Lessons in IT Transformation: Technology Expert to Business Leader

Sourcing—Expanding Your Team to Include Outside Partners

The days of hiring all of the skills and resources you need to effectively run a complex organization are a thing of the past. More and more CIOs need to be able to leverage relationships with third parties who have the specific knowledge of very narrow functional specialties in order to run their operations. Many of these partners may live and work in foreign countries and in different cultures. These people often interface directly with your clients and are as much a part of your team (and a reflection of your efforts) as the people who wear your company's badge and work in the same building you do. When clients call my help desk, they don't know (or care) if the person on the other end of the phone is a member of our staff, or whether the person lives in New York or Russia. All they know is that they called my team for support and either had a positive or negative service experience.

I have seen too many executives treat the vendors they work with as slaves. They think they are the masters who pay for the service and the vendor's people are their indentured servants who will do their bidding. But these individuals are people just like your staff. They have goals and dreams and personalities, and they want to work somewhere they are appreciated, recognized, and rewarded for excellence. I treat all of the people who work as an extension of my team as if they worked for my company. At the end of the day, they are working ...