Vendor Architects as Client’s Trusted Advisors
- Mohan Babu K (cross posted from the Managing Offshore IT blog)
Many of my peers enjoy the privilege of being trusted advisors to clients we work with, though I guess this comes with a lot of responsibility too. I use the phrase with caution since in our industry misuse of terminologies are rampant. In a sense, the term ‘trusted advisor’ is akin to another concept of ‘thought leader:’ every technologist and consultant worth her/his salt wants to be in that position though many don’t have a clue of what it takes to be one, or even to continue down the path when closer to that utopian goal.
Case in point, I am on the road this week, traveling with a client team that is embarking on a large integration [SOA] initiative. As is to be expected, they have floated Request for Information (RFI) to software platform vendors and are in the process of continuing down a deeper technical evaluation.
Since an existing Infosys team is already engaged with the client in the application development space, they looked to us for advisory assistance during this exercise. The request came at extremely short notice and we managed to quickly put together a team to for required support to the client and I offered to join them in person. A few interesting aspects jumped out during the exercise:
- We traveled to two large software vendors headquartered in the West Coast - that I shall not name for obvious reasons – where the vendors put together a series of secessions that included the usual Dog and Pony show along with sessions that were more customized deep-dives with their internal product experts
- The client was already aware that we had expertise in the platforms and the fact that we were also tier-1 alliance partners to the vendors being evaluated so the expectation was clear: be our trusted [read impartial] advisor in this engagement
- My team did factor in the yin-yang from our internal alliance management groups, each of which had an interest in positioning the specific vendor (alliance partner) for obvious reasons: the vendors were leaning on our alliance teams.
- Another obvious dynamic that my team in this engagement has to watch out for: client’s projects are downstream work for service providers. But in our eagerness to get started on the work, we should not spur them towards a decision.
While the evaluation is proceeding as expected, my eye remains on the ball :: translating the results of this exercise and evaluation into a strategy that the client’s executives can propose to their stakeholders … which will then have to get projectized…. And will hopefully get executed using our Global Delivery model
The horses are just out of the gate, so it would be hard for me to even speculate on the direction of the evaluation; but stay tuned.
Ps: And in case you are wondering, client’s advisors don’t get the trinkets and t-shirts while accompanying them to the vendor’s company store. :-(
