Managing the Insight Services Portfolio, From the Panic Cycle to effective delivery

IT budgets are always under constraint, but today’s CIOs are under intense pressure to deliver more for less. At the same time technology development is offering new options, from social computing to sourcing. IT must assess these effectively and invest for business benefit.

Coherent and well-aligned external advice has never been more important. Insight from analyst services, whether it’s the global majors such as Gartner and Forrester Research, or smaller and more specialised services, influences the whole of IT’s strategy and delivery. Yet, as analyst firms themselves respond to the same pressures, the costs of insight services are rising.

With over 700 varied providers, there’s plenty of opportunity to create a portfolio which delivers the right strategic and operational insight. The portfolio approach can yield significant direct savings while, at the same time, measurably improving effectiveness. And this relatively small investment in managing the service portfolio impacts not just the insight services budget, but through it the whole IT spend.

Yet there is limited experience on offer to help enterprises analyse their service needs. How do you shape and manage the portfolio to provide for coherent strategic advice?

Tony Law of InformationSpan has many years’ experience of doing just this. George Colony, CEO of Forrester Research, complimented Tony on his “amazing years” of relationship development and delivery in a major global enterprise. Duncan Chapple leads Lighthouse Analyst Relations market analysis of the research community.

Join Tony and Duncan on Tuesday 24th November 2009, at 3 p.m. UK time, for a free Webinar “Managing the Insight Services Portfolio: from the Panic Cycle to effective delivery”, and begin your journey.

Who should attend:

* Directors of Enterprise Strategy and Architecture
* Managers in Procurement or in IT who purchase external insight services
* Executive IT directors looking for coherent strategy advice
* IT directors with responsibility for supplier and vendor management
* Service owners and service improvement project leaders
* Risk management leads
* Anyone dissatisfied with their current use of insight services

What you will learn

Obviously we can’t describe a complete methodology in a short Webinar, but we will introduce the key ideas:

* How to assess your current use of insight services
* How to identify the insight services needs of your IT function (needs analysis)
* How to create a cost-effective portfolio
* How to move from disparate service contracts (“We just buy research”) to strategic delivery

P.S. Contact us for a recording of this webinar.

Duncan Chapple

Duncan Chapple is the preeminent consultant on optimising international analyst relations and the value created by analyst firms. As SageCircle research director, