• IT outsourcing: Will CIOs reclaim their power?

  By Stephanie Overby | 22 May, 2012 00:36

  IT outsourcing has always been a double-edged sword for CIOs. What starts out as a cure for IT's ills always seems to cause more headaches down the road.

• The inside story of why Puma dumped four Cloud vendors for one

  By Kim S. Nash | 01 December, 2011 05:47

  Cloud's ability to ratchet server power and storage up and down as needed suits the demands of online marketing campaigns that tend to gear up and wind down quickly. So a few years ago, sneaker manufacturer Puma ran fast toward adoption.

• Editor's Letter: Make Your Vendors Work For You

  By Maryfran Johnson | 01 December, 2011 05:00

  What have your vendors done for you lately?

• CIO Summit Roundtable: Application specific SLAs for the enterprise

  By Georgina Swan | 12 October, 2011 11:06

  Some enterprises have centralised, moved consolidated global ICT assets without giving much thought to the performance of their business applications. While consolidation can help to lower costs, users can have very different experiences for accessing data and applications based on the physical distance to the data centre, where latency may be an issue.

• Vendors as partners

  By John Dix | 22 August, 2011 20:39

  Ken Piddington, CIO of Global Partners LP, an $8 billion energy company in the Northeast, recently implemented an innovative vendor partnership program that he hopes will improve the product and services the company gets from suppliers while helping those suppliers more efficiently serve the company and benefit from the relationship.

• The six million dollar vendor

  By James Hutchinson | 14 July, 2011 07:00

  Between 2005 and 2010, Gartner estimated IT managers and executive decision makers have gone from dealing with an average of 3.7 vendors to 10. The onset of Cloud computing as well as the revival of service outsourcing in wake of the economic downturn have only exacerbated this as companies increasingly look to multi-source their services to obtain the functionality they need at a cost they can afford.

• Managing relationships with vendors - Part 3

  By David Binning | 06 May, 2011 15:09

  For some organisations the hassle and uncertainty that can arise from multiple vendor relationships is best addressed by putting all of their eggs into the one carefully chosen basket. South Australian transport and logistics company, Northline, recently entered into a five year, $5 million contract with integrator Brennan, which will handle more than 300 portable and desktop computers in addition to servers, enterprise software and LAN communications. Basically, everything except telecommunications, which is provided by Optus.

• Managing relationships with vendors - Part 2

  By David Binning | 05 May, 2011 13:07

  According to Dr Tim O’Neill, co-founder and director of business intelligence specialists Avolution, probably the biggest mistake an organisation can make when dealing with suppliers is to outsource the systems architecture. “This is why there’s so many untold billions of dollars-worth of failed IT projects out there,” he says. “Outsourcing the architecture function is fraught with danger.” In order for projects to be successful organisations need to maintain a healthy degree of cynicism and effectively force vendors to earn trust.

• Managing relationships with vendors

  By David Binning | 04 May, 2011 16:03

  The IT choices a company makes can mean the difference between business success and failure. Whether it’s access to information, communications between staff, partners and customers, HR, inventory management, operation and monitoring of equipment and other and assets as well as business security, IT has managed to make itself indispensible at virtually every organisational level. Yet it would seem that for many organisations, this awareness often fails to translate into properly thought out and well-executed strategies for managing the vendors that supply the technology.

• How to measure your IT vendor management office

  By Patrick Connaughton | 06 April, 2010 05:00

  Over the past few years, many companies have taken the first steps in setting up an IT Vendor Management Office (VMO), but many are still very much in the early stages of refining what exactly the role of the VMO is within the organization. And the definition of a VMO can vary widely across companies - ranging from a broad marketing term used to describe the process or a specific term used to refer to a dedicated group of staff who oversee and manage suppliers.

Whitepapers about vendor management

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  Learning To Compete: IT’s Next Transformation

  CIOs must become competitive players in managing relationships between IT and the business. Megatrends like virtualization, consumerisation, cloud computing, and mobility are forcing a new model for operating IT. This interactive white paper from CIO Magazine and EMC explores this transformation as a leadership opportunity, as an opportunity to create new models for IT, and as a catalyst to fundamentally change the dynamic between IT and the business. Embedded videos feature CIOs from T-Mobile USA and Wharton School of Business and a quick survey provides benchmarking between CIO peers.

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  EMC 15-Minute Guide to Smarter Backup Transform your future

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  Seven Steps to Effective Data Governance

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  Optimizing Data Quality in the Enterprise - How to Tackle Your Bad Information