Business models, or even commercial choices for purchasing from a technology provider, are complicated factors to take into account from the perspective of procurement. The qualities of various technologies or solutions generate various commercial models, which may or may not support the goals that you, as a customer, are seeking to accomplish inside your own firm.
One important selection criterion for creating a short list of suppliers is understanding what a provider is prepared to do.
Knowing what their operating requirements are is the first step for any buyer in making this determination. At the corporate level, this often entails the creation of a target operating model by the IT team that details the services and capabilities needed for IT to operate and which should be produced or employed internally as opposed to procured from technology providers. Although this is a significant and complicated effort for large organisations, all organisations that purchase IT services should have similar discussions.
Choosing IT support for business: important inquiries to address
What are the distinctive qualities of my business that make it valuable in such a way that internal knowledge retention is essential? These should be internal hires.
Where those important differentiators are not already accessible internally but need to be created more rapidly than they can be employed, they should be obtained from consultants as short-term or interim talents.
Again, services can be acquired on a project basis in cases where they are not necessary on an ongoing basis or do not offer much commercial value. These would be software developers for software initiatives and cloud or hardware engineers for infrastructure projects. These would typically last no more than 3–6 months.
Long-term services that are not essential to the operation of the company should be acquired as managed or outsourced services since they may typically be offered on a shared or non-industry-specific basis.
A “reseller” should be used to buy basic technology when no services are needed and the product has to be acquired as a transactional item.
The key to choosing which technology vendors to work with is understanding which of these models are offered by a certain source. A discussion about managed services with a reseller is probably not going to go well; although the reseller would be happy to take your money, it’s doubtful that they have the skills and resources necessary to serve your needs successfully.
We identify business models that a technology provider is likely to be able to offer using keyword analysis, SIC code analysis, and other factors, and we add that as a filter item inside the search. As a result, there is a lower chance that you will choose a supplier that cannot be trusted to give you what you truly need in the context of your operational demands.
