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 Need help with your Technology Category Strategy?

A category strategy can define the plan for managing a category of spend over a period of time in the context of business strategy, market forces, and other considerations. Embedded IT has created this Technology Category Strategy template in line with CIPS Guidelines, by which you can define / sub-categorise your technology spend to identify key suppliers, key dates or key actions to take to improve your Technology spend plans.

Since the onset of COVID-19, remote working has become a significant requirement for most businesses, driving a major transformation on methods of working for most employees able to work remotely from the office. From a technology standpoint, this presents a number of challenges, such as providing secure access to data/information, secure and cost-effective communications methods and distributed IT equipment. This guide will focus on the commercial and procurement impacts of home working in this context. It is laid out in the same form as other Buying Guides in this series, specifically to identify the key information to provide to potential suppliers, in terms of technical, operational, and commercial considerations.

The second in the Buying Guide series features Telephony / Voice focussed questions to enable you to create an accurate requirements specification when buying Telephony / Voice services. Sourcing the right provider is based on a number of specialist requirements which are covered in this guide.

 This Buying Guide provides a checklist of questions to ask in order to create a requirements specification for buying Cloud / Hosting services. Selecting the right service is entirely dependent on your requirement, and selecting the wrong model can be costly. This Buying Guide outlines the information you should provide, and the questions you should ask to validate a supplier's responses when going through the Buying process.

This Buying Guide provides a checklist of questions to ask in order to create a requirements specification for buying Office 365 (Technical, Operational and Commercial), questions you should ask to validate a supplier's responses, and suggestions on how to find a good quality supplier of services.

This is a simple scoring matrix to help perform a weighted assessment of suppliers in a procurement exercise.  Feel free to use for a small subset of categories (maximum 6) with a 100% weighting across categories.  Some Excel skills required to manipulate to cater for addtional suppliers or categories.