07

Jonny Dunning

You know, how how do their processes operate? Which which departments are involved in that? How strongly are things mandated versus, you know, how often how much are people left to get on and stuff? What are the thresholds where they can do stuff on their own versus, you know, getting more oversight, etc.? So I agree, there's a lot of, nuance to it.

00;25;28;09 - 00;25;50;02

Jonny Dunning

People need solutions to fit their specific problems, which is why as, as a technology provider, I would I would certainly, espouse this to anyone else, in the space or in a similar type space, you know, going in on a feature, product feature and function led sell, or even a function, a feature led conversation is not, in my opinion, the most effective way to do it.

00;25;50;08 - 00;26;15;03

Jonny Dunning

You need to understand the pain that the client has, and you need to be able to explain how the solution achieves their goals. So yeah, it's not just a question of, you know, has it got this thing or that thing. It's like, how do you get to the endpoint that you need to get to? So, so going back to the paragraph in the article, so the paragraph on tech was you said one of the things you need 0.6 was tech.

00;26;15;03 - 00;26;49;24

Jonny Dunning

That actually works in brackets together. So as soon as I was reading this, I was like, okay, here we go. Let's see what we've got here. So you said the best intentioned programs fall apart when the tools don't talk to each other. Oh. Absolutely true. So one of the one of the biggest issues, with the management of procured services or putting a a services procurement program in place to manage the spend all the stuff you're buying, under statement of work engagements.

00;26;49;26 - 00;27;12;09

Jonny Dunning

One of the biggest problems is people just not putting a program in place at all. That's that's the number one problem is people struggle to get their arms around it. They struggle to get started. So for me, it feels like a heinous crime. If people are being brave and actually getting started, but then doing it badly, it just it just feels like such a shame.

00;27;12;11 - 00;27;19;24

Jonny Dunning

I mean, obviously there's probably lots of different reasons for that, but is that something that you've seen a fair amount of?

00;27;19;26 - 00;27;46;25

Mickey Pelletier

Yeah. I mean, you know, that there's the two sides, there's the program operational side and then the, the technology side. And I think, it's always a struggle to move this forward. A it falls under that contingent workforce umbrella. So it is generally not prioritized. It's thought of as an afterthought. B, the amount of intelligence and people that they have that are working on this are quite limited.

00;27;46;25 - 00;28;10;04

Mickey Pelletier

And the people that know this stuff, not that they're not intelligent in general, they're intelligent and other things that may not necessarily be applicable to this. So I think that goes back to the prioritization of this, which I think is a big sticking point in our industry, whether you're trying to implement tech or solution or whatever it is in the contingent workforce space is, is it worth it to us?

00;28;10;04 - 00;28;38;24

Mickey Pelletier

You we talked about problems earlier and these these buckets of problems and the wheel of pain. Yeah, we know those. But the question is, is that pain? Is that problem big enough to actually action? You know, I think that's one of the biggest things that not the biggest thing, but a difficult struggle is is it worthwhile to make a change and make an investment to possibly disrupt what it is we're doing, to create efficiencies and value?

00;28;38;24 - 00;29;06;21

Mickey Pelletier

And is all of that justifiable? To make that change because the, the, the true biggest thing that holds our industry back is, complacency and the, ability to make a change and that commitment to change. And so whether it is a tech or an operation or service, that commitment to. Yes, you know what, let's go with the Zivio solution.

00;29;06;24 - 00;29;51;27

Mickey Pelletier

And let's do it. Now. We got to get everybody on board. And now we need to do that change process. And that could be quite disruptive. When we look at the technology, you know, part of what I was getting there at is, you know, there's the tech working together. There's, you know, clients I've worked with where they have six, seven, eight different systems that are doing some part of the end to end process of, of services, procurement, services management, whether that's, you know, the sourcing, the RFP, the contracting, you know, the, actual management of the assignment, the payment, the billing, all of that, you know, a bunch of disparate systems.

00;29;52;00 - 00;30;09;18

Mickey Pelletier

That's okay. But they need to be integrated and all talking to one another. And I think the way the VMs space is, is working, you know, they're looking to centralize that. Hey, you don't need to go to DocuSign. We'll actually just handle the contract for you. Or maybe we have an API or something with DocuSign and it's it's all done there.

00;30;09;20 - 00;30;32;10

Mickey Pelletier

The trying to create a one stop shop for it all. And and I know some people don't like that term, but basically a centralization of the steps in the technology that you need to use is, I think, one of the most important things, because if we go back to that change, boy, this new process that we're changing to better be a lot, a lot easier than what I was doing before.

00;30;32;10 - 00;30;46;24

Mickey Pelletier

Because if I'm going to have to learn a new system, you know, even if I'm going from eight systems down to one, that's still a new system that that I have to learn and I have to use consistently. And I think all of that ties together to be prohibitive and not to be a negative Nancy about it all.

00;30;47;00 - 00;31;05;26

Mickey Pelletier

But those are the problems that as providers, whether you're tech or consulting, we're trying to work through. And hey, yeah, this change actually is completely worth it. And here's the value you're getting out of it. Is it going to be easy now? No. Implementation is easy. If anybody is telling you implementation is easy. They're they're selling you something.

00;31;05;26 - 00;31;27;16

Mickey Pelletier

The implementation has a is a fair amount of change and requirement gathering. And it can be it could take time to go through but it's worth it. It's the same thing. Is building a house boy putting every board together sure takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. But it's worth it when you get to the end, when you have this full product that you can, you know, manage all of your services procurement.

