The Purchases Your Approval Process Never Sees

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The evaluation process is where a buying organization records its decision. It is usually not where the decision gets made. That happens earlier, at the point where something is admitted into the evaluation universe at all, and almost no organization governs that point.

Consider what the admission step actually looks like in most enterprises. A category owner has capacity to evaluate a handful of options seriously. Twenty or forty are available. The reduction from forty to five happens somewhere, and it happens fast, and it is rarely written down. Whatever survives that cut gets rigorous scrutiny. Whatever does not survive it gets none.

This is a failure mode with a name, and it is worth naming because it is invisible by construction: pre-evaluation attrition. Value is never assessed, because it never passed the attention and relevance gates required to enter the buyer’s decision system. The option may be sound, and it may be the right answer. Neither of those ever gets tested.

What makes it hard to see is that the signal is silence rather than rejection. A rejected option at least produced a decision, and a decision leaves a record behind it. An option lost to attrition produces nothing at all, because nobody logs what they did not look at. The corpus already carries the version of this that happens after a promise has been made, where nobody rates the promise. This is the version that happens before anything is promised at all.

Attention Is the First Thing a Buyer Governs

Buyers govern spend. They govern approvals. They govern security review and contract terms and renewal calendars. Attention, which determines what ever reaches any of those controls, is usually governed by whoever emailed most persuasively that week. It is the same shape as the gap that leaves verification unassigned after the contract is signed: an obligation everybody assumes is held somewhere, and nobody has been given.

There is one piece of published evidence worth putting next to this, and it is worth being exact about what it measures, because it does not measure the admission step. Avasant’s research on IT vendor governance, summarized on its free Research Byte in August 2022, found that 24 percent of organizations apply a vendor governance practice that is both formal and consistently applied, 35 percent have a formal practice they apply inconsistently, and 15 percent operate informally. That is about governing a supplier relationship the organization already has. Avasant also sells third-party governance services, so the figures are best read as an argument for the market it works in rather than as a neutral measure.

Take the numbers at their weakest and they still say something about the step before. If only a quarter of organizations consistently govern the relationships they have already entered, the odds that they govern which relationships get considered in the first place are not better. There is no survey of that, because nobody collects a number for a decision nobody writes down.

None of that is a lapse in diligence. It is what happens when a fixed attention budget meets an intake with no limit on it.

The Intake Just Got Louder

Artificial intelligence did not create pre-evaluation attrition, but it has raised the volume on it considerably.

Every artifact that used to signal effort now costs nothing to produce. Proposals are more polished, business cases are cleaner, and benchmark tables arrive faster and better formatted than they used to. The signals that buyers historically used as a rough proxy for seriousness have been commoditized, and they have been commoditized uniformly, which means they no longer separate anything.

The buyer response to that flood is predictable and rational: tighten the filter, raise the bar for what earns a first meeting, and cut the shortlist earlier. The result is an uncomfortable combination, because standards inside the evaluation go up while access to the evaluation itself narrows. The organization gets more rigorous about the five things it looks at and less deliberate about how those five were chosen.

Value That Never Enters Evaluation

Put plainly, value that never enters evaluation is indistinguishable from value that does not exist. Not worth less, but indistinguishable, because the buyer holds no record either way.

The consequence runs through everything downstream of it. Every downstream control an organization has built, every scoring matrix, every stage gate, every post-implementation review, operates only on the survivors of an ungoverned cut. Rigor applied to a shortlist assembled by attention is rigor applied to a sample nobody selected on purpose.

Governing the Entry

The correction starts one step earlier than the scrutiny already being applied, and it requires only three declarations the buyer has the authority to make today.

The first is a relevance boundary. What belongs in this evaluation universe at all, stated before anything is in it? A category with a written admission criterion behaves differently from a category with an inbox.

The second is a minimum viable evaluation. What is the smallest test that would confirm or deny relevance? Most attrition happens because the only two options on offer are full evaluation or nothing, and full evaluation is expensive, so nothing wins by default.

The third is an escalation threshold. What evidence justifies spending more attention? This converts attention from a resource that gets captured into a resource that gets allocated.

None of this requires new software or a reorganization. It requires writing down the cut that is already happening.

The standard a buyer applies to the options in front of them matters less than the standard that decided which options got in front of them, and only the first of those is usually written down.

Avasant, “IT Vendor Governance the Key to Realizing Value from IT Supplier Relationships,” Research Byte, August 2022, summarizing the full report “IT Vendor Governance Best Practices”: 24 percent formal and consistently applied, 35 percent formal but inconsistent, 15 percent informal. The figures describe governance of supplier relationships that already exist, not admission into evaluation, and nothing beyond that is credited to them.

Keep reading: ACT I · Chapter 2: The Broken Value Flow