Marry in haste, Repent at Leisure

It's a very old phrase, apparently first used in print by William Congreve, but it is ever more pertinent in the world of work. How many supplier relationships have started full of promise only to be foundering a year down the line. Most of the time, this is because the foundations of the relationship have been built on sand - an informal or thin-in-detail contract and neither party really knows what is being delivered or received.

If you want a good relationship with your technology suppliers, the effort is all in the prenuptials. Here are some ways to ensure that you don't end up in the divorce courts a few years down the line:

Choose Well: Making sure you have the right supplier for your company is a good start. Using a company just because a colleague from your chamber of commerce does is not a good enough reason. Your selection process needs to be rigorous. Don't ever allow a supplier to think they're in a one-horse race.

Be Clear: Make it very clear specifically what you want from the relationship, write it down and make sure the supplier understands what you want as well, get them to explain to you what they believe you want and if they've got it wrong go round it one more time.

Service Levels: If you don't agree your service levels, then this is going to be a major sticking point at some point in the future. If you don't know the rules to the dance, then you're going to be treading on each others toes. For instance, you need to know whether you can call them on a weekend and what service you can expect from them.

Communications: Once you're in a relationship, on-going communications is essential. Don't just leave it until something is going wrong. Meet regularly, have a fixed agenda to work through and a desired outcome. Review the reports, comment on performance. Above all, don't ignore your supplier because that's a sure way for the things to go west.

Relationships: Build relationships with the supplier, get to know them and make sure they get to know you. Face to face meetings, regular telephone calls, it all helps to build those relationships which means you gain flexibility and an improved service. Don't underestimate the value of a great relationship.

If you do end up repenting at leisure, don't hold on hoping things will improve. Initiate an improvement process with the supplier and if it doesn't work, terminate the relationship and walk away.

GreenBOLD can help you manage your IT suppliers, it's an integral part of what we provide to our customers. We help you build those relationships and get the most out of your suppliers.

Technology and Disaster Recovery

Yesterday, I stumbled across a rather scary statistic: 80% of invocations of a Disaster Recovery (DR) or Business Continuity (BC) processes were due to IT hardware failures. That is a scary and what it says to me is that there are many companies out there with a multitude of single points of failure in the IT infrastructure that they have not addressed. This is not perhaps that surprising; removing single points of failure from IT infrastructure usually costs money and it's hard for many CEOs to understand why they should pay for equipment that's just going to sit there idle waiting for a failure to happen.

I met a potential client recently who had invested over £100k on a completely new IT infrastructure. All that money and yet they still had a major single point of failure: Their main server. It was running multiple virtual servers and it sat in the basement of the office that had a history of floods. The cost of buying a small back-up server and sitting it on the 2nd floor of the office paled in to insignificance when compared with the amount of unbillable hours they would accumlate if the main server failed without a backup. I'm very disappointed with whichever company installed the kit in the first place, they should have known better than to agree to implement such a massive single point of failure in a brand new system.

There are 5 simple steps for ensuring your IT is ready for any Disaster:

1. Identify all the systems that enable the company to generate revenue
2. Analyse what type of risks you have within those systems and the consequences for the company should that risk become a reality
3. Evaluate your analysis and decide what to do, either remove the risks (buy more technology) or you decide to do nothing and leave the risk in place, but acknowledge they exist.
4. Document everything that you've found out and decided to do.
5. Maintain what you've achieved. This is not a one-off task, it needs to be continued and kept up to date.

Going through this process and producing a plan should at least make sure you're fully aware of your potential risk areas and be able to make prudent decisions on where to spend money and remove the single points of failure.

IT now plays a critical supporting role in generating revenue in the majority of companies. GreenBOLD provide a service implementing and managing DR & BC plans for companies. If you'd like to ensure your systems are always stable and available, get in touch.