00;31;27;16 - 00;31;45;09

Mickey Pelletier

So, sort of along with the long winded answer, but trying to cover both sides of that when, when it comes to the change that's required. And, and going back to that original statement of the technology and it needs to work together. It all needs to work together. Tech and tech and people included.

00;31;45;11 - 00;32;09;07

Jonny Dunning

Yeah, 100%. It's interesting you use the phrase one stop shop. I literally had a client, refer to us like that, in a, in a very nice LinkedIn post, recently, which I thought was quite interesting about it, but it does. It just speaks to centralization. And there are many different ways and many different technologies by which people can solve the problems they need to solve.

00;32;09;10 - 00;32;34;25

Jonny Dunning

But I think, you know, there needs to be a clear understanding of what's possible, and there needs to be a clear mandate for why an organization wants to do it. You hit on probably the most important point, which is where where's the desire for change? Okay. When. So we sponsored CWS London, this year and I ran roundtables, ran three, three sessions of roundtables, as I had done the previous year.

00;32;34;28 - 00;32;56;00

Jonny Dunning

The previous year, I was the only person talking about services procurement or statement of work. This year there were like five other people talking about services procurement statement of work related issues, which is fantastic. There's more urgency, there's more conversation. One of the really big game changes with regards to services becoming is AI, and it's both sides of the coin.

00;32;56;02 - 00;33;36;06

Jonny Dunning

So one side of the coin is it is massively turbo charged. Technology providers like Zivio and others to be able to just provide massively more value the other side or the other side of the coin that maybe people don't think about so much is say goodbye to your excuses, but it's organizations can't effectively manage their services supply chain and optimize it and get the best suppliers and and allow the the people in their organization who need to use suppliers to get work done, to do it really quickly, really easily, in a compliant manner with value in mind.

00;33;36;08 - 00;34;04;17

Jonny Dunning

They will lose. If they don't do that. They will lose in the market and the excuse has always been it's too complicated, it will be too difficult. You're dealing with large amounts of unstructured data. Well guess what? Large language models are perfect for managing, helping manage that type of problem and helping solve that sort of problem. So it's a two sides of the coin in the sense of goodbye, excuses and hello kind of much, much more effective solutions.

00;34;04;20 - 00;34;29;23

Jonny Dunning

So I think that's a really beautiful thing within this market. And I do think it's going to be one of the biggest catalysts, or has been one of the biggest catalysts as to why things are tipping over. Now to the point where, I can’t remember whose podcast it was or webinar it was, but somebody from Allegis was basically saying about the the increase in volume of RFP that have services procurement in them for like contingent work for MSP programs.

00;34;29;23 - 00;35;00;10

Jonny Dunning

And it's basically he was basically saying they all have now. And actually a lot of them have either services procurement significantly bigger in value than the contingent workforce contractor side of it, or it's just services procurement that's up for grabs. So it is genuinely changing and it's changing rapidly. And you know, when you talk about the kind of one stop shop, I mean, well, you know, there are there are VMs systems out there, there are source to pay systems out there, the procure to pay platforms.

00;35;00;12 - 00;35;20;07

Jonny Dunning

We're a services procurement system, which is a different category of technology where we only deal with the services procurement problem. But but you can see how the technology stack breaks down. You always going to have that strategic sourcing layer or that, you know, source to pay, procure to pay layer at the top level. Organizations are doing that very entrenched and embedded.

00;35;20;09 - 00;35;45;17

Jonny Dunning

Cooper Ariba, iValua etc. doing that work at the top level, managing the purchase, purchase, the pay process, and doing a lot of the strategic sourcing where MSAs are put in place. But when you break down to a level below that, yes, obviously there are VMs there for your contingent workforce interactions. And I always I never understand really why VMs call VMs because they should be called, in my opinion, contingent workforce management systems.

00;35;45;24 - 00;35;48;27

Jonny Dunning

But I call vendor management system., which is a bit vague. And then you.

00;35;48;29 - 00;35;59;05

Mickey Pelletier

Went down that path and we're not changing now doesn't. Yeah yeah yeah absolutely. It's it's a little bit antiquated for for the purpose it actually serves now. But we are where we are.

00;35;59;07 - 00;36;21;12

Jonny Dunning

Yeah. So so you got your VMs there to manage your contingent workforce interactions. And now you've got services procurement systems there to manage the services procurement side of things alongside that. And actually if you look at those two blocks of spend quite often the services became inside of it is 6 to 10 times the size of the kind of like, you know, contingent workforce, traditional contractor side of it.

00;36;21;12 - 00;36;45;15

Jonny Dunning

So the drive to do, the drive to change, AI has taken away the excuses. It's massively enabling the solutions and the amount of spend, the visibility on that spend and the urgency on what are we doing with that spend is just has just really pushed it to the front of people's mind. So I'm expecting it to be, certainly a big topic of conversation at the Dallas CWS summit.

00;36;45;17 - 00;37;14;25

Jonny Dunning

But you've got more and more companies that are actually doing something with it now, more and more MSPs that have specialists that are purely there to understand that side of the problem and engage with that different stakeholder group within organizations. So it is definitely moving in the right direction. But I think so. One of the one of the areas you were talking about in the article was you were saying, and this is this is very true, by the way, you're saying you VM's contract system, intake tools and analytics analytics dashboards need to integrate or at least align.

