Management Topics - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• Inside the next generation vendor management office

  Today, almost 50 per cent of companies have a centralized vendor management group in place, with 11 per cent planning to introduce one this year. Why are we seeing the growth of this unit within the organization? The main drivers for a business to invest in a VMO are to get more value out of existing suppliers and to lower overall costs through better rate negotiations and demand consolidation. Most often, the VMO is either housed in IT or procurement, depending on the business, and consists of two to ten people who are responsible for overseeing the big picture of vendor management.

• Switching outsourcing providers: 10 tips

  If at first you don't succeed with outsourcing, should you try again with a new provider? Many IT leaders are doing just that.

• Outsourcing: Why CIOs hate how you sell IT services

  Ask CIOs what their biggest professional frustration is and the answer might surprise you, says former CIO Mark Hall. It's not rogue systems, shrinking budgets or network outages, says the now CEO of xPeerient, provider of an online community for CIOs. "The repeated issue every year-what keeps CIOs up at night-is the sales and marketing practices of technology vendors. It's a cat and mouse game. It's not efficient for buyers; it's not efficient for sellers. The whole relationship is problematic."

• Four personas of the next-generation CIO

  Three factors have added up to a huge shift in the CIO role during the past five years-and CIOs who ignore these put their careers in peril, says a new report by Constellation Research.

• Why internal IT and outsourcing cultures clash

  Everybody loves a hero, particularly in IT-that talented professional willing to twist himself in knots to please his users and work overtime to get the job done. Most corporate IT organizations actively recruit, reward, and retain those willing to repeatedly save the technological day.

• Survey: More to IT than building and running systems

  Emerging IT roles for application developers, IT-business hybrids, cloud vendor managers and data masters signal a profound shift in the IT unit's value proposition. (For more about emerging roles in IT, see " Four Kinds of IT Professionals CIOs Need to Hire Now.")

• IT offshoring savings declined for past five years

  If there's been one constant during the years that Dr. Arie Lewin has studied the corporate offshoring experience, it's this: Very few companies understand the strategic value of global sourcing. Even today, just five per cent of companies that offshore IT services do it really well, says Levin, professor of strategy and international business at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and director of its Center for International Business Education and Research (CIBER).

• How IT sourcing pros can do better on emerging technology

  As the latest technologies are incorporated into the business process, organisations will naturally become more comfortable when working with third-party technology vendors. This means the ability to identify, select, and manage the right technology vendor can make the difference between the success and failure of a new business initiative. But, while many sourcing and vendor management (SVM) professionals are starting to play an increasingly important role in this emerging technology evaluation process, many of Forrester's sourcing clients explain that their involvement is not always clearly defined, resulting in a more reactive and makeshift role than they would like.

• Offshoring: The captive center rises again

  You can be forgiven for thinking that the days of the offshore captive center were numbered. Citigroup, Unilever, Deutsche Bank, and Dell are just a few of the Fortune 500 companies who have sold or shut down their one of their wholly owned offshore service centers in the last year. Some 60 per cent of all such captive centers fail to meet expectations. And the third-party offshore outsourcing industry, particularly in India, has reached a level of provider maturity that one wonders why a company would take on the hassle of setting up their own shop abroad. (Indeed, many industry watchers have.)

• Why IT jobs are never coming back

  The combination of more automation, increased offshoring, and better global IT infrastructure has taken its toll on the U.S. IT profession, resulting in a net loss of 1.5 million corporate IT jobs over the last decade, according to recent research from IT consultancy and benchmarking provider The Hackett Group.

• Why I outsourced application development to China

  Imagine that your company has never done any offshore outsourcing of IT-never even signed a major domestic outsourcing deal. Where in the world would you begin? Probably not China.

• Offshore outsourcing: 24 ways to compare India vs. China

  For nearly a decade, China has been touted as the biggest threat India's supremacy in offshore outsourcing, and its central government has been funneling money into developing the country's growing IT outsourcing (ITO) industry.

• Inside HP's new $1 billion outsourcing plan

  HP today revealed further details of its previously announced $1 billion investment in offshore outsourcing, selecting six countries-Bulgaria, China, Costa Rica, India, Malaysia and the Philippines-as its global delivery hubs.

• CIO résumés: Compare yours to the cream of the crop

  If you've recently begun to update your résumé, you've probably encountered conflicting opinions on how to write a résumé for a CIO position so as to attract an executive recruiter's attention. For example, you may have heard or read that your résumé needs to tell a story about your work experience, and thus needs to include specific details about your professional accomplishments. Yet you've probably also read that a résumé, by nature, should be brief, and that the goal of your résumé is to give the executive recruiter just enough information to make him want to call you to find out more. Such contradictory advice can curse even the most effective communicators with writer's block when they have to re-write their résumés.

• Windows 7 wanted at work: Consumer IT strikes again

  If you are happy with Windows 7 on your personal laptop, but grumble every time Windows XP boots up on your work computer, it may be time to tap your company's IT pro on the shoulder and ask for Windows 7. You might be surprised at the response you get.