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September 28
Assessing IT Talent Acquisition Models
By: Mike Canning

Often considered one of the best corporate leaders of his time, former General Electric CEO Jack Welch estimated that he spent one third of his time dedicated to acquiring talent. He clearly understood that operational success depended on highly-skilled talent and dedicated his time accordingly to acquire that top-tier talent.

This principle is no different today. Quality and timely talent acquisition remains an important element to successful companies as internal organizations from the executive suite to IT continue to rely on top-tier talent in order to launch or sustain their companies’ status as a top performer in their competitive marketplace. Company leaders recognize that the inability to fill critical positions does come at a cost – lost revenue, delayed projects, poor customer service to name a few.

Specifically for IT, there exists an imbalance in the current supply and demand of skilled IT professionals. Competition for highly skilled IT professionals places immense strain on recruiting organizations, lengthening the amount of time it takes to fill open IT positions. In order for recruiting organizations to optimize their operations, they must assess the proper recruiting model that aligns with their needs.

This, of course, is more challenging than it sounds since there is no one-size-fits-all recruitment solution for every organization. Companies must clearly understand their needs and assess which model best suits their needs – as each model has its own set of advantages and disadvantages – this can present quite a challenge to properly align recruitment needs with the best model for the organization.

Assessing and aligning a company’s talent acquisition requirements to the appropriate IT acquisition model ensures delivery of the proper IT resources in the right timeframe and at the right price. Read more by registering for our white paper on four common talent acquisition models: Just- In-Time, HR-Managed, Preferred/Tiered Supplier and Managed Staffing Program.

About the Author
Mike Canning

Mr. Canning joined CDI in 2007 as the Director, Strategic Planning and has worked in the IT professional services industry for over 15 years. Mr. Canning has a wide range of experience within the industry, having worked in numerous front office and back office functions – finance, planning, operations, sales and marketing – and in numerous environments – corporate headquarters, regional offices and field offices.
  on 9/28/2011 6:48 AM by  Canning, Mike
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September 14
Syncing the Extended Team
By: Jon Wayne

When you think of your team, who do you think of? Your immediate peers or employees? What about support people? The folks in marketing or legal? Maybe even the delivery personnel? What about your distributors or channel market partners?

Whether IBM, Oracle, SAP or whoever is on your external team, you should want to integrate them and treat them as an extension of yourself and your team. Too many times these critical pieces are not really thought of as an integral part of a company's team; instead, they are considered on the outside, almost a type of customer. In a way, they are. Customers to help you provide more value downstream.

If you have such business collaborators, how is the relationship? Formal and infrequent, or fluid and integrated? Over the years I have developed (and been exposed to) best practices that are time and results proven. Following are a few practical ways of ensuring your own success when working with external business collaborators:

1. Same Mission. Even if they are in a different company (most will be), you should be making sure your external business collaborators deeply understand your mission and vice versa. If they are reselling your product, their customer is really yours. Ensuring everyone is striving for the same goals is critical. That means everyone on the team embracing key strategies and centralized focus areas, such as migrating the customer from C++ to .NET, for example.

2. Part of the Team. As your product and service development team create innovative new processes and product concepts, be sure to include your external collaborators by working closely with your in-house development teams and making them aware of your external collaborators. That also means empowering your extended team to strategize with their clients too and pass on the best guidance for their projects.

3. Teach Value. Many times external collaborators, who may be reselling your product or services, don't have the focus on your product or service that you do. This can be especially true in sales. Be sure to share with your external team the value propositions and success stories you are seeing to educate and inspire your external team. For example, if your team has developed specific ways to provide cost savings by rolling out an ERP strategy, be sure to tune up the external team to do likewise.

4. Track Results. More often than not, companies do not track their own processes and procedures for value impact. Not only should they, the same companies should be empowering and tracking the value impact of their external collaborators as well, to ensure each customer experience is positive and documented over time for review.

Taking the above approaches can quickly tune and unify your external business partners. You may want to do that especially if you are dependent on strategic vendors or outsourcers.

