CIO Straight Talk - Issue 8 - 19

19
Advice from an Advisor

that partners aren't addressing the CIO's

Sourcing advisors are often responsible

capabilities for which they were selected. I

for making the match between a company
and an outsourcing partner. To get a
matchmaker's perspective on how a CIO can
ensure a successful relationship, CIO Straight
Talk spoke with Steven Hall, a partner at ISG
and the leader of the firm's digital strategy
group and its service lines for the Americas.

particular challenges with the expertise and
think one way to counter this is to establish
and co-fund formal co-innovation centers,
where a partner's best thinking can be applied
to specific verticals and sub-verticals and to
developing new products and services that
can be brought to market.

In what ways are outsourcing
relationships changing?

This sounds like a very
different way of working with
outsourcing partners.

They're changing from "vendor

That's right. You don't want to make your

management" relationships to true strategic
partnerships, a change brought on by
the digital transformations enterprises
are undergoing. Companies are turning
to partners for reasons far removed from
traditional cost-cutting - crucial CIO issues
like cyber-security, achieving agility on
a global scale, the shift from back-office
support to developing revenue-generating
services. That means companies need
partners that are experts in both new
technologies and a company's

relationship all about SLAs and incident
management - at least not at the CIO level.
There's an appropriate place for those issues
to be raised, but it is lower in the organization.
Governance for the CIO should take the form
of regular meetings with partners about the
state of the business, about co-innovation
initiatives, about creating new teams to
leverage new ideas.
Actually, it goes back to how you structure
the deal. Instead of being only prescriptive

business domain.

about what a service provider needs to do -

So what can a CIO do to make this
new kind of relationship work?

to be met" - you define a central challenge,

One problem I see is that companies

a solution, and build in some flexibility on how

sometimes aren't tapping the technology

you will get there. You're buying output rather

capabilities and potential for innovation that

than FTEs. This more open-ended approach

strategic partners offer. I tell CIOs, "Be open

requires trust and honesty from all sides. You

and listen. Understand that not all the best

have to be willing to be open and say, "We

ideas come out of Silicon Valley or appear in

don't know what we don't know." Being too

the Wall Street Journal CIO Journal section.

prescriptive locks CIOs in to what they know

Set up opportunities for real, meaningful

today without considering how it will affect

discussions with your strategic partners."

business or technology tomorrow.

On the other hand, sometimes CIOs feel

"here are the 1,053 requirements that need
figure out where you want to end up after
addressing it, work with your partner to define
CIO Straight Talk - Issue 8

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of CIO Straight Talk - Issue 8
