Critical.
Authoritative.
Strategic.
Subscribe to CIO Magazine »

Rules of Engagement

Shell's Ecosystem Guiding Principles mandate how its 11 core vendors should treat Shell and each other. To mitigate competition between suppliers-on Shell territory, at least-CIO Alan Matula has banned most salesmen from his offices and demands Shell and vendor staff respect the culture and heritage of each other's companies.

Other rules of engagement include:

  • Senior executives must set a positive example for everyone else, in part by actively advocating for the ecosystem relationships.
  • Staff must work to solve problems at the lowest level possible, using escalation as a last resort.
  • Vendors must understand that although Shell wants to concentrate IT spending on ecosystem members, there are no guarantees of contract awards.
  • Information gained through the ecosystem should not be used to win additional business at the expense of another member.
  • Vendors should respect the intellectual property of other members and consider it confidential by default.
  • All participants must do 360-degree reviews of each other and Shell.

Managing vendors by building relationships, rather than pushing and pulling on contract terms, gets Matula early access to strategic technology, he says, and promotes collaboration among IT suppliers on Shell's behalf. But to build the trust and discipline needed takes time, he admits. The first time he met with all 11 vendors, no one wanted to interact. "Silence," he says. But clear and enforced standards for behavior, over the course of 12 to 18 months, helped the vendors get comfortable working this way. "There are lots of people who want to mimic what we do but haven't gone through the journey.

Follow Senior Editor Kim S. Nash on Twitter: @knash99.

Read more about it strategy in CIO's IT strategy Drilldown.

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

References show all

Comments

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
Users posting comments agree to the CIO comments policy.
Login or register to link comments to your user profile, or you may also post a comment without being logged in.
Related Coverage
Related Whitepapers
Latest Stories
Community Comments
Tags: CIO role, competition, ecosystem, intellectual property, it management, leadership, legal, management, Management | IT strategy, networking, shell, vendors
Latest Blog Posts
Whitepapers
  • Best Practices for Implementing a Data Warehouse on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine
    Increasingly companies are recognizing the value of an enterprise data warehouse (EDW). A true EDW provides a single 360-degree view of the business and a powerful platform for a wide spectrum of business intelligence tasks ranging from predictive analysis to near real-time strategic and tactical decision support throughout the organization. Ensuring the EDW will get the desired performance and will scale out as your data grows you need to get three fundamental things correct, the hardware configuration, the physical data model and the data loading process. Read on.
    Learn more »
  • High Availability with Oracle Database 11g Release 2
    In this paper, we review the common causes of application downtime and discuss how technologies available in the Oracle Database can help avoid costly downtime and enable rapid recovery from unplanned failures and also minimize impact from planned outages. We also highlight new technologies introduced in Oracle Database 11g Release 2 that enable businesses to make their IT infrastructure even more robust and fault tolerant, maximize their return on investment on high availability infrastructure, and provide better quality of service to users.
    Learn more »
  • Why performance management? A guide for the midsize organisation
    Midsize organisations are uniquely positioned to take advantage of a performance management approach to business. Compared with larger companies, they have more agility to bring information and people together and respond faster to changing market conditions. With one performance management solution, midsize companies can turn disconnected data into information, turn information into valuable insight and turn insight into action.
    Learn more »
All whitepapers
rhs_login_lockGet exclusive access to Invitation only events CIO, reports & analysis.