Information Technology Staffing

 In Part 1, I introduced the concept of segmenting IT solutions providers.  In this part we will look at the criteria on how you might do that.  Now for the IT consultant’s favorite phrase, it depends.  It depends upon the type of provider.  For IT staffing, you may look at the ratio of resumes submitted to the number of candidates interviewed to the number of candidates placed.  For an IT application development provider, you might look at project costs or more importantly overruns.  For hardware service providers, you may look at time from initial call to response, the number of call backs. 

Once you have established your metrics, the most obvious thing to me would be to communicate to the providers what your criteria is.  But that’s not always the case, I know of a situation where a company was looking to eliminate some of their providers.  When a manager at the company was asked how they would go about making the decision on who stays and who goes, the response was “we will use a scoring system on criteria that we have developed”.  When asked if they could share the criteria, the answer was “no, we can’t do that”.

It’s critically important that IT solutions providers know what they are being measured on.  It’s the only why a supplier can find out what they need to improve on.  Every business should be interested in improvement.  By segmenting suppliers, you have an opportunity to get great feedback from your strategic suppliers.  It also gives you an opportunity to give feedback to your suppliers.  I know that’s something I would appreciate!