Our goal is always to exceed our customers' expectations. If we are not fully in sync and involved with our clients’ customer delivery value, we're missing the point. To do that successfully requires a well-integrated internal and external team.

About the Author
Jon Wayne

Mr. Wayne is a Client Executive for CDI in South Florida. With over 10 years of IT and Engineering sales and consulting experience, he has developed a reputation for analyzing and delivering complex project resources to mid- and large-size corporations. Prior to CDI, Mr. Wayne was a senior business development manager for an IT Solutions and Services corporation. His career experience in business development also includes web and video collaboration and his passion for technology started early in his career as a product marketing manager. Mr. Wayne is a graduate of New York University.
  on 9/14/2011 7:17 AM by  Canning, Mike
Permanent Link to Post | Email Post Link | Number of Comments 1 Comment(s)
August 31
IT Talent Crunch
By: Mike Canning

The national unemployment rate is north of 9% yet the unemployment rate for technology professionals is less than half the national average at 4%. For highly skilled technology pros, it can be argued that there is a candidate shortage – more jobs available than qualified candidate to fill those open positions.

This talent crunch is not limited to one or two geographies, but is prevalent in many regions and for many skill sets. With major technology employers such as Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft all aggressively hiring, most other companies are struggling mightily to fill open positions requiring cutting edge skill sets. According to one survey, 37% of American companies are having difficulty filling open technology positions due to a lack of available skilled talent.

With companies investing in technologies that can improve efficiency, help them to gain a competitive edge and deliver a high return on investment, hiring is up for IT professionals who can develop, install and maintain proprietary information systems enabling their employer to operate and grow more efficiently and securely. Additionally, other technology investments are being made that were tabled during the economic downturn.

This IT skill shortage applies across a wide spectrum of skill sets. It appears as though this situation will get worse instead of better in the near future, as the pipeline of future technology experts freshly minted from higher education institutions is losing ground to the steady wave of retiring Baby Boomers. In 2004, approximately 60,000 computer-related degrees were awarded, a number that has steadily decreased to approximately 38,000 in 2009, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Companies looking for technically-educated, recent college graduates will battle over these scarce resources as experts estimate there are three jobs available for every one technology-related graduate. Despite the fact that many educational institutions are reporting increased enrollment into computer-related degree programs, experts have noted that the increase comes from foreign nationals who choose, either voluntarily or involuntarily, to return to their native country after graduation. Therefore, U.S. companies do not have access to those graduates and are not able to benefit from those freshly-minted graduates.

In recent years, companies have turned to their IT department to create value and provide the tools and technology to support increased productivity. The constant proliferation of technology and shrinking of the corporate IT workforce has created an imbalance in the supply and demand of skilled IT professionals. Corporate IT departments are undermanned and overworked as Baby Boomers retire and the annual population of university graduates with computer-related degrees continually decreases. This growing IT talent shortage has corporate IT departments scrambling for skilled workers. It is critical that IT departments develop and implement an IT talent acquisition strategy to mitigate the market changes currently underway.

About the Author
Mike Canning

Mr. Canning joined CDI in 2007 as the Director, Strategic Planning and has worked in the IT professional services industry for over 15 years. Mr. Canning has a wide range of experience within the industry, having worked in numerous front office and back office functions – finance, planning, operations, sales and marketing – and in numerous environments – corporate headquarters, regional offices and field offices.
  on 8/31/2011 6:56 AM by  Canning, Mike
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August 17
Preserving the Best
By: Jon Wayne

I have a friend, Janet, who works in sales at consumer electronics company. Janet's great. She's very successful, nearly always beats her numbers and is a true corporate ambassador representing the company 100%. Janet looks like she just walked off a corporate recruiting poster and customers love her.

How many people like Janet do you have and what are you doing to protect your investment?

