In recent months I have noticed a distinctive trend emerging whereby CIO’s are switching from larger, well-known suppliers to smaller vendors who are leaner and more agile.
This has been backed up by the feedback in the sessions and the CIO’s who I have spoken with here this week in Barcelona at the Gartner Symposium IT Expo.
This is an interesting and positive trend as it allows the market to thrive with more up and coming vendors allowed to pitch for and win contracts by showing real innovation and enthusiasm to get the job done where they may have previously been frozen out at the RFP stages.
Gartner themselves stated in their keynote session that their recent CIO survey showed that the majority of CIO’s will change their primary suppliers by 2017.
Could new entrants like Samsung muscle their way on to your list of primary suppliers? Their launch this week in to the B2B market makes them a credible player.
What does this mean for established suppliers? Basically it means they need to be less complacent and engage better with their clients and not just around the times of contract renewal.
It shouldn’t mean they try to shortcut this process and just go out and buy a crop of these bright young new vendors, far from it. They would be better served in studying why they are winning business away from them and looking to instil that hunger and innovation back in to their product offerings and services.
I know they will say that due their size and complexity of contracts etc. this will be difficult but innovation and enthusiasm are contagious and adding those to anything at any level will only give everyone a boost.
I have even heard of some companies looking in to gamification techniques and the use of game thinking and game mechanics in non-game contexts to engage people in solving problems.
This may be a bit bleeding edge for some but it really highlights what digital and its associated disruption is bringing to the market with the amount of new technology and value added services it offers.
With the introduction of digital and other disruptive technologies, CIO’s are now faced with more requests from the business to leverage technology than ever before, often wanting to do it themselves within their own business units.
The smaller, leaner and more agile vendors are able to seize upon this and bring to the market services and solutions which you can get up and running in less than half the time your previous vendors take to do something along with significantly faster versioning and the addition of new features.
It’s an interesting marketplace and never before have I seen such a seismic shift in the way that organisations are being disrupted.
The better-organised organisations that are more agile and quicker to adopt will thrive in this new world and so they should.
This piece has also been posted here on the Samsung Business site
Business continuity planning requires CIOs to ensure that their own IT operations remain up and running, but it also requires them to consider the services from their outside IT suppliers and outsourcing vendors. The question for CIOs is how far down into the supplier ecosystem should they delve to mitigate supplier risk?
The simple answer is that they need to go as far as it takes to mitigate the risk to an acceptable level whilst delivering the highest quality service.
Some organisations/sectors have a greater appetite for risk than those in more legislated and regulated industries, so finding the level of risk that your organisation is prepared to digest is important.
The CIO is responsible for the risk as well as the supplier selection in the IT organisation so if they find that the risk levels from a particular supplier are too high, casting the net for a new one would be sensible governance.