09 October 2018
I went to the eWorld Procurement show last week, as the agenda / speakers looked excellent and I fancied a day out to get a clearer view of the current procurement market. It was in Westminster QEII exhibition theatre, and I’d wholly recommend it for procurement professionals if you are unaware. The “free breakfast” wasn’t actually free, but lets not split hairs in what was an excellent event.
14 September 2018
A big thank you to all of those who attended the 2nd meeting of the South Hants IT Professional Outreach Organisation. Its good to see the acronym doesn’t get boring, and that people universally think it’s a nice idea albeit difficult to comprehend something that has no particular commercial agenda. Anyway, once again, I am judging last night’s event as a success.
The nice progression of the experiment is we had a true representation of the whole IT Supply Chain, from Clients, Channel Partners and Vendors, all of whom were sparking off each other when discussing the chosen topic of Artificial Intelligence and its impact on everything.
29 June 2018
So I would judge last night’s inaugural session as a success, despite relatively low attendance. As chair I take full responsibility for organising a business meeting which directly overlapped with an England game, and my lesson is learnt.
31 July 2018
One of the things that is sorely lacking in our industry is an ability to articulate requirements. IT and Telecoms is complex, and usually involves lots of detail, and many buyers do not bother with writing a decent specification before they go to market. This leads directly to a mismatch of expectations, vague service delivery, poor value for money and some sort of dramatic falling out in the post-contract phase. So why not just write down what you want at the outset?
20 June 2018
I had an interesting discussion with a client this morning about Managed Services. He is working with a supplier who say they are a Managed Service Provider, but was a little disappointed with the quality of service he was receiving. Specifically, he felt he was doing all the proactive work, and they only actually started to provide a service when he notified them there was a problem. It’s not an uncommon situation.
Maybe I’m old skool, but the term Managed Services should be treated with respect. For about 30 years, its been bandied around as mechanism to rebadge IT and Telecoms companies in the hope it will increase their multiple value at exit. The truth of the matter is however that many of the companies in the channel who started off as resellers have found it difficult to be able to offer true managed services because it needs to be fundamentally engrained in the culture of an organisation. And this is the problem – it you haven’t got the organisation and culture to support a Managed Service, you ain’t no MSP.