00;37;15;01 - 00;37;43;05

Jonny Dunning

So it kind of comes back to what we were saying about the techniques to talk to it to each other. But I would look at that kind of like VMs contract system intake analytics dashboard for for services procurement specifically. I would personally look at that. But obviously I have a, you know, a specific view on this, but I would personally look at that as that's something that's been around for a while, and it's something that hasn't necessarily led us to this panacea where all the problems are solved.

00;37;43;08 - 00;38;01;02

Jonny Dunning

I'm not saying, you know, there's one way to do everything, but what do you when you look at these situations where maybe it isn't that well connected, what do you see as the typical workflow when people take that type of approach in terms of what they're actually doing within an organization?

00;38;01;05 - 00;38;08;23

Mickey Pelletier

Yeah. Making sure I understand the question. So when they do have disparate systems, you know, what that workflow is looking like? Is that what you're getting at?

00;38;08;26 - 00;38;12;01

Jonny Dunning

Yeah. Because you can end up with kind of like swivel chair situations.

00;38;12;06 - 00;38;37;24

Mickey Pelletier

Well that was what I was going to. Yeah. I mean yeah, you just you just have these disparate, processes that are owned by different teams using different technologies, and it just becomes very chaotic. I mean, it's it's it's the antithesis of what, you know, the solutions that we're going for are right. It's the genesis of why these types of things are needed because you have, just things done differently in different systems.

00;38;37;24 - 00;39;01;11

Mickey Pelletier

If they don't talk, obviously there's value loss, data corruption going from one system to a next to the next is particularly if it is a manual swivel chair approach. You know, we do see that a lot. And there's just a communication breakdown. To put it bluntly, in terms of what it is you're trying to get done, to excuse me to of what you're trying to achieve.

00;39;01;11 - 00;39;08;08

Mickey Pelletier

Right. And trying to get that out of I have a need. Right. So absolute breakdown.

00;39;08;11 - 00;39;31;11

Jonny Dunning

It comes back to terminology as well because. So if somebody says contracts system, I always think to myself, well what does that mean. What do you mean by that. So what what type of contract is that. So when people have contract systems do they talking about DocuSign or Adobe Sign or some sort of signature package? Probably not that they just call out their e-signature package.

00;39;31;11 - 00;39;57;12

Jonny Dunning

And that's kind of a an accepted additional thing. But is it is it the MSA or is it, you know, is it a contract with a worker in a VMs, or is it a contract with a supplier for a statement of work in a services procurement system? You know, that's that's where is it from a product point of view, if you sort of say, oh, the Zivio product handles, how do you create a statement of work contract?

00;39;57;14 - 00;40;31;04

Jonny Dunning

Somebody might say, well, we've already got a contract management tool that, that that's, that's where people miss the point ultimately because and this is where you can get to the simplicity around what you were saying just a second ago and what I said earlier, which is what's the problem you're trying to solve. So if the problem you're trying to solve is to bring up contract a worker and bring a worker on board, then that's going to be best done in a VMs and not in just Ariba, for example, if it's if it's a SAP set up, you have Ariba at the top level doing a strategic sourcing or MSAs that, you know, your suppliers

00;40;31;04 - 00;40;55;20

Jonny Dunning

and that sort of thing. You're not going to do a contractors engagement contract in a region. You're going to do it in Fieldglass, you're going to do it in the VMs. So, so likewise, from a services procurement point of view or any other area, there are pathways that just need to be channeled through the correct platforms. So when people look at integrating systems, they can make it two disjointed

00;40;55;20 - 00;41;20;29

Jonny Dunning

They can continue to have a disjointed process, or they can allow the system that is best for that particular outcome to deal with that particular pathway. So again, people think about using different systems, but ultimately it's just should just be different screens. If you're utilizing white label capabilities, if you're utilizing single sign on, things like that on a centralized, you know, we talked about you talked about intake or triage.

00;41;21;01 - 00;41;42;21

Jonny Dunning

If you talk about centralized start points, you can then have different channels, different workflows, different screens where a user doesn't need to sign in because they're just using their, their, their single sign on that they use anyway to just go straight into that screen. There might be, well, be white label to look like every other type of screen that they're using, and they do what they need to do within the system.

00;41;42;24 - 00;42;05;25

Jonny Dunning

And then the system takes care of where that information goes, you know, reporting and things like that. It's not massively complicated, centralized reporting. As long as you know what you want to report on, you know, this is where things like the dashboards and BI packages like Tableau Sisense power BI information can be centralized there from multiple systems, but it's obviously different companies are set up differently.

00;42;05;25 - 00;42;37;24

Jonny Dunning

So, I think there are simpler ways to do things than people might think from the outset. But the worst case scenario is, you know, people can't continue with situations where they just don't have a technology solution in place for things like services, procurement, manual, manual workarounds, you know, just stopping people and getting things done quickly, making people go outside the process, calling, causing compliance, risk, all kinds of financial risk.

00;42;37;27 - 00;43;08;01

Jonny Dunning

It's just those companies, as I said earlier, they're not going to be able to compete effectively. They will just lose. So I think although it's a thorny issue, organizations do need to start addressing this. I mean, you mentioned friction killing adoption, where you get these kind of processes, manual processes, etc. and we talked about the desire for change in the adoption side of it, within the context of of what people are trying to solve here.

00;43;08;03 - 00;43;21;08

Jonny Dunning

Where do you what examples have you seen of really good adoption in terms of how did the organization go about achieving good adoption? So for technology solution that actually made a difference?

