Outsourced Vendor Management Improves Your Business

The small business owner has to do a lot. In fact, the smaller the business, the more he/she has to do. One thing that many small business owners do is make technology decisions. By acting like the organization's CIO or CTO (short for Chief Information Officer or Chief Technology Officer, respectively), the small business owner needs to understand what his/her organization’s technology needs are. Or, he/she needs to outsource that role. 

Procurement is a big deal when it comes to information technology. Most business owners don’t always know what kind of IT they need: which model of a solution works best to fix a given operational problem, or which software is going to cause the least amount of headaches and forced downtime.

What’s worse is that, if left to make uniformed decisions, vendor representatives, whose lone job is to secure product sales, will undermine their business’ efforts with products and services that a business simply doesn’t need. Fortunately, there is an answer to this: the Virtual CIO.

What is a Virtual CIO?

A Virtual CIO service is exactly what you think. A Virtual CIO is an outsourced version of an in-house CIO. Using the decades of accrued knowledge and experience dealing with business information systems, a Virtual CIO can make informed decisions and procure necessary technology for a company without anyone at the company having their time wasted with unnecessary sales calls. 

Not only can your organization gain the expertise it needs to get the right technology in place, it can do so without spending a second on the phone with any number of sales representatives. This not only helps build a more productive and efficient business, it also saves quite a bit of time by keeping decision makers’ focus on their businesses, not on sales reps. 

Vendor Management By the Pros

Have you ever entered an agreement that worked for you at the time, but has since lost its value? Are you paying more than you should for the Internet and utilities? The Virtual CIO service provides top-of-the-line vendor management options that can work to reduce your overhead for services that aren’t actively working to enhance your business. 

At Computerware our vendor management service will help you:

• Consolidate vendors: Often times businesses will test products by working with multiple vendors. If they are comparable, you should consider moving to one vendor rather than several, making the process of handling all of your products much easier as a whole.
• Measure vendor performance: It can take time to measure vendor performance, but the time you spend will easily be made up when you eliminate vendors that aren’t providing adequate services.
• Implement a vendor management service: When you have a single point of contact for all of your vendors, you’ll find that it’s easier and more effective to work with them. Outsourcing this to Computerware can help you save time and resources. We can handle your contracts, performance analyses, relationship management, and vendor risk to keep your technology working as intended.

If your IT isn’t working to provide unquestioned benefits to your business, a Virtual CIO service is right for you. You don’t have to allow vendors to hold your business hostage. Call the IT experts at Computerware today at (703) 821-8200, and get your IT working for you.