Are you managing vendor service levels and costs for better performance?
IT needs a consolidated view of how much it is spending on IT assets and with whom. It's a long list, from PCs and PDAs to routers and telecom services, from software licenses to system integrator services. Analyzing the IT Vendor Management decision area helps identify what to consolidate and/or standardize to reduce costs and complexity and increase performance. It also reveals where you can pool requirements to gain purchasing power or generate higher service levels.
When this information is fragmented across the enterprise, it is difficult to spot duplication of contracts and agreements. Simple comparisons of vendor costs by function and user can help uncover potential excesses. Knowing that other vendors have provided similar products or services also helps IT foster healthy competition and price/quality comparisons.
To help with this analysis, the IT Vendor Management decision area lets you set planning goals and scorecarding metrics for performance management elements such as:
- IT contract cost ($).
- IT project completion (%).
- IT vendor on-time.
- SLA (Service-Level Agreement) performance.
- IT asset availability, compatibility, scalability ratings.
- IT vendor hourly rates.
With a performance management system in this decision area, you can analyze these goals and metrics by a number of dimensions, including:
- Application software type.
- Data sources.
- Infrastructure environment.
- IT vendor.
- Department/organization.
Using the IT Vendor Management decision area
As an IT professional, the IT Vendor Management decision area lets you ask questions such as:
- IT project completion: Are we exposed with too many open projects for a particular application area? Is there a way to consolidate?
- SLA performance: What vendors perform best or worse on SLAs, and its there a department we are underserving because of it?
- IT vendor rates: Are rates jumping due to overtime because of completion issues?
This decision area is also important in managing service levels tied to major outsourcing contracts, a fixture for many IT functions. All service level agreements have trade-offs between quality, time, and cost. Measuring quality, especially in the more complex Tier 3 contracts that manage and enhance applications, can be a challenge.
For example, where Tier 1 agreements may measure service availability, numbers of incidents and resolution response times, Tier 3 agreements need to address access to and use of information from applications, and how easy and quick it is to make changes. Even knowing when contracts are up for renewal, as well as when you are triggering penalty or incentive clauses, can lead to cost savings or improved service levels.