00;43;21;10 - 00;43;40;28

Mickey Pelletier

Yeah. Some of the best implementations I've seen is, is the change management process started before the implementation ever did, you know, they they had sold the idea of what they were moving to before they had even bought a product. Right. And there was just this idea of this is what we want to move to, and we all agree on this.

00;43;40;28 - 00;43;59;04

Mickey Pelletier

We were clear on what the root cause of our problems are. We know what the value of solving that would be, and we're all bought in that this changes is worth it. That takes a lot of time, right? But to have champions that are building that up before a solution is even selected and we know that it exists, we're going to go out and do that.

00;43;59;06 - 00;44;22;19

Mickey Pelletier

They've enabled the business to already vision, visualize what this could be and how their lives could be made simpler and transformed. And it's funny as providers, that's a little bit out of our control. Although I'd always sell myself as a as a change, change architect, you know, transformation architect for clients to help them come in and start visualizing what this could be.

00;44;22;19 - 00;44;43;12

Mickey Pelletier

Before you know it, it never actually gets implemented. I think that's a key component because, having a good idea of where you stand right now and what the future could be, is a big deal. Because when you've, you've probably approach this where you come in and you start selling, you're not selling, but you're trying to get the sale.

00;44;43;12 - 00;45;07;14

Mickey Pelletier

You're trying to educate, generate value around what, what you're going to provide. But if they don't really know what the root cause of their problems are and be able to take stock of where that is and where things could go to in the future state, it's very hard to relate. And I keep using the word visualize, but understand what that forward looking, approach would be and then what the value would be behind that.

00;45;07;14 - 00;45;29;07

Mickey Pelletier

Because if you don't know truly what the the problems in the root cause are, it's hard to establish that that change management and the champion championing of these ideas, right, to push that forward into the business so that adoption, as you implement the system, it's incrementally, hey, we're doing this. Let's do some testing. Let's let's bring it to life for you.

00;45;29;07 - 00;45;45;27

Mickey Pelletier

Let's start showing you how to do that. Let's start getting you trained on it. Change management I think, is one of the utmost important things that honestly gets devalued. And, I'm trying to think of the right word. Deprioritized. Yeah.

00;45;45;27 - 00;45;48;14

Jonny Dunning

It gets pushed to the bottom of the pile sometimes. Isn't that.

00;45;48;16 - 00;46;06;10

Mickey Pelletier

Right? But if I if I can't enable the business and the users that are going to do this, not just the exec that's going to do this because the exec. Yeah, they, they get it. But, you know, the people that are going to live and breathe this every day. I mean, I think that's one of the most important things.

00;46;06;10 - 00;46;29;23

Mickey Pelletier

And it's funny because that all that existed before AI, before before services procurement, before all of this, but we we sometimes forget that we're humans. And humans struggle with change as much as we say we embrace that, that that is what I think is one of the important things. And then from that executive standpoint, them to be a champion of that because easy to get on board.

00;46;29;23 - 00;46;51;10

Mickey Pelletier

But it's like, oh, you know what? The CFO, you know, CPO CHRO they're all in on this man. And they're, they're, they're saying, join us, join us on the boat. We're going for a cruise here. And it's going to be a good time because our life is going to be better. That that's a key piece. And I'm not saying you need to mandate everybody this is what you're doing, like it or get out.

00;46;51;13 - 00;47;22;23

Mickey Pelletier

But there needs to be, I think, rules and guidelines of we're doing this because XYZ z value and ABC outcome that to us generates the real ROI and it's going to make our lives better and our business stronger. I know all of that seems very, very basic, but some of the programs I've seen and been a part of, particularly with services procurement, having that vision from the outset and that buy in just goes a long way, because otherwise you're going to run into roadblocks and hiccups along the way.

00;47;22;23 - 00;47;38;11

Mickey Pelletier

Don't get me wrong. You need to have your data. You need to have your contracts. You need to have everything fairly buttoned up. But I think a lot of that can come along the way. But in terms of adoption, you have to have that change mentality before the change even starts.

00;47;38;14 - 00;47;48;26

Jonny Dunning

Yeah, I think that's a great point. I've definitely seen some examples of that that have been very effective. But I always just think of it. It's just like strategy. It's just like business strategy. It's like, you.

00;47;48;27 - 00;47;49;23

Mickey Pelletier

Know, it's nothing new.

00;47;49;27 - 00;48;10;09

Jonny Dunning

Yeah, exactly. It's like, you know, you want to get a team together to row the Atlantic. The team need to know you're rowing the Atlantic. They need to know what that involves, why you're doing it, where are we going? And then they one can row together. The. So so that getting ahead of it, I think is a critical, critical thing for people, for organizations to do.

00;48;10;11 - 00;48;36;24

Jonny Dunning

Your organization makes a decision. They get a clear mandate. They then like, you know, almost like you say, rolling out an advance, getting Buy-In. I think one of the other areas that I've seen, work extremely well from the change management point of view is everybody knows within their organization there's going to be certain people in certain departments, depending on the organization, that are going to say, we don't want to do this.

00;48;36;26 - 00;49;08;04

Jonny Dunning

We like how it is. We're going to be more resistant to change than anybody else. And it might be like it might be a very human thing. It might be a personality trait in a particular individual or business unit manager or department head or or somebody operation, whoever it may be. It doesn't really matter. Or it may be that particular parts of the organization are going to have more change to take on than everybody else, because their part of the process is really complicated and it's been done manually in some weird way for ten years, and it's got it.

