Maybe your business is moving en masse to the fabled cloud, or you’re tackling some heavy compliance issues. Or perhaps you’re unloading your offices for the sweet, sweet freedom of a totally mobile workforce. For whatever the reason, having a robust IT procurement strategy will make things easier, more streamlined, and more cost-effective. Because everything is better with a strategy.
So, What’s an IT Procurement Strategy, then?
It kind of does what it says on the tin. In short, it’s an agreed way of finding and buying IT. In long, it’s an organizational-wide plan to acquire IT-related assets that support your present and future business needs, goals, and activities.
The usefulness of an IT procurement strategy knows no bounds. Your strategy will help you:
- Introduce a consistent methodology for how your business acquires IT stuff.
- Assign roles and responsibilities to staff members.
- Decide budgets for hardware, software, and licenses.
- Determine the quality standards and technical specifications of what you buy.
- Source and choose IT suppliers, and establish ways of working with them.
- Determine the compliance levels of the suppliers you choose to deal with.
- Negotiate prices.
- Decide procedures and permission levels for requests and approvals.
Choose a Goal
Your IT procurement strategy must align with your business goals because that’s how you make sure you have all the IT stuff you need at the right time.
You also want to create a particular flavor of procurement strategy, depending on what’s essential to your business. For instance, you may focus on one, some, or all of these:
- Reducing costs and increasing cost-effectiveness.
- Mitigating risks and managing compliance.
- Expanding your business.
- Optimizing your suppliers.
- Getting greener and more sustainable.
You’ll also find that having a consistent and systematic approach to purchasing helps you to:
Reduce Errors
Duplication will be easier to spot. You’ll discover that Max in Marketing and Juanita in Engineering are both buying the same software licenses. And what’s that service you’ve been paying for, like, forever? It’s much easier to eliminate needless historical spending when your purchasing approach is systematic.
Stop Wild West Spending
If Shawn in Sales thinks he can buy a cooler tablet on the house because he’s always been allowed to, then Shawn can think again. Spending outside the procurement process falls into the territory of dark purchasing. And that’s as scary as it sounds. Dark purchasing can lead to a bigger risk of data breaches, poor quality purchases, and non-compliance. Your shiny new IT procurement strategy is clear on purchasing permissions, and that doesn’t include Shawn.
Reduce Costs
Everyone loves hearing those three little words: economies of scale. If you’re scaling up your business and are buying IT in bulk, your costs will usually reduce. You’ll also be exploring the wonderful world of IT suppliers, and having a strategy allows you to create special relationships with them, which may lead to sweet deals.
Stay Compliant
There is more than one way of keeping auditors in love with life, and one of these is an IT procurement strategy that is ranked with compliance. This may look like buying only from IT suppliers who have achieved particular standards. It’ll most probably have strong links to your recruitment policy, for instance, linking seamlessly and transparently to reliable zero-touch onboarding and offboarding.
Why IT Procurement Can Be Weird
IT procurement isn’t like the other girls, not just because the digital landscape is continually shifting. When creating your strategy, here are our top three things to look out for:
1. Who Has the IT Smarts?
If you have a designated procurement person, they’re very often generalists. But IT is such a technically specialized area that getting it precisely correct might give your non-technical procurement person a breakdown. And it’ll cost you in time and money if you buy IT that isn’t fit for purpose. Small businesses with big ambitions don’t always have that in-house expertise. If this sounds like you, there’s no shame in outsourcing the technical specification and sourcing to an IT specialist team (ahem, that’s us).
2. Everything Is Different / Stay Flexible
Technology makes life better, but not for procurement people. Different types of IT equipment or services of different suppliers will require different procurement procedures. But when you expect it, you can easily adapt your IT procurement strategy to take this into account.
3. Start Early
Technology moves fast but buying it doesn’t. Purchasing a new network isn’t like nipping into Walmart for a round of ammo. If you need tech for a particular project, get it decided, specced (is that a word? It is now), and ordered early. There are two bugs in the woodwork:
- Your in-house decision-making process: Evaluating what you need, understanding and preparing the technical specifications and statements of work, putting the work out to tender, evaluating the lucky winners, confirming contracts, and then ordering the dang stuff—it all takes time.
- The supply chain: If you’re lucky, what you need is available NOW. Yay. But, more usually, it won’t be. Lead times are often lengthy.
This is why we’re a big fan of starting early—order in advance. Build effective and realistic timelines into your strategy. If you buy in new equipment that you can’t yet deploy, that’s no problem as device warehousing is a thing (and we do it).
Putting together an IT procurement strategy fit for purpose isn’t just about saving time, money, and headspace. It’s about having the technical resources that support your business in the right place at the right time.
We’ll help you create an IT procurement strategy from scratch or fine-tune your existing strategy. Call us for a friendly chat now.