Telecommunications and mobility (T&M) technologies will play a critical role in the success of geographically distributed companies during the next ten years. Business professionals need their IT organizations to keep pace with their requirements related to globalization, virtualization, and bring-your-own technology. At the same time, the demand for unified communications (UC), collaboration (including room-based telepresence and desktop and video), and mobility is exploding (both in and out of the office). These business technology trends create a vortex of new challenges for business technology/IT sourcing and vendor management (SVM) professionals, who will need new skills to keep pace with everything from crafting technical and service-level specifications in RFPs covering multiple services to negotiating and governing complex service contracts to managing overlapping and interrelated vendor relationships.

Forrester’s Telecommunications and Mobility Sourcing Playbook provides insights about the "art" and the "science" of T&M sourcing in the rapidly changing technology environment. It explores the interplay of trends in technology adoption and management and also provides tactical advice for SVM pros regarding how-to build and review/revise your corporate sourcing strategy regarding advanced communications applications such as unified communications and collaboration, including accessibility using corporate-liable and personal (BYOD) connected mobile devices, selecting vendors and service providers, and achieving continuous improvement beyond cost savings.

You can use Forrester's Telecommunications and Mobility Sourcing Playbook reports to understand important industry and market dynamics, plan your sourcing strategy for telecom and mobility technologies and services, and improve your communications vendor management capabilities. You also can learn how to apply best practices from Forrester's dozens of years of telecom and mobility sourcing expertise to optimize the effectiveness of your strategy over time.

This playbook provides guidance for SVM pros in four areas for effectively managing telecommunications and mobility services and technology sourcing — discover, plan, act, and optimize. The reports included in it are based on a combination of Forrester’s extensive primary market research, including hundreds of client inquiry calls each year about T&M sourcing, surveys of thousands of IT and business decision-makers, and dozens of consulting engagements related to defining a best-practice T&M sourcing strategy, service RFPs, vendor evaluation and selection, and contract negotiations. Users of this playbook will discover best-practices for optimizing T&M sourcing. In addition, the playbook will help SVM pros keep pace with the ongoing market developments that affect T&M sourcing and vendor management.