Digital Skills Perspectives: Adam Brown, Maersk

[SG] “If you look out into the market, there’s a huge amount of noise about tech and emerging tech, and of course, Generative AI. Tech always evolves, but do you think we are on the cusp of revolution, or are we simply in an evolution?”

[AB] “No, you’re on the cusp of revolution without a doubt. There’s been this drip feed of the evolution of technology for years and years and years. If we take the microcosm that is procurement in the evolution of that tech, there hasn’t been anything revolutionary. It started with putting your data in Excel and manipulating it, followed by some fairly basic automation and some fairly basic analysis on top of that year after year, followed by some workflows on top of that data year after year. But there’s been no fundamental step change or seismic shift in the way that we deal with things and do things. It’s still very much driven by human interaction.

Five years ago, we were talking about the augmentation of the Category Manager and how we can better augment the capability of a Category Manager through technologies with better, slicker user interfaces and by putting things on a mobile phone. Today, we’re talking about how we can commoditize the Category Manager because of the advent, particularly of large language models. In theory, we can enable a tech-savvy, digitally native person who doesn’t have procurement expertise to do the work. So yeah, I think we’re at a critical tipping point whereby all conventions will change. “

[SG] “This research has looked specifically into digital skills. You are excelling in leading your businesses’ digital (procurement) programs, so what about your role? What are the skills that make you successful and that a CPO might look for when looking at someone to lead their digital program?”

[AB] “Self-reflection has always been a highly difficult one for me. For starters, communication. I’m not a salesperson driving revenue, and I’m not a procurement person putting money on the bottom line. I cost the company money, and everything I do has to make a procurement faster, better, or cheaper to run. Communication of those initiatives is critical to making them stick. 

Tied into that is the ability to understand technology, what’s real, and what can really make a material difference in the company’s context. So, digital literacy is absolutely critical. But, warning here: If you are a good communicator and passionate about technology, you run the risk of overselling, so a dose of pragmatism or the ability to stop and take a reality check is important. 

Finally, as a transformation professional, I will say change management skills. It’s one thing to communicate the benefits, but you must also be able to foresee, envisage, or plan out that change management program to land at a level where it’s going to deliver the benefits you promised “

[SG] “We might, not without reason, accuse sales professionals of overselling but it’s interesting to hear you talk about that as a danger in your role. Is there a time when things haven’t gone to plan when rolling something out?”

[AB] “Adoption primarily comes down to usability. And so (non) usability is the single biggest reason for things failing, perhaps tied with an overselling of what it’s going to do. Usability can be at an app level or simply the cognitive load that you are asking someone to take on with a change. 

Look at your phone, for example. When you switched it on, it probably had what, ten apps? And you explored three or four? Now, it has over 100. If I gave you that phone with 100 apps on it and told you to figure them all out at once, it would break your cognitive load; there would be too much to take in at once, and it would break you. It sounds ridiculous, but you would’ve rejected the smartphone.“

[SG] “So there is a balance between familiarity of approach and ease of use?”

[AB] “It cannot be different. That’s the problem and a misconception everybody makes. If you’re doing it today and this just represents a different way of doing it, it’s not good enough. That simply isn’t good enough. Something new has to be an order of magnitude easier than you’re doing it today. And so, you know, for example, messaging on the phone versus a fax machine. You are broadly doing the same thing but messaging on a phone is an order of magnitude easier because you simply hit somebody’s name, type, and send.

But I see it time and time again where the benefits of doing something a new way just aren’t great enough to drive adoption. Take a governance process in Excel, for instance.“

[SG] “So if you imagine you walked into a greenfield procurement organization tomorrow with the mandate to put the digital building blocks in place. Is there a logical place to start in building that roadmap?”

[AB] “Data, you must get your data in place. Every decision you take or metric you’re going to measure your success on is better with meaningful data. Otherwise, it’s conjecture. Any decision you make in life based on anecdote or conjecture has an enhanced probability of failure. If you don’t understand your data, you don’t fully understand how the business is operating. You could say, OK, I’m not going to particularly worry about getting my data clean and fresh because we can deploy some level of artificial intelligence to clean it up. But you are kind of hiding a mess under the carpet. You might have AI on top, but it’s still messy underneath.

Secondly, I’d be looking at getting risk under control because that’s what procurement is fundamentally there to do: manage that interaction between cost and risk. Once you have your spend under control and you’ve got the “oh ****, something’s gone wrong” under control, you can relax, knowing that everything else that you do will now be incrementally better. You can start building and building upon this with whatever sourcing tools are relevant to whatever workflows and orchestrations are needed. But whatever you choose to build, and whatever guard rails you want, the cornerstone is making that honest decision right up front of what is procurement actually needed for?“

[SG] “And large language models?”

