CIO Blog: 10 Steps to Successful IT

I really like Peter Birley's list for practicing successful IT. He brings up a couple of key points which are quite often missed by CIO's. No particular order but marketing your successes and working with suppliers should be no-brainers but inexplicably seem to get lost.

In my mind you have two kinds or classes of IT suppliers- partners and vendors. Partners should be a) severely limited in number and b) not only behave as a partner, never abusing the relationship but be critical to your success. The rest, sorry to say, need to be relegated to the vendor status. To me, this means they have much more limited access to you and your teams and will, by design, not be nearly as influential. A good partnership can be invaluable.

Marketing (Peter's point 10. Shout about it) is absolutely spot on. My saying here is "Bad news travels fast, good news doesn't travel at all." Just like any business you need to be letting customers and business partners know about your successes. This has the added benefit of banking political capital for use later.

Great advice from Peter!

CIO Blog: 10 Steps to Successful IT: ""

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