00;49;08;09 - 00;49;50;04

Jonny Dunning

It's going to have to change, and there's going to be a lot more change. One of the things that I've seen to be really effective, and I always, I always steal the phrase, tiger team, is when, when people basically put together, a Tiger team, the one of our, clients kind of referred to as their way of solving the problem, was taking the people who are going to complain the most and getting them involved really early and and actually pressure testing the process and the solution with the people that are going to put up the biggest struggle and and in those type of situations, people end up with the

00;49;50;04 - 00;50;04;02

Jonny Dunning

best solution and the best adoption because they've tackled the thorny issues. I haven't just tried to kind of go through on a path of least resistance. They've said, this is going to be good. Who are the naysayers? Who are the people going to go, oh, it's not gonna make any difference. It's not going to change my life.

00;50;04;07 - 00;50;31;10

Mickey Pelletier

Get it? What is the critics get the critics involved? Yeah, I mean, those are those. And if you could turn a critic into a champion. My goodness. You know that that's going to go a long way because they said, you know, at first I was skeptical, but now I'm really bought in. And that that's a pretty powerful message when the skeptic, the critic comes in and, and can make, you know, obviously they can make improvements to it like, hey, yeah, you know, this isn't going to work because of XYZ.

00;50;31;12 - 00;50;40;16

Mickey Pelletier

Great. That gives us something to evaluate as we're assessing this and setting up this, setting up this technology. You know, I love that. That's a great approach.

00;50;40;19 - 00;51;06;23

Jonny Dunning

And like you say, they can improve it so they can help shape it. You know, they can pressure test your solution because it's within organizations. It's like it's like a family. that’s going on holiday. You know, somebody says, you know, have we got the insect repellent. And this is like somebody who's sort of, have we got this? Or did we remember the, the kids fishing nets so you go to the beach, whatever it is, there's going to be people who say, hey, have you thought about this?

00;51;06;26 - 00;51;26;11

Jonny Dunning

Because in the reality of how our business operates, this is important, and we need to make sure this is taken into consideration. And when the plans are just kind of like loftily rolling along, strategic level, you might miss something that could really put, a ton of, you know, a nail in your tire as you get going if you don't address it.

00;51;26;11 - 00;51;46;13

Jonny Dunning

So I definitely think that that early pressure testing of the solution, it's not about finding reasons not to do it. It's about finding the best way to do it. And if you find the best way to do it, you will get better adoption. And I think this kind of leads me on to the thing that resonated most out of what you were saying.

00;51;46;13 - 00;52;07;00

Jonny Dunning

So you were talking about the confusion about which systems do what, you know, and the handoff between systems. We kind of discussed that in terms of, you know, best to breed horses for courses. What's the right out, what which thing is solving, which problem. But then you were talking about the fact that you need to, outline the tech stack, really have a plan for it.

00;52;07;05 - 00;52;33;17

Jonny Dunning

What's the flow? And you said the critical thing, which is what will be easiest for the end users. That's for me. That's the magic. Because, you know, we always used to primarily think about what we were doing from the point of view of making procurement life better and easier. But that view has radically changed. You know, procurement is still as a technology provider, they're still like a primary customer.

00;52;33;20 - 00;52;59;02

Jonny Dunning

But what they want is not necessarily just to make their life easier and their life better, but it's to make their organization more effective, to drive business value. And to do that, they've got to make the they are there to enable the end users to be able to buy the services, buy the best services, make it compliant, make it fast so the business can succeed and everyone can get a pay rise and keep their job and the business sails forward very nicely.

00;52;59;02 - 00;53;10;01

Jonny Dunning

So the fact that you brought up that end user piece, I think that is something that is completely critical and sometimes it sort of gets lost in the detail.

00;53;10;03 - 00;53;33;28

Mickey Pelletier

It's amazing. Our entire industry is built on the backs of deploying people to work, right. Our entire contingent workforce industry is based on other people putting to work other people for for businesses. Right. You know, so obviously there's the end user in terms of the worker that's going out there. But I and obviously they're impacted by this.

00;53;33;28 - 00;53;46;29

Mickey Pelletier

They need to be able to do the things they need to do within the technology. But then, you know, the point, I think I was going back to is the, you know, that end user when we think of like the the hiring manager or the engagement manager.

00;53;47;01 - 00;53;48;23

Jonny Dunning

That's exactly what I'm thinking. Yeah.

00;53;48;23 - 00;54;03;09

Mickey Pelletier

I mean, I focus on the worker in my own head. Like we always got to keep them in mind. Right. But in services that may not always be, the, primary user, but that that engagement manager, that end user.

00;54;03;09 - 00;54;23;28

Jonny Dunning

They're sitting there in their department saying right, okay, this is what I've got to do this right. The business has got this strategy. We've got to release this new product. We got to we got to increase revenue. We've got to look after this type of client. We've got to deal with this kind of change, whatever it might be, whatever it took to do that particular function, they need to get that done.

00;54;24;00 - 00;54;52;28

Jonny Dunning

And it's not about them being controlled. It's not about, just making procurement slightly easier. It's about procurement adding this value and sometimes just getting, you know, being able to get out of the way. But, but do what the business needs to do to make it so that that end user, that buyer, as you call them, engagement manager within an organization, just make it easier, faster, more compliant, let them do what they need to do.

