Nearly Half of IT Pros Spend Weeks or More Renegotiating Vendor Contracts
New research from IT management and security company Ivanti has revealed that vendor management and contract negotiations are particularly time-consuming endeavors for IT professionals who are struggling with un-unified IT processes.
The firm surveyed more than 1300 IT pros, discovering that 50% work with 11 or more different vendors and 48% can spend weeks, or months, renegotiating vendor contracts each year, with Ivanti noting the greater the number of vendors to manage, the greater the contract negotiation time for IT pros.
What’s more, operations reports are also proving to be time consuming for IT pros. Only 20% spend minutes producing IT operations reports while 52% spend hours, 22% spend days and 6% spend weeks.
These findings highlight the need for more unified IT strategies across businesses, Ivanti claimed.
The majority of respondents agreed that the benefits of more unified IT are compelling, citing the following:
- Consistent data across systems and IT departments: 70%
- Improved user experience: 61%
- Ease of use: 60%
- Consistent and aligned processes across IT departments: 59%
- Cost savings: 58%
The survey also suggested that unified IT strategies will be adopted by respondents as they demonstrate value in helping IT meet priorities and initiatives, including improved patching and security, cutting down time to resolve incidents and improved IT reporting.
“Conflicting initiatives are competing for IT budgets and complicating visibility and reporting processes. This is making it challenging to achieve IT unification,” said Duane Newman, vice-president, product management at Ivanti.
“Compounding the situation is the time IT organizations spend on vendor and contract management. However, by taking a unified approach to the priorities of security, issue resolution and reporting, IT organizations will likely find that they are better able to achieve their highest priorities without added cost or effort.”
This post Nearly Half of IT Pros Spend Weeks or More Renegotiating Vendor Contracts originally appeared on InfoSecurity Magazine.