As you probably know, your personnel are your biggest competitive edge. Your people are everything. So here's the question: how long does it take to groom a SUPER STAR? How much time, training and coaching? How long before customers know and trust an employee? Estimates vary from 6 months to 24 months. Don't forget the investment in time and hours that go into searching and recruiting a great employee.

To make matters worse, we know that only 5% of any team rises to the top of their game. So how do we preserve the best and groom them for even more success? Here are some tips to make it happen.

1. Got Superstars? How many super stars do you have? How did they develop? Great C++ programmers who also have a terrific phone voice to help customers, for example, are rare. Take inventory now and briefly summarize what makes them a super star in your book. Always be watching for such personnel and those with super star potential. These are the people who will personally step up and take the business personally.

2. Give Opportunities to Excel. What are you doing to groom your personnel, especially the super stars? An informal competency program can go a long way to ensuring everyone is on the same page regarding company values and goals. What about mentoring? Plug your super stars into coaching others periodically and give kudos whenever they do.

3. Succession Planning. Okay, maybe you can't promote or give more responsibility (and pay) to your super star right now, but you can tell them (a) You're doing a great job, (b) you would like them to have more impact and mentor others and (c) be a part of the succession plan should one of our more senior personnel be lost. Then develop the succession plan to make it happen - maybe appoint your superstar as the Shadow Director of Quality, which requires the superstar as part of his/her regular job function to spend 2 hours every two weeks with the Director of Quality. Powerful.

Maybe you are a "Janet" or have a few on your team. By making a few small investments of time, you can drastically keep your best network designer, Java programmer or support tech secure and highly productive. Go ahead; start today.

About the Author
Jon Wayne

Mr. Wayne is a Client Executive for CDI in South Florida. With over 10 years of IT and Engineering sales and consulting experience, he has developed a reputation for analyzing and delivering complex project resources to mid- and large-size corporations. Prior to CDI, Mr. Wayne was a senior business development manager for an IT Solutions and Services corporation. His career experience in business development also includes web and video collaboration and his passion for technology started early in his career as a product marketing manager. Mr. Wayne is a graduate of New York University.
  on 8/17/2011 7:31 AM by  Canning, Mike
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August 03
Domain Modeling: Get Everyone Speaking the Same Language
By: Joe O’Neil

You’ve elicited requirements from the stakeholders and now have a collection of interview material, notes on the relevant business processes and spreadsheets of data. The customer pain points have been discovered through interviews with participants through your careful inspection of the business process. Before you start to define the scenarios and functionality in the form of use cases, screen mockups and prototypes, you must first define the problem space, project terms and definitions. This is done through the development of the Domain Model.

The Domain Model is the starting point for defining the static portion of the application; the objects and entities and their relationship to one another. It also serves as a source for vocabulary terms to help ensure all team members are speaking the same language.

Miscommunication is a serious issue in nearly every software development project. The key to avoiding miscommunication is defining the terms and definitions used for the project early in the project lifecycle so that everyone is using the same language.

Let’s suppose you are in a meeting with stakeholders and project resources talking about requirements for the new timekeeping application that you’ve spent the last few weeks gathering. You begin talking about the employee’s time card and suddenly hands go up. You hear waves of clarifying questions. “Do you mean the hours for the day or week?” “Are you referring to work time logged for a specific user?” “What if people are paid bi-weekly?” “Is the timecard for one week or both weeks?”

The Domain Model is the vehicle to begin defining the objects, their relationship to one another and the terms that will be used to describe the objects involved in the application. It is intended to be a living model, in that as objects are discovered through further analysis, they are added to the model diagram. The Domain Model is the precursor to the final Object Class Diagram and serves as the first visual representation of the high level requirements. It can also be used as a means of representing the problem space to stakeholders. Agreement on the initial Domain Model can advance the project into the design phase as it helps to define the scope of the project.

Don’t spend too much time trying to make it perfect. It is supposed to be a dynamic model, because you will likely discover additional objects as you develop the use cases. You can always go back and update it as necessary, achieving approvals from stakeholders as changes are made.