00;54;52;28 - 00;55;04;29

Jonny Dunning

Because ultimately, that's why in a lot of cases, you get engagement managers who just circumvent the procurement process. If it's a rubbish process, a manual process is a slow process. They are just not going to be able to. They're just going to.

00;55;04;29 - 00;55;06;05

Mickey Pelletier

Go find their own way.

00;55;06;11 - 00;55;29;12

Jonny Dunning

And then and then not doing it to try and you know, sabotage. Right. It's not malicious. They just need to get it done. If the organization can make it better for them, they'll get the compliance, they'll get the adoption, they'll get the, the guardrails and the data and the visibility that they need. But I have to focus on solving the problem for that person that's trying to get work done for the organization.

00;55;29;12 - 00;55;48;21

Mickey Pelletier

That's exactly it. I mean, one of the complaints of the VMs and not picking on anyone in particular, but generalized complaints, is that it's built for the MSP, right? It's built for the people that live and breathe this day to day. And we forget about the the manager, the end user, that uses this tool once, maybe twice a year.

00;55;48;21 - 00;56;04;22

Mickey Pelletier

Right. And think of any technology you've ever used. If you got to go into it once or twice a year, once or twice a year, you say, geez, how how do I log in? What do I do again? Where do I go? So it has to be built in the most simplistic way possible to shepherd them through the process.

00;56;04;24 - 00;56;27;22

Mickey Pelletier

I mean, that's why I think having good service, you know, good service wrapper of humans in the mix along with that technology can be great because then you have somebody to phone a friend, hey, I'm kind of hung up, but to get that technology to as user friendly point as possible is ultimately the goal. Because yeah, like you were alluding to, the managers generally don't care about the tech, they don't care about the process.

00;56;27;22 - 00;56;50;12

Mickey Pelletier

They know that they have to go through it to meet their goals and do the things that they need to achieve to, get get their output of the business that they're targeting. Right. And to them, it's just it's just another process, another step, maybe even another hassle, even if it is easy because they just they just want to be be able to just phone the phone their consulting firm and just have have somebody in the door tomorrow.

00;56;50;12 - 00;57;19;13

Mickey Pelletier

Right. But that's not the process, that that we want to have the proper visibility, compliance, etc.. So yeah, that ease of use for the end user always has to be, kept in mind, particularly in this space and in a process that could be particularly, you know, languishing in terms of the processes and the steps and the hoops you have to jump through just to get an SOW signed to deploy for workers to help you finish the build of your widget that your team is hung up on.

00;57;19;15 - 00;57;33;11

Mickey Pelletier

Right. And you needed that three weeks ago. And here you are. So it's not that people don't care that they're not apathetic, it's just another thing they have to go through to achieve their their goals.

00;57;33;13 - 00;57;50;20

Jonny Dunning

It's like if if writing a scope of work takes you three weeks or three months because you're like, I've got a blank page here, I don't know what to write. People are either going to do the bare minimum, and it's just going to be what you see on the PO, and there's going to be no detail and there's going to be nothing valuable worthwhile in the SOW

00;57;50;20 - 00;57;52;05

Jonny Dunning

That's probably just a or.

00;57;52;05 - 00;58;02;27

Mickey Pelletier

They pushed to their supplier to write the SOW on their paper and then it's backwards and you lose a lot of control and you're already off to a bad start. And, and we're just writing on paper. Yeah.

00;58;02;29 - 00;58;22;14

Jonny Dunning

Yeah. And then, and then they're just marking their own homework. But it's. Yeah, it's it's it's just not it. Like I say, the companies that take a laissez faire attitude to this sort of stuff are going to find that these things are inefficient and things are slow that will affect their business viability in the market because there's too much changing.

00;58;22;21 - 00;58;45;03

Jonny Dunning

Things are happening too fast. If you look at the technology, if you look at the the kind of the primary VMs platforms, they are, you know, amazingly successful, massive, massive companies. But they've been around since the early 2000s. And the way that technology was built on them, obviously they thought was updating it, but they're they're in to a certain extent.

00;58;45;03 - 00;59;04;07

Jonny Dunning

They're always going to be victims of their own success because they're massive platforms with massive numbers of massively complex, massive clients. That's a that's a massive legacy tech burden for you. But they're obviously always trying to update their user interface and things like that. But technology was designed in a different way then it was more the sort of thing you got to be trained on.

00;59;04;10 - 00;59;25;18

Jonny Dunning

And it is it does. The adoption hurdle, in my opinion, is higher. Modern technology that's designed kind of like AI native, you know, self-service is table stakes. You have to be able to allow business users and suppliers to be able to interact really quickly and, and only actually require minimal amount of training. It should just be obvious what they need to do.

00;59;25;18 - 00;59;42;26

Jonny Dunning

It should be really simple. It should be intuitive. With AI. I think the key thing with AI and it's I'm so lucky being in with and within an organization that have great people that can really leverage effectively. It's not about saying we're just going to use this one AI provider and it's going to it's going to do all these things.

00;59;42;26 - 01;00;15;12

Jonny Dunning

It's about saying within the service that we provide within our processes, at what point can we most effectively utilize AI to make things easier and make that end user have a better experience? And it's incremental, building different things in with different providers that utilize AI in slightly different ways. But add value, add value, add value, not trying to force thing into one for things, into just one box or one solution, but just saying, what's the most intelligent way to add AI to this process?

