Managing Multiple Vendor Relationships: Major CIO Concern

As organisations in India realise the importance of IT compliance and governance, most of them are considering approaching IT consulting companies to help them have a standardised IT governance plan in place. Sunil Mehta, country manager, Quint India, sheds light on this phenomenon in a conversation with Biztech2.0.

Could you tell us a little about Quint’s operations?

Quint is a global player in the area of IT consultancy and service management. We provide services related to IT strategy and compliance, service management and outsourcing and consulting. In the area of strategy and compliance, we provide governance education and training to our clients across the globe. We have started operations in India from 2001 and have acquired 220 customers in different verticals till date. We have recently introduced a COBIT-licencing course for our Indian customers in order to help them achieve their business as well as IT objectives.

What are your India specific plans?

We already have offices in four cities in India and are now planning to expand our presence to two more cities. There are four major partners we have engaged in the country to reach out to our customers. Though we were earlier focusing on service management, now the time has come to focus on IT strategy and governance as Indian organisations are now maturing to the next level. Our Asian model ‘Cocreat’, which enables us to work as a team with our customers, is helping us to expand our reach in India as well. We have created our own methodologies and building blocks to approach customers for COBIT. We have already had discussions with some of our existing customers, who have shown interest in COBIT.

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Which are the basic challenges being faced by CIOs with regard to IT service management?

Most organisations today deal with multiple vendors and have long term SLAs with them. The biggest challenge that CIOs face revolves around the organisation’s engagement with external vendors. In some organisations, we have seen that they don’t even have basic knowledge about the details of the contract made between the organisation and the vendor. Selection of service management tools and integration of these tools with the business processes are some of the hurdles that IT heads are facing. CIOs are often unable to control the internal and external processes with regard to information governance. They are facing problem while aligning IT with their businesses. Most IT heads are facing problems during the transition phase. Such organisations suffer more when they fail to conduct weekly or monthly reviews of the working processes and the services provided by external vendors.

Your suggestions for CIOs…

Organisations are externally facing cut-throat competition while internally battling with budget constraints for investments. Therefore, while making any decision about any kind of relationship with the vendor they have to first make basic checks about the processes and systems running at their organisation. They have to prepare an objective for outsourcing and have a clear and distinct SLA in place. For the purpose of outsourcing, they have to also take a call about which processes to outsource and which to maintain in-house. For this, they have to monitor and measure the processes on a continuous basis.