Handing Technology to Procurement Is Corporate Self‑Harm: Why Every Leader Must Be Technically Literate

What happens when the people who decide your technology treat it like a commodity to be purchased, not a capability to be grown? The short answer: expensive failure. The recent collapse of an Oracle ERP rollout at Birmingham City Council is another painful reminder that delegating technology choices to procurement teams or treating IT as a pure cost centre is not prudent risk management — it’s active organisational self‑harm.

The myth: technology is a utility you can buy and forget

For decades many organisations treated technology the way they treat office supplies: outsource procurement, let specialists install it, then expect it to run. That model made some sense when IT supported back‑office functions only. It makes no sense now. Technology is the mechanism through which products are built, services are delivered and decisions are made.

When purchasing teams or non‑technical executives are given ownership of vendor selection and contract negotiation without sufficient technical oversight, three things typically happen:

• Requirements are written as a shopping list rather than as outcomes, inviting expensive customisations.
• Vendor selection focuses on price and procurement templates rather than architecture fit, integration risk or operational maturity.
• Accountability becomes fragmented: nobody owns long‑term technological capability, only short‑term procurement KPIs.

Real costs — not just invoices

The story from Birmingham is instructive: a supposedly straightforward move to a cloud ERP led to a bespoke banking reconciliation system that failed to work, years of financial misreporting and eye‑watering costs. You can read the reporting here: The Register. Oracle’s product is mature (oracle.com), but maturity doesn’t absolve customers of responsibility. Vendor capability alone cannot substitute for internal clarity about business processes, data ownership and change capacity.

Beyond headline costs there are less visible but equally damaging impacts:

• Loss of trust (among regulators, citizens or customers) when core functions break.
• Operational paralysis while workarounds proliferate — increasing technical debt.
• Forced customisations and long vendor dependency that lock the organisation into expensive maintenance and consultancy.

What must change: treat technology as your business, not as a line item

If technology equals everything your organisation does, then capability in technology must sit at the heart of leadership decisions. That doesn’t mean every CEO needs to be a coder, but it does mean every senior leader must be tech literate and accountable for tech outcomes.

Three shifts are essential:

• From procurement to partnership: Procurement should enable strategic supplier relationships, not run vendor tick‑box exercises. This means longer discovery cycles, technical due diligence and shared success metrics.
• From project thinking to product thinking: Treat platforms and core systems as products with roadmaps, product owners and cross‑functional teams responsible for outcomes — not as one‑off projects handed to integrators.
• From outsourcing expertise to growing it: Build internal capability for architecture, security, data and integration so external vendors augment your capacity rather than replace it.

Practical steps leaders can take this quarter

If you are a CEO, board member or an executive with P&L responsibility, start with these pragmatic actions:

• Run a technology literacy audit at board level. Make sure at least one director can read an architecture diagram and challenge technical trade‑offs.
• Insist on technical due diligence in procurement. No deal moves forward without an independent architecture and operations review that includes integration, data migration and run‑costs.
• Adopt the product model for core systems. Assign product owners with budgets, KPIs and cross‑functional teams for ERP, CRM and other mission‑critical platforms.
• Embed engineers in procurement. Technical staff should participate in vendor selection panels and contract negotiations — not as silent witnesses but as decision makers.
• Measure capability, not only spend. Track metrics like lead time for changes, mean time to recover, and amount of technical debt — alongside traditional procurement metrics.

Where this leads — and why it matters

Organisations that recognise technology as strategic do three things better: they reduce risk, they capture value faster, and they remain adaptive. The alternative is the slow attrition of capability and occasional catastrophic failure. If your governance treats technology as a commodity, you will eventually pay — financially and reputationally.

Technology mastery must be a requirement for any position of responsibility. Not because we need more technocrats at the top, but because decisions about strategy, risk and value can no longer be made in a vacuum. The moment your procurement team becomes the arbiter of strategic technology choices, you have outsourced the future of your organisation.

Start by making one change this month: a short, focused technical due diligence for any major contract on the table. It’s inexpensive, pragmatic and immediately revealing. If you find gaps, fix the governance — before the headline appears on page one and the real bill arrives on the next quarter’s balance sheet.