Midwest IT Survival

Does IT have a strong or weak partnership with the Business?

Whether you are working in a complete custom software development shop with little vendor interaction or a technology integration shop with vendor solutions integrated with other vendor solutions on top of yet other vendor solutions, you will have to manage vendor relationships to some degree as an IT manager in a MidWestern company.  This series looks at the complex arena of IT vendor management and offers some tips to make the arduous process a bit less arduous and possibly discover some additional benefits along the way.

Vendor Management Categories

• Who Owns the Relationship

In the previous article, I used an example of a company CIO bringing in a software vendor with the CIO’s brother as a majority owner of the software company and how to navigate the need for technical assistance from the vendor to get their product installed successfully by your team.  The notion of needing to investigate and understand the non-technical dynamics of who owns the vendor relationship is critical to avoid a potentially career limiting exchange involving vendor bashing or venting frustrations too openly.

Continuing in the theme of understanding who owns the vendor relationship, especially when you or your immediate management don’t, what other dynamics come into play?  Another challenging dynamic is when the business owns the relationship yet IT needs significant interaction with the vendor to establish the vendor’s service for the business.  Starting from the beginning during the vendor selection process, depending on the business plus IT partnership, the vendor selected will have a significant impact on how smoothly the service will be implemented.

Strong Partnership between IT and Business

If the intra-department partnership is strong and thus IT has an equal seat at the vendor selection table, then there is a greater potential for the vendor selected will include critical due diligence around the vendor’s IT strength and competency.  To determine the vendor’s capability to smoothly integrate the service, IT needs an efficient yet thorough due diligence process to quickly understand if the vendor successfully integrated their service with another customer recently that matches key attributes of your technology framework.  The vendor that can site examples without prompting of integration challenges and how they over came those challenges that closely match your anticipated challenges given your technology frameworks is in a stronger position.  A vendor that can’t cite examples with confidence and clarity will most likely be learning “on the job” with your company.  Note, not all “learning on the job” situations are negative.  In a future article I’ll describe a “strategic customer” relationship that turns learning on the job into a significant win for both company and vendor.

Weak Partnership between IT and Business

If the intra-department partnership is weak, the business will most likely engage vendors and make a product or service selection based more strongly on their goals and objectives and not consider the IT integration costs heavily in the due diligence process.  The business could be conducting the due diligence process and not have a way to engage IT partners easily due to how IT is structured within the organization.  Or, the business could be specifically down playing the role IT needs to play in the service integration effort due to lack of service implementation experience and just how important IT’s role is in that success.  Additionally, the business may be lulled into a sense of artificial comfort by the vendor’s slick sales pitches that create the impression the IT side of things is a “no brainer” and they’ve done this integration in the recent past with countless customers with nothing but success.

Sounds like the strong partnership between the business and IT fosters more open communication in an effort to more equally way the IT costs in with the business integration costs.  How can one leverage techniques to generate conversation when the partnership isn’t strong?  Continuing this MidWestern IT [] perspective on the topic of “Who Owns the Relationship?” in the next article.

Related posts:

1. Vendor Management – Part 2 – Who Owns the Relationship
2. Vendor Management – Part 1 – The Intro