RECAP | ROUNDTABLE | Vendor Management

The September 18, 2018, Inside Track roundtable demonstrated that IT infrastructure and operations have become more dependent on vendors than ever before. Roundtable participants talked about how ingrained vendors have become in their systems, with at least one participant asking how best to shift even more responsibility to his prime construction vendor.

He noted that data center construction project management is very challenging but the impact on enterprise staff can be very high when an organization must oversee many simultaneous projects, even if some of them are small.

Interestingly, this organization did not get off to a very good start with a prime construction vendor, noting that the original team in one region lacked IT experience, although it was very qualified in other ways. Some years later, the experience is much better, as the vendor’s regional group slowly added team members, with remaining members gaining competence.

Yet another roundtable participant spoke about the difficulties of coordinating vendors across the operations, facilities, and IT environments. She noted that an organization that does not build many facilities faces another set of challenges. Her team must work together more closely than ever before, so that the new facility can transition smoothly from pre-production to production. This requires operations, facilities, and IT environments to coordinate multiple vendors across multiple disciplines through commissioning into live operations.

Uptime Institute’s Scott Killian, vice president for Efficient IT, discussed how most organizations now utilize IT change management processes as a way to coordinate and notify all data center activities. Data center facilities and operations changes are submitted with severity and risk levels, just like IT changes, with approval levels varying based on assigned risk.

Scott also highlighted communication during his remarks. He noted the importance of weekly meetings, and how a lot of organizations are having daily meetings that highlight all internal and vendor activities planned. More insightfully yet, he and Matt Stansberry, VP North America, discussed the ICE (Integrated Critical Environment) team concept and suggested that some organizations had benefitted from deploying ICE as a way to organize communications about change orders, testing, and maintenance windows, especially during high-stress activities.

Almost all the participants spoke about the importance of building trust. One participant said that terminating a vendor was a drastic solution, but that it had taken years to resolve a vendor that had become difficult because of poor communication. “You can do a job on SLAs without doing your job,” she said.

Before the meeting came to a close, Matt, Scott, and moderator Kevin Heslin all noted the different challenges that vendor management brings (considering the group did not really cover security or maintenance issues), with Matt Stansberry taking the opportunity to share hyperlinks to a number of Uptime Institute research papers.