Courtesy of Jason Busch I saw this Oracle white paper (registration required) which advises organizations NOT to invest too much on spend analysis projects .
I think it is good solid advice - better than what the analysts are providing. I would just change a few words per below (italics mine)
"Many organizations are spending millions of dollars and countless man hours on ERP, CRM and other enterprise software spend analysis projects that do not deliver on the promise that our and SAP's salepeople have made of global sourcing.
Organizations are struggling and devoting increasing resources including expensive third party implementation resources to elaborate, long term spend analysis projects around our software ...."
Seriously, why not also recommend customers only implement general ledger functionality as against complete ERP functionality, or just SFA versus more elaborate CRM functionality...and while at it why not also issue Oracle's own version of the Magic Quadrant for these categories?
