Be the Master of Your Enterprise's DestinyBe the Master of Your Enterprise's Destiny

Enterprise IT executives share how they've seized control of the vendor relationship.

Amid all the braggadocio about service superiority and cajoling to use this "great" feature or that one, you might find your voice gets lost in roadmap conversations with vendors and service providers. And clearly that's no good -- enterprises that can't dictate their needs in today's rapid-paced, always-on, digitally oriented world could find themselves in tight spots with no room for competitive maneuvering.

Airbnb, often held forth as the quintessential digital company, has experienced this pain. So too has Hyatt Hotels, a competitor coming out of the traditional hospitality vertical... as well as companies in aerospace, financial services, and healthcare. This we learned during our Enterprise Summit with enterprise IT executives at last week's Enterprise Connect conference, as well as lessons for how to contend with vendor sluggishness.

Enterprise Summit participants (l-r): Robin Gareiss, Nemertes Research; Jim Mitilier, Hyatt Hotels; Beth Hibling, Northrop Grumman; Franklin Castro, NewYork- Presbyterian Hospital; Jeff Fairbanks, Bloomberg; Jason Galanter, Airbnb; Beth Schultz, No Jitter/Enterprise Connect

Airbnb, for example, has encountered roadblocks because some of the vendors it selected early on as a fledgling company with a novel business idea "simply don't move fast enough" for its operations today, Jason Galanter, the company's unified communications architect, told us during the panel discussion. "That's one of the key issues we run into on a daily basis," he added. "As quickly as we're moving and as fluid as this situation is, finding vendors that can move at the pace we need them to move has become rather difficult."

Airbnb's response to provider sluggishness was to pull its contact center operations out of the cloud and run on premises instead, as Eric Krapf, No Jitter publisher and Enterprise Connect GM pointed out in a post yesterday. Sometimes, Galanter said, you'll find yourself at "a point of diminishing returns" when trying to manage the cloud relationship.

Responsiveness is absolutely an issue -- particularly so with cloud providers, agreed Jim Mitilier, assistant director of contact center information technology with Hyatt's Global Contact Centers & Shared Service Center. Accepting that fact upfront is an imperative, because with that understanding an organization can move forward in a way that best meets its needs. Maybe it's not the greatest of situations at the moment, Mitilier said, "but we can pick and choose, and if a provider can't meet our needs then that's where the on-prem comes in."

And, importantly, as the relationship builds, Hyatt is finding providers starting to be more responsive in the "off menu" features and functionality they offer and "more open to changing their models to suit us," he added.

Over at Bloomberg, enterprise IT takes a firmer stance. Jeff Fairbanks, global head of AV and media technology at Bloomberg, explained how the company approaches R&D and its technology roadmap: "What we've said is, ... we're going to decide what technology we want to work with and what we want it to do, and we're going to go out and find a partner and if they don't have it we're going to help them make it. The relationship is going to be about, 'Hey, we're going to help you develop this technology, we're going to use it, and you're going to give it to us for a reasonable rate... but you can run off and sell it and monetize it in some other way."

Bloomberg, in other words, will not be married to any vendor's roadmap. "Instead we say, this is our vision. This is the way we believe the world is going to go, and we're going to do it. If you want to help us, great. If you don't, we'll find somebody else," Fairbanks said. (For more of Fairbanks' insights, read my earlier No Jitter post, "Bloomberg IT Exec Shares Lessons Learned on Video Project.")

During the Enterprise Summit, more great advice came from Beth Hibling, senior director of global collaboration services at Northrop Grumman. Signing a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) is one sure way to get your voice heard, and something that Northrop Grumman has done on a few occasions, she said.

As an example, she recounted going under NDA with Microsoft to help ensure the Windows 10 phone (under development at the time) would meet Northrop Grumman's security requirements. By partnering with Microsoft, the company was able to get its secure phones "in play within a year -- which was really good."

Whatever tactic you take, do be the master of your enterprise's digital destiny. I especially like the advice from Bloomberg's Fairbanks that launched the vendor relationship discussion in the first place. Bloomberg is always hearing things like, "'We've got this greatest thing since sliced bread. It does this, and it also makes julienne fries,'" he said. But nobody -- nobody knows Bloomberg like Bloomberg knows Bloomberg, he added. "We're the foremost authority on what we need, not the vendor."

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