Manage Your Vendors Before They Manage You
Maximize the value of vendor relationships.
- As IT services and products continue to become outsourced, IT is increasingly dependent on external vendors, and a transaction-based approach becomes insufficient to guarantee continued value.
- When IT does not manage these vendors properly, performance levels can drop and fail to deliver essential services 鈥� and IT is left accountable.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- All vendors are not equal. Invest your vendor management efforts where they can deliver the best return; focus on the vendors that are most important to your business. Classify and prioritize your vendors to separate the wheat from the chaff.
- Vendor management is an ongoing commitment. From contracting to renewal, a successful vendor management office (VMO) depends on your ability to create repeatable, iterative processes that can flourish over many years of diligent work.
Impact and Result
- Prioritize and classify your vendors with quantifiable, standardized rankings.
- Focus on your strategic vendors first, then, year over year, work through every classification of vendor.
- Standardize your processes for transitioning in new vendors, maintaining communications, and monitoring performance.
- Create clear escalation pathways and contingency plans for addressing vendor underperformance.
- Codify your tailored, best-practice methodology for managing vendor relationships.
About Info-Tech
91制片厂 is the world鈥檚 fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.
We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.
What Is a Blueprint?
A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.
Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.
Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst
Get the help you need in this 3-phase advisory process. You'll receive 7 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.
Guided Implementation 1: Prioritize vendors
- Call 1: Review inventory tool.
- Call 2: Discuss what attributes make a vendor indispensable to your organization.
Guided Implementation 2: Classify vendors
- Call 1: Review Info-Tech鈥檚 classification system.
- Call 2: Validate your vendor classifications.
Guided Implementation 3: Document vendors
- Call 1: Review the vendor information sheets and discuss any roadblocks.
- Call 2: Review the vendor scorecards and feedback cards.
- Call 3: Review meeting agendas and engagement plans.
Contributors
- John Alexis, Director of IT Services, GTAA
- Deepak Bansal, Enterprise Head of IT Vendor Management, Envision Healthcare
- Ronald Flockhart, Group Sourcing Head, FirstRand Group
- Carla Di Castro, Senior Global Sourcing Manager, Workday
- Gerry Holmes, Director of IT, Canadian Cancer Society (ret.)
- Rick Johnson, IT Manager, St. Lawrence County Information Technology Department
- Sherif Sheta, CIO Advisor, CCRM
- Stratton Penberthy
- Three anonymous contributors
Essentials of Vendor Management for Small Business