Recommended Key Initiative Plan

These 9 initiatives have been found to elicit the most significant measurable impact for professionals in this role.

Review and Save on Your Top IT Contracts

Info-Tech has identified over $50 million in savings through our contract review process.

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Activities

  • Prioritize and identify your most critical technology contracts
  • Assess vendor performance and align business needs to contracts
  • Build negotiation strategies for each contract

Benefits

  • Execute best-in-class contracts tailored to fit your organization
  • Drive transformational cost savings through holistic contract reviews

Design and Build an Effective Contract Lifecycle Management Process

Understand the immediate benefits associated with a CLM process – even a basic CLM implementation can provide significant cost savings to the organization; reduce time spent on creating, negotiating and renewing contracts; and help identify and mitigate risks within your vendor contracts.

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Establish a Vendor Management Office

An effective VMO can yield a 10X ROI on your staffing investments in this space.

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Activities

  • Identify the ideal VMO structure for your organization
  • Build a VMO team designed to deliver results
  • Leverage your VMO to reach higher levels of vendor management maturity

Benefits

  • Emerge with a long-term strategic roadmap for vendor management
  • Define the scope and meaning of vendor management for your organization

Manage Vendor Relationships

A focus on vendor relationships will yield a 4-5X greater economic benefit than extracting price concessions in isolation.

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Activities

  • Initiate vendor management processes and link to the VMO strategy
  • Categorize and prioritize vendors to focus scarce resources
  • Build the key stakeholder relationships that enable a unified approach

Benefits

  • Focus your attention on critical vendors with confidence
  • Validate vendor conformance and drive tangible savings

Implement a Proactive Vendor Selection Process

Choose your partners carefully. One cross-industry study placed companies' average total spend per procurement employee at $115 million.

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Activities

  • Assess vendor sourcing and selection processes, then map to current organizational roles
  • Identify shadow IT present in the business and explore mitigation
  • Conduct meaningful reference checks

Benefits

  • Build IT-business alignment at the earliest stages of the acquisition process
  • Perform proper due diligence to increase successful project outcomes

Master Contract Review for Software Agreements

IT leaders can save up to 5% of their IT budgets. Adopt our best practices to ensure you are not leaving money on the table.

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Activities

  • Assess current contract review process
  • Review critical terms and conditions (T&Cs) for IT products and services
  • Identify negotiation tactics for key T&Cs

Benefits

  • Control rising renewal costs on support agreements
  • Protect your organization from vendor mandates that dictate key terms

Proactively Identify and Migrate Vendor Risk

On average, over 89 vendors are accessing a company's network every week (Bomgar).

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Activities

  • Identify critical vendor risks and map them to existing IT vendor risk controls
  • Classify IT vendor risks and implement risk planning, ID, monitoring and mitigation strategies
  • Develop and implement a risk mitigation plan

Benefits

  • Proactively identify and mitigate vendor risks from multiple angles
  • Avoid costly and damaging incidents that negatively impact brand reputation

Prove the Value of Your Vendor Management Office

Vendor over-dependency and vendor-quality problems were cited as two of the top three major procurement risks by 77% of companies surveyed by MIT.

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Activities

  • Identify and develop KPIs to monitor vendor performance
  • Create business value metrics that resonate with executives
  • Integrate relevant metrics with stakeholder review to build strategic vendor partners

Benefits

  • Identify areas where vendors are not performing to expectations
  • Partner with business owners to ensure they are engaged with and utilizing vendors' services

Improve Contract Negotiations

IT leaders see operations budgets reducing by 2.5% this year. Adopt our best practices to ensure you are not leaving money on the table.

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Activities

  • Thoroughly evaluate solution options vs. the status quo
  • Establish a BATNA to increase leverage
  • Identify and design situational negotiation strategy and supporting tactics

Benefits

  • Create a level playing field with existing vendors
  • Standardize the negotiation process to yield value-add outcomes

Employ a Strategic Vendor Risk Framework to Ensure your Vendors are Financially

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1 / 9
  • 1. Review and Save on Your Top IT Contracts
  • 2. Design and Build an Effective Contract Lifecycle Management Process
  • 3. Establish a Vendor Management Office
  • 4. Manage Vendor Relationships
  • 5. Implement a Proactive Vendor Selection Process
  • 6. Master Contract Review for Software Agreements
  • 7. Proactively Identify and Migrate Vendor Risk
  • 8. Prove the Value of Your Vendor Management Office
  • 9. Improve Contract Negotiations
  • 10. Employ a Strategic Vendor Risk Framework to Ensure your Vendors are Financially

Evaluation

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