01;00;15;12 - 01;00;37;11

Jonny Dunning

To take away the to make things easier where they where they need to be made easier, those low consequence decisions dealing with like let's say, for example, if you got bids coming in, you might have a thousand 5000 words bid to look through. Well, it doesn't hurt to have a really good AI powered summary of that bid and recommendations on that bid based on what was in your scope of work.

01;00;37;14 - 01;00;53;02

Jonny Dunning

Right. And large language models are very good at doing that very accurately. So, so there's all these things that can be added to it. But but by making it easier. So the end user, it's just you. If as a technology provider, if you're not focused on that, you won't survive.

01;00;53;02 - 01;01;13;19

Mickey Pelletier

Right. And I'm clearly all in on AI, without a doubt. The only thing I caution is like, is it solving a problem? Are we just bolting on AI to say we have AI? If it's genuinely solving a problem and the need is there and it's not adding a complexity on top of the problem you already have, then, then absolutely.

01;01;13;25 - 01;01;37;06

Mickey Pelletier

I think we've seen, you know, with the shift in everybody does AI this AI that solutions have been spun up without them necessarily matching a very specific problem. And I think that becomes a problem in itself if you're just spinning up AI to say that, you know, that could be prohibitive later. Perhaps if that AI fails or the need evolve.

01;01;37;06 - 01;02;01;28

Mickey Pelletier

So it has to tie back like this whole conversation is, you know, what's the problem you're trying to solve. And if it's genuinely going to do that, amplifying how you are already going to solve it. But now, instead of cutting it down from 3 hours to 30 minutes, now we're doing it in 30s. Well, geez, I think that's, you know, obviously a win win win for for everyone involved as long as there's genuine problem solving, going on.

01;02;02;05 - 01;02;29;00

Mickey Pelletier

And I look at the world of AI beyond contingent workforce, we've seen so much of it in the the creative space, you know, and just a lot of AI that's used to create these nonsense videos, nonsense music, it's just like, oh, well, is that solving a problem? I don't know, I guess it's putting money in somebody's pocket, but tying that back to our space that the AI has to be informative and and really, you know, tying back to true problems that genuinely exist.

01;02;29;00 - 01;02;46;15

Jonny Dunning

a bit of a tangent, but something that, I'm interested to get your opinion on that came up very recently. I saw a post by, Joe Schwann talking about the bill, the new big bill, whether people regard it as, beautiful or not, it's big, far reaching.

01;02;46;15 - 01;03;08;09

Jonny Dunning

And it's, it's, you know, arriving, arriving soon. So I saw that you commented on that post on LinkedIn, I think was to, today or yesterday. Do you think that's going to have an impact from a misclassification point of view? I don't have like a very deep understanding of it as such. But it looked to me like there's going to be greater scrutiny.

01;03;08;12 - 01;03;09;15

Mickey Pelletier

On, yeah.

01;03;09;17 - 01;03;14;02

Jonny Dunning

On a 1099 versus W-2 type scenarios.

01;03;14;05 - 01;03;38;04

Mickey Pelletier

Yeah. I mean, that was a 900 page bill that got passed. And, you know, I, I'm not going to get political on on this whether whether you were pro that bill or against it. Yeah. I mean the implications I think are. ICs and 1099s in the US it's always been wishy washy and then it varies by state.

01;03;38;06 - 01;04;00;08

Mickey Pelletier

I'm always cautious to say like, oh, this is this is what's going to happen. And this is, this is where it is just because it's been all over the place. And the variability by states and whatnot. I would be. Not surprised if it, if there are implications for us, but I don't know if there's enough information out there.

01;04;00;08 - 01;04;26;05

Mickey Pelletier

And I certainly don't feel intelligent enough to talk about it. I mean, his post had provided had shedded a small amount of light on that. And I it's sort of said that like, hey, that's helpful and informative, but I don't know if there's enough there to really go off of and say, you know, there's going to be more scrutiny or, you know, or less generally that, group had been less scrutinizing over, you know, the use of 1099 and whatnot.

01;04;26;05 - 01;04;31;09

Mickey Pelletier

But I, I honestly don't know enough to speak intelligently about it. So.

01;04;31;12 - 01;04;57;00

Jonny Dunning

Yeah, it'd be really interesting to see what comes out of that. I just coming from a kind of if you look at what's happened in the UK, if you look at what's happened in Europe, in terms of just the scrutiny around engagement type, those that kind of misclassification issue, you know, it does feel a little bit more, all over the place in the way that the of, you know, a bit more of a free for all in the way that operates in the US.

01;04;57;00 - 01;05;22;12

Jonny Dunning

It's just less tightly controlled. And it's there is more, scrutiny on it. I think that would be very interesting. And just another driver in, within programs for the need to get all of these different workforce channels working effectively, lined up with a clear process around them. So yeah, it'd be interesting to see what that drives, you know, compliance, regulatory changes, as they might cover always can be quite big drivers.

01;05;22;12 - 01;05;52;18

Jonny Dunning

So I think that's an interesting one to keep an eye on. No doubt. That'll be plenty of discussion out of that at CWS Dallas as well. But before we wrap things up, last question I was going to ask you, so when people are in a situation where they don't have an effective program in place to manage services procurement, which is most organizations, in my experience, there are clearly painful questions to be answered.

01;05;52;20 - 01;06;21;23

Jonny Dunning

They need to be asked to the people who lead procurement, people who lead finance, the people who lead operational functions. Those are the sort of questions that people like you and I might pose or float in this type of conversation. But if you were to go into an organization, what are the what are the questions you would get people would you would ask people or get people to start asking themselves or each other, when it comes to like, where are we now?