About the Author
Joe O’Neil

Mr. O’Neil joined CDI Corporation in 1991. With 25 years of experience in all areas of information technology, he has held position in operations management, IT infrastructure consulting, project and program management and software requirements development and management. He has served many Fortune 1000 companies during his career and now specializes in requirements development and management. He possesses a unique ability to understand, organize and analyze business computing requirements and produce usable solutions aimed at improving organizations business process performance.
  on 8/3/2011 7:33 AM by  Canning, Mike
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July 20
The Truth About Interviewing Skills
By: Jon Wayne

You've probably interviewed many people over the years. You have your favorite questions but get intrigued when overhearing a coworker say, "Try this opening line to throw the candidate off and see how they react."

You may have been told that the primary focus is on skills. "We need that C++ programmer yesterday!!" That's the hiring manager talking of course. They have an agenda: hire staff!

Hiring is not too unlike a presidential election. Polls have shown the contest to be very subjective and almost evenly split. But when it comes to qualifications, in terms of what people think a president should have, technical skills are low the list. #1? Able to get things done and work across the aisle.

A few years ago a woman's business magazine surveyed its readers asking, "What traits does a great leader have?" Surprisingly, technical skill, financial savvy and core product expertise were way down on the list. #1? Able to motivate people and communicate effectively.

I'm not running for president, and I only occasionally am involved in looking for CXO talent, but in my role, I spend a lot of time getting to know the client and then getting them the right candidate. Not surprisingly, core skills are not #1 on my list. They are there, but just not #1 or even #2.

The following are my guidelines for recruiting talent for my clients. See if you already practice what I am preaching.

1. It's all about the person. I want someone who has the core skills, but who is also able to relate, to discuss more than technology and is looking for a place to stay long term. That goes way beyond a simple job application and 30 minute interview. I have to look deeper, and really listen to their heart-felt answers, attitude and values before sending them on to meet with the hiring manager.

2. I'll never find "perfect." He/she does not exist. There are those who will be pretty close, but none will be perfect. If I hold out for perfect, I'll probably miss great. Remember that Decca Records passed twice on the Rolling Stones and EMI passed on the Beatles initially. Looking for perfect? Doesn't exist. You have to know great talent when you see it, hear it, speak with it.

3. Uses common metrics. I do use panel interviews, but I try to keep them small (max 3). I provide everyone with a common set of traits and suggested questions before we go into the interview. I'll say something like, "Okay, this position's primary role is to act as a technical liaison between marketing and production. They must be personable, flexible, adaptable, able to keep up technically and be a concise communicator verbally as well as in writing." That way, we're all "shopping" for the same thing in terms of what matters most. That's a lot different than just saying, "We're looking for someone to run between engineering and marketing and they must know C++, Java and work on the Mac." I don't know three people who can agree on lunch or music in a car let alone a new employee without LOTS of guidance. Beware of panel or multi-level interviewing.

4. It's the scenario. Use scenario based questioning. It's more relative, more insightful to the job at hand and overall a better indicator of how a person would react in the real world vs. "Tell me about your quality test job at Microsoft." Instead ask, "I see you have a quality test background. How would you approach a task where you are asked to investigate a quality issue and report back to the account teams on only the absolute issues they need to be aware of while selling? How would you decide what to leave in and what to leave out?" Much better.

Taking the time to think through your interviewing strategy can really make the difference between finding a great new hire or none at all. I've see some clients (before I worked with them) go through 30 or more interviews while using a panel system of 3 to 5 interviewers. My vote goes to keeping it clear and simple. And you don't have to Google all those "killer interview questions" to do so.

