Often, the stonewalled vendor will be hesitant to complain, on the grounds that this might look a lot like they’re playing inter-vendor politics themselves.
And there’s another layer of complexity to deal with when trying to prevent, or at least manage, inter-vendor politics: In addition to one vendor trying to torpedo a rival by failing to fulfill data requests, there are times a vendor will request data from a rival in order to uncover something damaging about that vendor’s performance.
The annoying solution to inter-vendor politics is to insert yourself into any and all inter-vendor interactions. Because Vendor A refusing to provide information to Vendor B is one thing. Refusing to provide it to you? It’s your data.
Exit mitigation migraines
Here in the USA our entire system of economics is built on a single empowerment, namely, that a customer can threaten to take their business elsewhere. When it comes to IT services vendors, however, this can be a hollow threat.
To be effective, an IT services vendor’s employees have to engage in the osmotic process of learning their customer — its key staff and their quirks and temperament just as much as the application portfolio and integration architecture.
Once a services vendor is firmly entrenched, transferring that incumbent’s tribal knowledge to a replacement vendor would be, to put it gently, a non-trivial task, and that’s just the quantitative view. The political dimension exacerbates the problem: Why would you expect a vendor you’re kicking to the curb make it any easier than necessary for their replacement to succeed?
Fair’s fair, though. The same was true for the IT staff the CIO kicked to the curb during the outsource.
And beyond the political angle, in many cases the services vendor will have installed its own toolkits to help in fulfilling its responsibilities. It will take that toolkit with it should you decide to make a change.
So on top of all the rest of your exit mitigation planning, make sure your contract includes an obligation to leave these toolkits in place for a long enough transition that the replacement vendor has the time it will need to install its own proprietary toolkit.
In any event, prudent CIOs have two possible exit strategies, and they’re complementary, not dichotomous.
The first: Keep a small cadre of IT professionals on staff to work alongside each vendor. That way, if circumstances dictate, they can smooth the transition to the next vendor.
And the second? Keep a close enough eye on your vendors that you can circumvent the need to replace any of them in the first place.
It’s a quandary. Managing outsourcing vendors is arguably more complicated than in-house management and staff, because CIOs who have outsourced IT services have fewer management tools at their disposal than those who need to lead employees.
After all, when you have to deal with poorly performing employees you can call on HR.
But when you’re dealing with a poorly performing vendor, in contrast, who do you have to call on?
That would be your company’s general counsel, who would be no happier about being called in than you’d be in calling them.