01;06;21;23 - 01;06;24;01

Jonny Dunning

And are we happy with that?

01;06;24;04 - 01;06;47;08

Mickey Pelletier

Yeah. I mean, the the general questions. Yeah. What are the pain points, what are the problems you're trying to solve. But tying it back to what we were talking about, how painful are these problems in these situations that you're you're going through? Because I think, depending on the maturity of your organization and the things you're trying to change, perhaps there isn't, you know, a, an absolute must change.

01;06;47;08 - 01;07;07;27

Mickey Pelletier

Maybe there are more dire things going on in the organization that they, they need to get things right. But I also ask, like, how how serious are they in terms of improving their, their workforce management and the way that they engage non employee talent? Because if they're not prioritizing that I can't force them to do that. And I can show them all the value of what I do.

01;07;07;27 - 01;07;26;19

Mickey Pelletier

You could show them all the value of Zivio all day. But if they aren't committed to this and seeing it as a priority, even even though it's 30 to 50% of their workforce, man, there's not a whole lot we can do. And I hate to be just like, wow, you just give up. But there has to be a certain mentality and commitment to being able to make this change.

01;07;26;19 - 01;07;49;06

Mickey Pelletier

So on top of, you know, what are the problems, the pains, you know, how important is this to you right now? And how willing are you to to make a change? And what does it mean for your organization if you don't know that I'm willing to help you and help you figure out, how big of a priority this is, because from an outside looking in, it's an absolute must have and thing you should be focusing on.

01;07;49;06 - 01;08;10;11

Mickey Pelletier

But, you know, you have to be able to make that decision, and I'll give you all the education and knowledge you need. But where are you guys at in terms of your commitment? And what can you stand by in terms of your beliefs and values of being able to make, you know, transformative change within your organization? Because that's what it's going to come back to, is that commitment.

01;08;10;12 - 01;08;40;16

Mickey Pelletier

You can have the best solution, best ROI. But if we're not committed clients, not committed, what can you really do? So I think being able to gauge that is, is really, a valuable thing for them before they even start making an effort. Is this something you're going to take on and, and really want to transform? And then I think that helps everybody as well to go in with, you know, a clear plan of, of what to expect and what we can possibly accomplish, depending on where you are right now.

01;08;40;19 - 01;09;00;15

Jonny Dunning

Yeah. Really interesting. I like it it's I sometimes feel like realistically, I'm talking to, like, the 10% of people in the room that are sick of it that want to make a change, and they're not willing to just settle that like, no, I've had enough. We can do this better. This is this is not where it should be.

01;09;00;18 - 01;09;21;01

Jonny Dunning

I'm kind of, you know, the people that are fed up with it, angry with it, really recognize it. So why the hell are we doing something about it? Those are the people that. Yes, sometimes I'm speaking to in the room because and those are the people that are ready to just take radical action and actually push things forward and make a change.

01;09;21;03 - 01;09;44;28

Jonny Dunning

And they're the people who get the benefit of that. As well. They're the people who come away from it having achieved great things and have really moved the needle. You know, with something like this that can be seen as quite difficult to tackle. Certainly this point and it's evolution within the market, if you're the person who can go in there and make a change that's going to do wondrous things for your career, and this can impact on your your organization.

01;09;44;28 - 01;09;49;03

Jonny Dunning

And, you know, hopefully they get a big pat on the back for it.

01;09;49;05 - 01;10;19;18

Mickey Pelletier

So squeaky wheel gets the grease. So I mean, you know, somebody has to speak up and and be willing to make that change and get others committed to it. Right. Because I know the C-suite isn't always committed to the actions of improving contingent workforce program. They probably may not even know that it exists. Right. And so, we always have to be advocates for that and, and arm our partners and help them, progress this forward to be that squeaky wheel to help the company get commitment.

01;10;19;18 - 01;10;24;28

Mickey Pelletier

Right. Because I think that's what it's going to come down to if you want to make substantial and meaningful change.

01;10;25;00 - 01;10;48;15

Jonny Dunning

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, again, the C-suite can't afford to be complacent when it comes down to what's your organizational capacity, how do you get things done and how much stuff can you do? What can you do? Because you're making promises to your customers, you know, your your delivery, your products and services to the world. Are you, can you are you going to be able to when this changes and that changes?

01;10;48;17 - 01;11;11;18

Jonny Dunning

So, yeah, I think it's it comes right down to those, those two things of business value and ultimately empowering the end user. Yeah. Nice one. Thanks, Mickey. I really enjoyed that. That was definitely way more, enjoyable for me than just trying to hammer out some stuff on the LinkedIn comment and, and, you know, go back and forward and you're probably thinking, oh, Jonny's read a massive comment.

01;11;11;20 - 01;11;25;21

Jonny Dunning

Now, I've got to respond to that. I can't do that in 50 words. So I really appreciate you taking the time to to chat about it. And then, as always, brilliant to hear your insights and, yeah, keep it coming. I love all the content. I love the thought provoking stuff you're putting out there.

01;11;25;24 - 01;11;36;21

Mickey Pelletier

Appreciate it. Jonny. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me and always happy to talk to you particularly about this topic. It's it's one I'm very passionate about. So, love it. And, thanks again for having me.

01;11;36;23 - 01;11;39;02

Jonny Dunning

Awesome. Thanks very much, Mickey, speak soon.

01;11;39;05 - 01;11;39;28

Mickey Pelletier

Thank you.