About the Author
Jon Wayne

Mr. Wayne is a Client Executive for CDI in South Florida. With over 10 years of IT and Engineering sales and consulting experience, he has developed a reputation for analyzing and delivering complex project resources to mid- and large-size corporations. Prior to CDI, Mr. Wayne was a senior business development manager for an IT Solutions and Services corporation. His career experience in business development also includes web and video collaboration and his passion for technology started early in his career as a product marketing manager. Mr. Wayne is a graduate of New York University.
  on 7/20/2011 6:25 AM by  Canning, Mike
Permanent Link to Post | Email Post Link | Number of Comments 0 Comment(s)
July 07
A Stress-Free Vacation from Work
By: Mike Canning

With the summer months upon us, many professionals are eagerly preparing for their family vacations. I’m not speaking packing or itineraries, setting light timers or coordinating pet care, but planning the last couple business days in the office and first couple days upon return which bookend vacation time.

As I was recently preparing for my 1 ½ week family vacation, my mind was consumed by reducing the overwhelming workload required to leave the office, what tasks to address while away and the expected workload awaiting my return. To combat these thoughts and find peace, I approached my pre-vacation days as follows.

1. Establish Vacation Ground Rules
Decide what work tasks (if any) you plan to address while on vacation. Rather than stress about what needs to be done, establish pockets of time to jump back into work. By scheduling these pockets in the morning and/or evening, this will allow you and your family to schedule fun activities around work requirements and prevent the mounting stress of trying to identify time to fit work in.

Also, if you plan to be in touch while on vacation, be sure your destination can accommodate your needs – cell phone coverage and internet access – before you communicate boundaries to supervisor and co-workers. Make sure your boundaries are widely known and clearly understood, defining how and under what circumstances you are willing to be contacted.

2. Schedule Pre-Vacation Down Time
Block out sufficient time in the day or two before your vacation to tie up loose ends. Enter this time in your calendar and dedicate yourself to bringing open projects to conclusion, responding to outstanding emails and voice mails, clearing your desk, and creating a to-do list of items to address upon your return to the office. Do not succumb to distractions or participate in unnecessary meetings or conference calls. The goal is to clear the plate of old business so only new business awaits you upon your return to the office.

Set your email and voice mail ‘out of office’ auto replies with pertinent contact guidance. If co-workers are covering for you, discuss and agree upon expectations.

3. Schedule Post-Vacation Ramp Time
Block out sufficient time the day you return from vacation to get back up-to-speed. Similar to the previous principle, enter this time into your calendar and focus on catching up on projects’ progress, new emails and voice mails, and addressing the to-do list created prior to leaving on vacation.

By establishing vacation ground rules and budgeting calendar time pre- and post-vacation, you and your family will have an enjoyable vacation without omnipresent work-related stress.

About the Author
Mike Canning

Mr. Canning joined CDI in 2007 as the Director, Strategic Planning and has worked in the IT professional services industry for over 15 years. Mr. Canning has a wide range of experience within the industry, having worked in numerous front office and back office functions – finance, planning, operations, sales and marketing – and in numerous environments – corporate headquarters, regional offices and field offices.
  on 7/7/2011 6:50 AM by  Canning, Mike
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June 22
Does Service Live at Your Service Desk?
By: Jim Patrick

Back in the day, we knew what service really was. A cheerful, welcoming and sincere voice would warmly greet you , ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ were sprinkled graciously throughout a friendly and pleasant exchange, and the agent truly wanted to help you. Even a familiar American accent could be heard that would clearly show what area of the good ole US of A the agent hailed from. All this made you feel at home and warm and fuzzy all over, like grandma’s best sugar cookies. Yum!

Yep, that was American service done right and everyone was happy as punch. Not!

Well, way back in the day, call queues didn’t even exist as the cost of telephone service was prohibitive. Computer screens popping the caller’s name didn’t really start until the late eighties. The airlines and travel industry had the closest thing to what we know today as service desks, but they called them res centers and they didn’t just take reservations, they supported and kept operative thousands of travel agents and airline based operations.

I recall talking with Stan Rapp, the father of direct marketing and an old high school buddy of mine, Jimmy Dunn, now both legends in direct marketing history. What Stan and Jimmy jointly described to me was a world of interconnected databases that contained profiles on people and then narrow casted a message honed to appeal to those persons while collecting an ongoing flow of information used to predict future decisions.

