Centralizing Your Strategy For Telecom Sourcing Simplifies Contracting And Vendor Management

Defining a centralized IT strategy for telecom services sourcing helps firms with distributed organizations simplify and streamline the contracting process. It involves establishing common practices for qualifying vendors to submit proposals; defining and weighting provider selection criteria; establishing contract reference terms and conditions and SLAs; and creating metrics or scorecards to use for vendor management. Regardless of the organizational structure of your firm, and even if some telecom services are purchased locally or separately by business units or affiliates, sharing a common set of baseline sourcing templates and policies will reduce administrative burden and other resources required for managing each step of the acquisition cycle. To ensure compliance it's essential to communicate the strategy to executives with contract authority for telecom. During periodic strategy reviews, executives also should be asked for feedback and suggestions. Together these measures will lead to better contracts, potentially easier and faster contracting, and improved contract governance and vendor management.