In today's competitive buyer/seller technology market, there is a pressing need for IT vendors that can fully understand and respond to the specific challenges facing CIOs. It has never been harder to differentiate enterprise technologies from the countless IT vendors I meet each month. I'm constantly bombarded with ‘me too' technology solutions and offers, and frustrated by IT vendors who arrive with generic solutions expecting generic business problems.
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I'm not alone. I am part of a network of CIOs who meet regularly to share ideas and my peers often echo my belief that too many IT vendor sales personnel don't really understand my underlying business processes and investment criteria and therefore don't understand the levers that technology can pull to drive change and produce a positive business outcome. At the Daily Mail, we have systematically begun to rationalise our supplier base and have evaluated IT vendors based on economic, strategic and partnership criteria. This work has led me to conclude there are two related issues that IT vendors must address:
Firstly, CIOs need partners who are prepared to understand the business. My business relies on us keeping everything operational whilst finding new ways to innovate, drive down costs and improve performance. However, we can't do everything ourselves and we rely on an extended network of IT suppliers who help us to support the business and achieve our objectives. Unfortunately, relatively few suppliers spend time in really getting to know how their customers operate as a business. CIOs want potential suppliers who can evolve into partners but over the last two years, only a couple of IT vendors have asked if they could spend time observing the Mail being produced, or accompany photographers on assignments or interrogate the supply chain of producing and distributing four million newspapers every day. And yet that sort of approach is essential if a vendor wants to truly understand our value chain and to assess where and how their technologies, services and solutions can have the greatest impact.
Secondly, CIOs need relevant solutions. IT vendors tend to be driven by their portfolios rather than by business outcomes. They continue to make significant investments in their portfolios but aren't prepared to make the same investment in understanding how these apply to their customers' businesses. This can lead to huge inefficiencies.
Consequently, when vendors visit me they tend to give poorly defined generic presentations that bear only passing relevance to my challenges. I'm often left having to connect the dots to find out if there's any inherent value in their solution. And, as I said earlier, it's hard to differentiate between IT vendors. They all seem to talk about generic business challenges and benefits, along with the occasional technical architecture slide; they are unable to put their solutions into the context of my business.
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