Service desks today have grown to be very sophisticated and support a wide variety of technologies and user communities. They operate 24/7 across all global time zones. Data is abundant and an agent likely knows more about a caller than can be imagined.

All too often the user experience is negative, a cost cutting entity is portrayed by a poorly executed services that uses layers of IVR selections to finally dump the caller to an inadequately prepared and uncaring, often not understandable voice, that leaves the caller wondering why they took the time to wade through an avalanche of options to the sit on hold for 5, 10, 15 minutes.

The glitter of a great product or service can be totally lost when the client’s satisfaction is sacrificed. Also lost is the opportunity to gather new information that could have been used to update the client’s profile to build an even stronger relationship in the future.

Smart entities invest their monies wisely with professional s servicing and support resources based right here in the US that also follow Help Desk Institute (HDI) approved processes. Those taking this approach see their caller satisfaction levels increasing along with their data banks growing. Good service is all about a great user experience and the ability to collect additional meaningful data to tune the enterprise model and drive even better service as a result.

About the Author
Jim Patrick

Mr. Patrick recently joined CDI IT Solutions. He specializes in change management and business process improvement. He is a social scientist and former senior executive with over 35 years of business experience. Mr. Patrick produced and was featured in over 1,600 radio commentaries under the title ‘90 Seconds for the 90s’ which aired on select CBS and CNN affiliates (KRLD in Dallas / Fort Worth) and discussed changes in business and trends. Mr. Patrick was also a news correspondent, covering major news and business stories such as the World Economic Summit, terrorism in the first Gulf War and business change and economics.

Other past experience includes Vice President level positions with several Fortune 100 corporations including GE. During his 10 years at GE, he was part of the Jack Welch era change team and he created GE’s BPO business in the Southwest. In the mid-eighties, Mr. Patrick founded American Airlines’ “think tanks” under the infamous Bob Crandall that examined and predicted trending for a twenty-year period. He also managed several AMR subsidiaries.
  on 6/22/2011 8:03 AM by  Canning, Mike
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June 08
Are you prepared for “Atomic IT”?
By: Michael Kerman

According to a recent InformationWeek survey of IT professionals, outsourcing remains a popular choice for everything from end user support to data center operations and most commonly, application development. In fact, 76% of respondents said they are now using cloud-based services and almost one-half of those plan to increase their use. Will this trend continue? Most likely, since a staggering 85% of companies say it is easier to bring in an outside provider than to hire staff.

CDI has coined this transformation “Atomic IT” and it represents a fundamentally different operating model for the IT organization. The core becomes smaller in size, with more services and operations being delivered externally. While growing in popularity, “Atomic IT” poses several interesting and unique challenges:

1. Weak Provider Management
Despite a rapidly growing array of providers, most companies are not making the investment in tools to manage these relationships. For example, the same InformationWeek survey revealed that 49% lack automated RFP/bid management, 43% are without vendor time-management systems and 62% do not monitor cloud application performance. Furthermore, their legacy help desk systems and processes are seldom capable of supporting the growing number of provider partnerships and associated service agreements.

2. Quality? What Quality?
With more services delivered externally, are you getting what you’re paying for? IT leaders need to develop or obtain the tools and expertise needed to raise service monitoring to a more formal, objective and metrics-based process.

3. Trust and Verify
As an IT leader, you can outsource work and responsibilities, but you cannot outsource ultimate accountability. As such, the concept of independent validation and verification (IV&V) makes more sense than ever.

4. Protected. Are you Sure?
In the “Atomic IT” model, data is shared among an increasing number of IT partners. This begs an extremely important question - Are your IT partners protecting your data as well as your company is? Unfortunately, many organizations simply rely on their service providers to “self-police” (in clear violation of #3, Trust and Verify) which is a scary approach to ensuring compliance with PCI, HIPAA, SOX and other critical regulations.