[AB] “We know that we have these wonderful large language models coming along, meaning we can go even further in how we can rapidly interrogate and understand massive volumes of written data. This opens a lot of possibilities, and if I was starting in a greenfield now, the really exciting thing is then that I could build a Co-pilot from day one hooked into all of this data at every step. My dream would be that procurement people would never need to go near a laptop. They can focus on face-to-face conversations with their vendors and business stakeholders.“

[SG] “The advent of Gen AI, in particular, is interesting for the supply ecosystem that sits around procurement, and maybe even procurement itself. Gen AI can make the amateur feel like they are a professional, which could alter the perception of the added value that consultants, software, and service providers bring. It could even apply to procurement itself; if stakeholders can access information and templates at the touch of a button, why use procurement? Will some of these firms fall away?”

[AB] “There will be a shift. It’ll be a change. It’s like any revolution that we’ve seen: industrial revolutions, technology revolutions, and information age revolutions. This is now the next step, and like before, it will enable the human mind to be applied to a different problem set or different problem area. There’s going to be something new to do.

With the advent of GenAI, procurement’s role has undoubtedly changed…today, the ideal procurement person would consist of a quarter lawyer, a quarter negotiator, a quarter accountant, a quarter engineer…the list goes on, and will be enabled by the next gen of AI. You probably wouldn’t say Master of Excel and, or PowerPoint Ninja.“

[SG] “Let’s not go too hard on PowerPoint; we are talking about the foundations of my career here… But I have an observation that 10-12 years ago, we started to see real traction in the ‘Specialist Operating Model’, and these ‘Super Specialized Hybrid ‘models that we are talking about now are the next generation of that. So, we will likely see a push towards a new generation of ‘Digital Managed Services’, outsourcing, and consulting partners in addition to new tech. 

But what was super interesting with the advent of the specialist model, whereby you start to get specific teams running specific processes and tasks, was that you quickly found out who was holding on to work because they enjoyed it or felt comfort from doing it even though that work could be done by someone or something else better or cheaper.”

[AB] “This, in part, comes back to my earlier point that whatever technology you’re deploying can’t just be: here’s the same thing. It needs to be an order of magnitude easier and point to a better way for the individual. But there will always be that thing, regardless of the technology, regardless of the change; is it somebody who is going to always want to aspire to do more, or is it somebody who is just going to stay at a level?“

[SG] “As a follow-up, we also found that when transitioning to a specialist model, the briefing process became absolutely critical. If you couldn’t brief effectively (to the team taking on the work), you would not get back what you thought you would and would need to rework. For briefing, substitute in prompting to make it relevant today. Learning how to prompt/ get the best out of Copilots or Knowledge Pilots will be a critical skill.

Switching gear slightly. You have set up and run digital teams and programs; what skills have you found important to have in those teams and surround yourself with?”

[AB] “There are a lot of similarities between what we did at BT and now what we are doing at Maersk. Fundamentally, in BT, we were firmly in the buy camp, whereas at Maersk, we have more build capability as we adapt to some very big nuances that exist in the logistics industry around, you know, ships and ports and containers and movements and all that kind of thing. So, at Maersk, in that environment, I need more pure development skills.

BT will probably be more aligned with the average procurement function. In that environment, it was critical that the team had all been procurement practitioners. We understood the processes, guardrails, and drivers of procurement. But we were also extremely tech-minded or tech-curious. This went beyond being good at Excel or PowerPoint and into a deep understanding of how various systems really work. When you marry that up with the procurement understanding, you get a really focused team. If you were to take any of the people who worked for me at BT, they would have also excelled at being consultants; it’s that mindset.“

[SG] “And if you were to give some advice to someone who’s just stepped into the role as a digital procurement leader, or in fact, to your younger self stepping into the role, what would the key points be?”

[AB] “Usability is key. Technology is useless if nobody uses it. A digital ghost town is the worst place to be. So, to make your life easy for change management, focus on usable solutions. And by that, I mean consumer-grade user interface. This is the lesson we learned from Steve Jobs and Apple: Who is the customer? How are they using it? What are their needs? Hyperfocus on usability and how people are actually going to use it is super, super critical. So, it would be the absolute #1.

The second is just to be curious. Be very curious. Keep challenging yourself to learn and know more, but critically try to understand how things really work and why things don’t. There’s so much technology that achieves the same outcome in different ways that you need to understand. Does the way that it achieves it, work for you? Good tech is a wasted investment if it doesn’t make sense to you and your business. There are lots of good ideas; don’t stop at the first one you see.“