Management Challenges Facing Information Technology Organizations

This study was sponsored by one of the leading financial organizations to document the most significant challenges to Information Technology management and procurement. The respondents represented an installed base of more than 520,000 PCs and an annual product procurement budget in excess of one billion dollars.

To increase the relevance of the conclusions for all participants, the analysis differentiated between respondent organizations with an installed base of greater than 10,000 workstations and respondents with less than 10,000 workstations installed. This differentiation also recognized the economic leverage of large organizations in negotiating products and services from vendors.

While most respondents had successfully negotiated on pricing, this study identified a wide gap in the back office support services provided by Value Added Resellers (VARs). In fact, the study recognized that while pricing was an important criteria in the initial selection of vendors, it was no longer among the top three considerations in evaluating the vendors' performance.

The following are a few of the benefits that respondents realized from this study:

• Benchmarks were established for respondents to evaluate the effectiveness of their technology procurement organizations.
• Service Level Agreement (SLA) criteria were documented.
• Back office service enhancements were identified.
• Capitalization and expense write-off thresholds were updated.
• "Best practices" included the use of Intranets, electronic approval processes and the authorization and integration on non-standard products.
• Advances in the implementation and use of software based asset management solutions were explored.

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