5. Shift from Doing to Oversight
This evolution represents are rare opportunity (and compelling need) for IT leaders to re-examine the skills and structure of their teams. Instead of needing masses of expert developers or data base administrators, the team needs to become managers of resources, provide governance and oversight and have deep understanding of core business processes, integration/interfaces and service level management.

Using third-party providers will continue to be a growing part of the IT services puzzle. The trick is how to evolve from the current operating model to a model that can harness the power of “Atomic IT” and yet still maintain an appropriate level of control, discipline, scrutiny and quality.

About the Author
Michael Kerman

Mr. Kerman joined CDI in 2009 as the Director of Solutions Development and has worked in the IT and High-Tech industry for over 20 years. Mr. Kerman has held senior and executive-level engineering, marketing and sales support at several Fortune 1000 organizations. In these roles, he has introduced more than 100 commercial technology solutions and services, generated more than $3B in revenue and created numerous award-winning brands.
  on 6/8/2011 6:55 AM by  Canning, Mike
Permanent Link to Post | Email Post Link | Number of Comments 0 Comment(s)
May 25
Selecting the Right IT Service Provider
By: Mike Canning

In searching the internet, there are many articles, blogs and white papers on the topic of selecting the right service provider.

We operate in a business climate where IT outages – sustained or even brief – can impact product production, worker productivity, or the delivery of core services. In other words, IT interruption can affect an organization’s ability to generate revenue. Given that IT touches nearly every employee and function within an organization, the importance of selecting the right IT service provider to manage, deliver and/or support decision cannot be understated.

Whether your needs are staff augmentation services to support peak time demands of a project, project based outsourcing to ensure project success or functional outsourcing where an entire support function (i.e. Help Desk, Application Development, Application Maintenance) is outsourced, or some blend of the three, the first step is to identify your goals and objectives before engaging an IT service provider.

After identifying your goals – customer satisfaction, compliance management, staff levels and cost reduction are common – consider the following 5 tips to create a pool of service providers that best match your needs:

1. IT Provider Stability
Conduct thorough due diligence. Company research, customer references, internet research and social media review are proven and newer methods to validate a company’s fiscal and business stability.

2. Capabilities
Ask the tough questions to evaluate the service provider’s capabilities. It is not uncommon for some service providers to oversell capabilities leaving their client with under-delivered services, falling far short of expectations. The ability to deliver will be a driving factor to your internal customer satisfaction ratings as well as your ability to manage hidden costs related to additional quality assurance/control.

3. Responsiveness
Will your provider be responsive when you need them? Challenges may exist if your company has a national operation and your service provider is located in another country for example. Geographic alignment is important should a problem arise and you want response in a moment’s notice.

4. Communication of Goals and Objectives
Are you and your service provider aligned, working toward the same goal? This must be in the forefront throughout the service provider evaluation and selection process. If the service provider does not understand your goals, how would they ever be able to deliver the right service that alleviates the pain points and the very essence of why you are searching for a service provider in the first place? Open, two-way communication is critical so the appropriate expectations are established on both sides at the very beginning of the relationship.

5. Cost Considerations
Not cost reductions. While we all have budgets to meet our goals, selecting a vendor solely on price is a recipe for disaster. The IT services industry is fiercely competitive and some providers may agree to any price to obtain your business. When effectively naming your own price is appealing, it often comes at a much greater cost when the service provider is unable to deliver the services at that price.

Considerations for selecting a service provider do vary based upon many factors. Be prudent in adhering to a process that yields success. Do not take short cuts as the switching cost from one service provider to another can be painful, difficult and even costly. A decision maker focused on developing a long-term partnership with their service providers will generate significantly higher value and ROI and improve customer satisfaction.

About the Author
Mike Canning

Mr Canning joined CDI in 2007 as the Director, Strategic Planning and has worked in the IT professional services industry for over 15 years. Mr Canning has a wide range of experience within the industry, having worked in numerous front office and back office functions – finance, planning, operations, sales and marketing – and in numerous environments – corporate headquarters, regional offices and field offices.
  on 5/25/2011 7:03 AM by  Canning, Mike
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