Archive for the ‘vendors’ Category

More IT Regulation: Is It A Good Thing For CIOs?

Wednesday, August 4th, 2010
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Could more laws actually make a CIOs life easier?

Could more laws actually make a CIOs life easier?

Software is all around us. CIOs depend on it to keep the company up and running. If for some reason, a company’s critical applications stop running, run incorrectly, or divulge private data to bad guys, there’s a good chance that the company is going to quickly have a new CIO. If only there was some way to make software more reliable so that CIO’s could spend their time focusing on the things that really matter…

3 Possible Futures For Software

You would think that CIOs would have already used their collective influence to get software vendors to do the right thing. However, as system outages that still exist today clearly show – this has not happened. Thomas Smedinghoff is a lawyer who studies science and technology law. According to Smedinghoff, there are three possible futures for how software vendors are going to be required to do a better job of supporting CIOs:

  1. Increased legal obligations for software vendors to do a better job of ensuring that their applications and associated communications are secure.
  2. A much bigger responsibility to tell the world when there is a security breach.
  3. Defining just what is meant by “reasonable security” and then ensuring that every application provides at least this level of protection.

What’s Coming Down The Road

This of course leads a CIO to the next question: which one of these future possibilities is going to happen (or will it be all of them?) Smedinghoff points out that little by little, the responsibility to disclose when a personal data breech occurs is getting written into laws in each state.
Legal scholars are predicting that within the next 10 years or so CIOs should expect that their IT vendors will be required by law to improve both the security as well as the quality of their software applications. Toyota’s recent car troubles may end up representing a first step in this direction.
Where does all of this lead to? Once again those legal scholars are predicting that by 2015 we should expect software vendors to find themselves being required to clearly specify their products capabilities as well as their limitations. What will give these words some bite is that they will have had to be verified by 3rd party certification firms.

What All Of This Means For You

When you become CIO, running an IT department will be much different than it is today. While that is good news, it also means that you’re going to have a different set of tasks that you’re going to have to do.
Gone will be the days in which you had to spend so much time and energy just keeping applications up and running not to mention secure. Now you’ll be spending a lot more time during the selection process doing double checks to make sure that each vendor’s product truly has been verified and certified by reputable 3rd party firms.
Yes, your life as a CIO will have become much more manageable because you should experience fewer fire drills. However, you had better start getting ready to become a good fact checker so that you choose the right vendor after all the rules have been changed…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills

Question For You: Do you think that these new IT regulations will cause the cost of software to increase?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Times they are a changing. Once upon a time a CIO only had to worry about making sure the email servers stayed up and everyone thought that he / she was doing a great job. That’s no longer enough. Now CIOs are viewed as being the hub of a company’s new media activities – generating, transmitting, storing, and ultimately archiving more and more information. Do you know what you need to be doing?

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Partner Or Vendor: You Make The Choice

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010
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Working With Partners & Vendors Is Sorta Like Double Dating

Working With Partners & Vendors Is Sorta Like Double Dating

What’s The Difference Between A Vendor And A Partner?

When you become CIO, you’re going to be faced with the challenge of picking your friends. No, I’m not talking about being nice to the CEO and CFO – let’s hope that they are already your friends. What I’m talking about is the collection of outside firms that provide your IT department with goods and services. They can’t all be your best friend, so you’ve got some decisions to make…

The first thing that we should all agree on is that not all companies that you will be doing business with are created equal. What this means in practical terms is that the world is divided into two groups of businesses: vendors and partners.

A vendor is someone with whom you simply be doing business with. This is not to say that they aren’t important, it’s just that there’s not a lot of additional value to be found in the relationship. A case in point might be the firm that supplies your IT department with paper: it’s important, but it’s not really a part of IT’s long term strategy.

Things are different when you are working with a partner. In this case you are both always seeking a win-win solution because it’s going to be a long-term relationship and it turns out that you are both in a position to help each other out.

Why Worry About What A Partner Is Thinking?

When you are the CIO, you’re going to be busy. Worrying about your relationship with your partners is going to take some of your time. Why bother?

It turns out that it’ll be worth the effort. The IT department’s relationship with it’s partners is a long-term investment. This means that how you treat your partners today will end up being remembered for a very long time.

This is a relationship in which you always have to be thinking about what the next step needs to be. The key is to identify those steps that both companies can take together in order to add value to both firms.

It’s when things go bad in the marketplace that the real value of having created a partnership with some of your suppliers will benefit your IT department. Taking the time to sit down and work with your partner in order to find ways that both of you can remain whole during a market downturn will end up benefiting both firms in the end.

How To Make Life Better For A Partner During A Downturn?

One of the secrets to being a successful CIO is the ability to show creativity when it comes to dealing with partners. During a rough patch, cash is probably going to be tight. You’re going to have to come up with some innovative ideas if you are going to be able to help your IT department’s partners out. Here are a few suggestions:

  • Add an extra year to a contract at a lower rate: even though you may need to renegotiate a contract with your partner at a lower rate, help them out by extending the contract so that they know they have a guaranteed revenue stream.
  • Acting as a reference: although your partner may not be able to get more cash out of you, by acting as a reference for them you may help them to close business with other companies that they couldn’t get without your help.
  • Allow them to leverage your organization’s brand: something as simple as giving a partner permission to put your company’s logo on their web site in order to identify who they do business with can be of great value to them.
  • Get a testimonial from you: taking partner support to the next level, providing a partner with a testimonial that they can incorporate into their marketing material has a tangible value to them and will be appreciated.

What All Of This Means For You

In today’s global economy, an IT department no longer consists of only your employees. Instead, it’s a spread out entity that includes both internal staff as well as your partners.

