One process, three owners: where does the mandate sit?

Take any process in a large procurement organisation. Someone develops it, someone builds the tool that runs it, and the line lives with it every day. Where the mandate sits between those three decides whether anything scales. How often is that actually decided?

A CPO Outlook 2026 discussion piece · EBG | Network

Pick a sourcing process, a supplier onboarding flow or a contract approval route. In most large procurement organisations, three groups touch it. One group develops the process. Another builds and configures the digital tool that runs it. And the line uses it every day, and adjusts it when it does not quite fit.

When those three disagree, who decides? That is procurement process ownership in practice. And how often is the honest answer that nobody decided, and someone just did?

Process and tools are becoming one effort

EBG’s Xperience 2026 survey asked 48 senior procurement professionals, one per company, how their operating model is evolving. Several answers were possible. Two stood out, and they point in the same direction.

Reliance on digital tools rose from 55% to 71% in a year. The process-driven approach held at 58%. EBG’s own reading in the survey report was that process and tools are increasingly seen as one effort, not two.

If that is right, the mandate question gets sharper. Whoever owns the tool starts to own the process, whether or not anyone decided that. And a process that each team is free to configure starts to exist in as many versions as there are teams.

What slows things down when the opportunity is clear

The same survey asked what most often holds action back when a clear opportunity or risk is in front of the team. Competing demands came first, named by 62%. Stakeholder alignment followed at 53%, and unclear mandate at 36%. Data confidence, often treated as the main brake, came in at 29%.

The pattern is not a Nordic one. Deloitte’s 2025 Global CPO Survey of more than 250 CPOs across 40 countries names siloed ways of working as the top barrier to delivering value, at 57%, followed by competing priorities at 46%.

One Xperience respondent put the underlying need in a single line, in the survey’s free-text field:

Why local solutions are hard to give up

EBG’s reading is that local adaptation is seldom a failure of discipline. More often, it may be how a team solves a problem the central process did not foresee. Over years, those fixes add up. Each one made sense. Together they make harmonisation very hard to land.

Behavioural science has a name for part of the reason, and it happens to be the IKEA effect. The researchers named it after flat-pack furniture that arrives with some assembly required. In four experiments, Norton, Mochon and Ariely found that people valued products they had assembled themselves more highly than identical ones they had not built, at times almost as highly as work made by experts. The effect held only when the work was completed. When participants built something and then took it apart, or were stopped before finishing, it faded.

The studies used small everyday objects, not organisations, so carrying the finding over to ways of working is EBG’s reading. It may still help explain why a line’s own, working solution is hard to give up: it was built and it works. The authors also suggest that when many people contribute to one shared initiative, ownership spreads and the attachment to it may thin. For anyone designing one process for a whole group, that turns into a practical question. How does the line get to complete something in the shared process, rather than only receive it?

Change in two directions at once

That is one direction of change. The programme text for the lab below names a second one: the leadership above, which keeps assigning the line projects. Read against the survey, that is the 62% again. Every new project handed to the line is one more competing demand, landing on the same people asked to stop designing their own solutions.

Most people who drive this kind of change sit in between. Their mandate reaches some way up and some way down, rarely all the way. So which direction is harder to move?

When the button gets too easy

There is a newer problem at the far end. The more integrated and simplified a process becomes, the less the people running it can feel whether the result is right. When switching supplier is one click, who still checks the answer?

The research on this is older than generative AI. In a review in the journal Human Factors, Parasuraman and Manzey went through empirical studies of people working with automated systems and decision aids in aviation, medicine, process control and military command and control. They describe automation bias: when a decision aid is wrong, people follow it anyway, or miss what it did not flag. It occurred in novices and experts alike, in teams as well as individuals, and it could not be prevented by training or by explicit instructions to verify the aid’s recommendations.

Design, not only training

Two findings in the review point towards design rather than training. The bias seemed to depend on how far the aid went towards making the decision, and on how reliable it usually was. And the authors see preliminary evidence, still to be confirmed, that it can be reduced by aids that support the analysis of information rather than hand over a decision. Raising users’ accountability for the overall outcome has also helped, although the authors call that evidence not fully conclusive.

The studies concern pilots, clinicians and plant operators, not procurement teams, so applying this to a one-click supplier switch is EBG’s reading. It does suggest where to look: at what the button hands over, and at who feels accountable for the result.

An Xperience respondent described the same concern from inside procurement. Over time AI will run more of the data-intensive work, but staff still need to understand the data structure to evaluate what the AI recommends. Where in the process is understanding deliberately kept, and by whom?

Where else the programme picks this up

The morning roundtables are hosted by organisations that see this pattern across many procurement functions at once, rather than from inside one. Three of them sit close to the question.

Which is why this is a lab

None of this has a single answer. It is the kind of question that moves when people running comparable organisations compare how they have actually drawn the lines, and what it cost. That is what the afternoon of 14 October is for.