Tidal wave of new digital solutions demands a new approach to the customer-vendor partnership

CIO’s Executive Roundtables offer CIOs and other senior IT professionals a chance to get together and discuss important issues of the day, such as how to optimize the value of new digital solutions. I’ve been leading these roundtables for nearly two decades, and it is clear that the present state is very different from the past. The current state is highly dynamic and exciting, but the rate of change has the potential to overwhelm IT leadership, who need to consider adopting numerous new business-critical technologies, from evaluating and deploying artificial intelligence to building the corporate data asset, pursuing cloud-native development, maximizing the IoT,  improving the customer experience, and automating everything that can be automated. And it all has to be done under more stringent security and compliance requirements. There’s more to do than ever before. 

The problem is that executives and line-of-business managers demand that all these new digital systems be effectively planned and deployed in a compressed time frame. That’s tough to do when IT teams are already overstretched with current tasks, and even tougher when internal IT skill sets don’t align with the demands of the new products and services.  

This fact has not gone unnoticed by the providers of these new products and services, and many of them are offering to be resources that can help IT teams get new technologies up and running as quickly as management demands. The utility that they and other professional services firms and vendors’ various partner organizations provide has become a key consideration in the buying process. Many of the attendees at the CIO roundtables say they never start the implementation process or a pilot project for a new technology without first lining up such external resources. And many others that started off with an internal team ended up adding outside resources as the project moved ahead. 

Using such outside resources is nothing new, of course, but it’s happening much more consistently now. Today’s projects have a higher degree of difficulty simply because they will have much more substantial impact on the organization’s operations and results and the business will depend on them for many years. Another factor is that many of the technologies being implemented today are 1.0 technologies, making it much more difficult to get it right the first time while doing it at speed. 

Roundtable attendees have cited several keys to success that are common across technologies and industries: 

• Partners and vendors must have a deep and effective level of technical interaction and knowledge. Training and support must be in place at a level commensurate with the importance of the project.  
• Adding partners into the vendor-customer equation cannot result in finger-pointing. Putting the customer in the middle has never worked in the past and won’t work now.  
• Everything in the relationship must be transparent. Responsibilities, compensation, roles, and commitments need to be spelled out in detail and at the outset. This can be particularly important when new technologies may have more variables than older ones during the design, deployment, and operation phases. 

The rapid rate of change shows no signs of slowing.  And as organizations become facile with these new systems and demand more from them, constant upgrades and enhancements will be required.  It all adds up to growing need for skilled human resources.  Having an effective strategic plan in place, in cooperation with your critical vendors will be central to success.