Change provider
A procurement exercise, a migration, six months of disruption, and a new logo delivering the same service model. The roadmap still has no owner, because that was never in either contract.
Tickets get closed. Nothing gets better.
You may not need a different provider. You may need a different function.
The service is not obviously failing. Tickets are answered, laptops get replaced, the helpdesk is polite. What is missing is anybody who owns where the technology is going: no roadmap, no budget beyond next quarter, no view on the systems decision that is coming. That is not a service failure, which is why changing provider so often changes nothing. It is a missing function, and support and leadership are two different purchases.
Underneath
What is actually going on
The visible problem is rarely the one that decides how this goes. These are the parts that are true whether or not anybody has said them out loud.
Reactive by design
Managed service contracts are written around responding to things. Nothing in a standard agreement obliges anybody to tell you what to do next year, so nobody does.
The roadmap has no owner
Ask who decides what the company spends on technology in eighteen months and the answer is usually a name from finance and a shrug. Decisions get made by whoever raises them.
You have outgrown the sizing, not the people
The provider was the right choice for the company you were. Growth changes what the relationship needs to be, and providers rarely initiate that conversation about themselves.
Escalation is a person, not a process
Everything important routes through one individual who has been there longest. That works until they are on holiday, and it is invisible until then.
The fork
Two ways this usually goes
Separate the support question from the leadership question
Establish which of the two is actually missing. Often the provider is competent and the gap is that nobody is doing the CIO's job — in which case switching costs a fortune and fixes nothing.
The order
What to do, in sequence
The order matters more than the individual steps. Most of the cost in these situations comes from doing the right things in the wrong sequence.
- First
Evidence the service
Ticket volumes, repeat issues, response against contract, what has been billed as extra. From the exports rather than from impressions on either side.
- Then
Name the gap precisely
Service quality, scope, sizing, or leadership. These have completely different remedies and only one of them is a procurement exercise.
- Then
Write what you actually want to buy
If it is support, define the service. If it is leadership, define the function, its authority, and what it owns.
- Finally
Fix the relationship or replace it, deliberately
Most incumbent relationships improve markedly when the expectations are written down. Some do not, and then you know.
The questions
What you will be asked
Each of these has a real answer and a plausible one. Knowing which you are giving is most of the job.
Who owns our technology roadmap, by name?
What has measurably improved in the last twelve months?
Are we buying support, or leadership, and which are we short of?
What happens when the one person who knows us is unavailable?
The result
What you end up with
- An evidenced view of what the current service actually delivers
- A precise statement of the gap, service or leadership
- A written definition of what you intend to buy
- A decision on shape rather than only on supplier
Also happening