By treating your partners well, you’ll actually be able to expand the impact of your IT department. An added benefit of doing this will be that when your partners come into contact with your customers, they will do a good job of positively representing both your firm and your IT department.

Just in case you’ve missed the final reason that cultivating a select group of partners is worth your while, remember that your CIO job may not last forever. When your time as CIO is up at your current company, it sure would be nice to have a collection of firms in your industry that thought favorably of you…

How many partner firms do you think that a CIO should work to develop?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

To say that last year was a rough year, might be the understatement of the decade. Every business seemed to be taking it on the nose and anytime you opened the paper or turned on the TV, it just seemed as though the bad news kept on coming. What’s interesting for all of you who dream of someday becoming a CIO, is that the best CIOs didn’t allow all of the bad news to discourage them – they still made progress…

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Dealing With Vendors AFTER You’ve Signed The Deal

Wednesday, February 10th, 2010
Image Credit Getting Married To A Vendor Is Just The Beginning…

Getting Married To A Vendor Is Just The Beginning…

When you become CIO, vendors will enter your life and they just won’t leave. What this means is that they’ll be a constant pain in your neck, always wanting your time and attention. However, on the flip side, they will be a valuable resource that can provide you and your team with information and guidance that you couldn’t get anywhere else. Don’t do what too many new CIOs do and stop talking with vendors after the deal is signed…

What’s In The Relationship For You

CIOs always have the same problem: they are being asked to do more and more with the same amount of resources and funding. The challenge is to do an inventory of what tools and talents you have available to you and then find ways to use those to perform the tasks that the company needs you to do.

One way to do this is to find new ways of using more fully the hardware, software, and services that the firm has already bought. As smart as your IT team is, there is no way that they can know all of the ins and outs of every IT tool that the department is currently using.

Ericka Chickowski over at CIO Insight points out that this is where your vendors come in. Assuming that you didn’t burn your bridges with your vendors during the negotiation process, they can be a fantastic resource for you to draw on. Often new CIOs spend too much time looking only inside of the IT department and don’t take the time to look outside in order to uncover this set of hidden resources.

How To Manage Your IT Vendors For Maximum Benefit

As your company’s CIO, you will ultimately be responsible for controlling how your firm interacts with its IT vendors. You may not be part of every negotiation, but you certainly will end up living with the results. With that in mind, here are six things that you’ll have to do as the CIO in order to get the most out of your IT vendor relationships:

  1. One Cook To Run The Kitchen: those IT vendors are sly guys. They know that when they are dealing with inexperienced CIOs that they can always talk to other parts of the company if they don’t like how things are going with the IT team. You need to step up and put your foot down both inside and outside of the company – let everyone know that you are the one who will ultimately be making the decision and nobody else. This will force your vendors to deal with you.
  2. Banish Confusion: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this issue sink what could have been a great vendor relationship: when the IT department doesn’t know what they really want. This is pretty simple right: if you don’t know what you want, then there is no way that you’re going to be able to tell the vendor what you want to buy. When this happens, the post deal relationship always seems to go poorly because nobody is happy – you’re not happy with what you got and the vendor isn’t happy because you’re not happy.
  3. It’s NOT All About Price: I think that it’s only the government that still sticks to the rule that they’ll always buy from the lowest price vendor. Yes, the up front price of whatever you are buying is important However, the cost of owning or using the product or tool over the lifetime that your company will use it is what really counts. The CIO who can step back and determine what the true cost of a product is can make good negotiating decisions. Once again, choosing wisely will help you to have a good long-term relationship with your vendor.
  4. Boxing Yourself In: One of the popular trends in IT these days is to reduce the number of suppliers that the firm is dealing with. This can have many benefits like being able to get greater discounts because you buy more from one supplier; however, there is also a dark side. You can easily get trapped into having to go along with what a vendor proposes if you’ve become too reliant on them. In order to have a healthy relationship with your vendor after the deal is struck, make sure that you keep your vendor options open.
  5. Forget The Little Guys: Which vendors should you spend your time dealing with – the big guys or the little guys. We generally tend to favor the big guys, they do a slicker job. However, it’s the smaller vendors who can more easily provide the customized services that you’ll need as the CIO and they are the ones who will be willing to work more closely with your team after the deal is done.
  6. The Contract Is Just The Start: CIOs who are just starting out often don’t realize that after all of the effort that went into defining and signing the contract, the real work is only starting after everything has been signed. It’s how you manage the day-to-day relationship with the vendor that you’ve selected that will really control how much value the company gets out of that contract.

What All Of This Means For You

All too often when new CIOs step into their position, they can get caught up in all of the internal issues that are always ongoing. However, if they do this, they may be missing one of the biggest “free” resources that they have available to them – their existing IT vendors.

The vendors know their products better than anyone else on the IT team and they have the experience with other IT departments in understanding how the tools can be used to solve real business problems. You’ll need to be careful how you choose to deal with them, but they are a great resource in these cash strapped times.

Taking the time to realize that selecting a vendor and entering into a contract with them is very much like a marriage is what a new CIO needs to do. Sure the wedding is fun, but you need to realize that you are in it for the long haul and just like every other part of your CIO job, you’re going to have to work at it in order to make it successful…

Do you think that your vendors would be willing to work more closely with you if you asked them to?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

You and I both know that a well run IT department is what can make one company more successful than its competitors. That must mean that the IT department is important, and therefore the CIO must also be important, right? If that’s true, then why are some of the really big companies like News Corp, Harrah’s, ConocoPhillips, etc. getting rid of their CIO and then choosing to not replace him / her? What are they thinking?

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