IT Procurement and ITAM working in partnership

IT Procurement and ITAM working in partnership

“IT procurement is the burger between the buns of IT and supplier market”

In this podcast I chat with Harinder Bansal, Head of IT Procurement at Motability Finance.

I first connected with Harinder when he posted a poll, and subsequent artcle, on LinkedIn entitled “Should ITAM sit within IT Procurement, wider IT or elsewhere?“.

Harinder sparked an interesting discussion on the reporting lines of IT Asset Management and where ITAM should sit within an organization.

In this podcast we discuss the role of IT Procurement in introducing new innovation, negotiating and building deals on behalf of the IT function, and ensuring business requirements are being met.

Topics include:

• Managing a “hopper” of creative ideas to explore
• Trends in IT procurement as a result of COVID, risk management and renegotiating to free-up much needed cash
• IT procurement being asked to “run faster than ever before”, turning the traditional RFP process on it’s head, agile ways of working and adapting to market needs

Harinder’s view of ITAM from an IT Procurement perspective:

“There is common ground between the ITAM and the procurement team. There are different ways to procure things and there are different tactics that you might want to adopt when speaking with certain suppliers. So, I think there’s a skill set that’s common there. And that’s where I think ITAM and procurement can work together to maximize the deal on the table.”

“The challenge with ITAM is that it could be perceived as potentially a purely clerical or administrative role if it is immature.”

“It’s more important than ever for both teams to develop a strong partnership, and to really complement each other’s expertise and skill set.”

“…Given our role, that’s not technical in nature, this is where we have to recognize our limitations of what we can and can’t do. And this is exactly what I mean, recognizing the skills and the strengths the ITAM person brings to the table and looking for ways on how we can work together on that.”

Harinder Bansal

“When a supplier sends your renewal quote, and in that quote, it says, right, here’s, here’s your hardware assets. And here’s our maintenance renewal. The question you should be asking yourself is, how do you know you still have those assets today? If you don’t know that information, you don’t really know why you’re buying that amount of hardware maintenance that that supplier is offering, you cannot simply rely on the fact that what you bought last year, what you had last year, in in the infrastructure state is what you happen to have this year. We know that cloud adoption is on the rise. And there’s less companies out there having their own data centers. And so, it shouldn’t be unreasonable to expect that the hardware state entirely is changing.

The best place to get that information is from an IT expert, because this is exactly what they do day in day out track hardware and software, and increasingly cloud application assets to keep a real time view on what a company has. Reach out to the IT Asset Manager. Introduce yourself, understand what they do, demonstrate what you do and find a way of working that helps bring out the best of both roles.”

https://soundcloud.com/itamreview/harinder-bansal-podcast

The opinions expressed on the podcast are those of individuals and not their employers.

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