A brave and honest soul recently admitted to me that they have no idea what is meant by the concept of “managing IT suppliers”. This then is a response to those of you outside the procurement and IT supplier management fields. You need to take a step back and recognize how many IT suppliers you rely on. IT suppliers are companies that provide you with your laptops, mobile devices, hand-held Paypoints and more. These are also the companies that provide you with the software applications that run on these devices. Your operating systems, the software you use to run your payroll-or the company that maintains the data on the cloud for you. Everywhere you look in your daily work existence, you will find IT suppers, quietly ticking all the boxes that are required to help your company operate efficiently. When these organizations are effective at what they do, your business runs smoothly.
However, the moment that they fail to deliver your hardware, software or data in time and according to expectations, you may find that your business could be massively impacted. In such situations, your business gets put on hold while you wait for much needed hardware and software to be delivered, your customers could lose trust in you after their personal details get leaked and their passwords and contact details become compromised, or perhaps your suppliers fails to adhere to local regulations and your company is the one that needs to pay the millions of bucks in fines because you are deemed liable for your suppliers mistakes. To stop these calamities from befalling us, we manage our IT suppliers.
This means that we carefully select suppliers who have the skills our businesses need before painstakingly putting contracts in place. These contracts state what the supplier is providing to us, and for how much. More importantly though, the contracts also detail the legal and regulatory requirements that the suppliers should adhere to as they go about their work. And those are just the basics of contracting with the supplier. Once the supplier has been contracted, they need to be managed. We need to make sure they deliver in alignment with the agreed KPIs before your customers start to cry foul. We also need to do our best to ensure that the suppliers continually adhere to the legal and regulatory frameworks that they agreed to in writing.
This process goes beyond blindly trusting your suppliers and involves engaging in an intricate relational framework that ensures that you and your supplier rise together instead of them pulling your business down due to their failures. This is what needs to be done to manage IT suppliers. To get more detail on HOW to go about this process, click on the link below and buy the book that will provide you with step by step guidance on how to level up your IT supplier management game. Read the book Managing IT Suppliers to find out more.
