Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) has to be one of the fastest growing considerations for procurement staff, and businesses more generally, over the last decade. Its surprising, but reassuring, that we as a society have realised that to truly to provide excellent services we need those services to represent their customers – in as many facets as possible. Ensuring your technology suppliers base are considerate to your needs, representative of your business and engaging across the whole of society is a critical part of a procurement evaluation.
Despite the “woke” labels being bandied around, true D&I is an economic imperative With job vacancies at an all time high, technology suppliers need to ensure they are not just fishing in the old “known” talent pools. Traditional recruitment practices are being replaced with more broad minded approaches where potential staff gender, sexuality, disabilities, neuro-diversities and any other consideration matter less – the focus is on their capabilities and what they can offer to your customers. It is amazing its taken to long to get traction.
From a data perspective, it is very difficult to track D&I at a company level with the current landscape. Gender is fairly easily derived from first name (with error tolerances) of owners of companies, nationality can be derived from company registration data, but other more personal attributes for good reason are not published.
That said a broad-minded supplier will have published Diversity and Inclusion, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) or Environmental / Social Guidelines (ESG) polices on their website. This can be traced within Embedded Intelligence, and is how we track a company’s respect of good D&I practices.
So, selecting a supplier with good D&I awareness will lead to improved service. If you are a company with a broad range of employees, with different needs and viewpoints, you need a supplier who will respect and understand that. Similarly, if you want to be considered a D&I aware company yourself, your supply chain should be able to stand up to similar scrutiny.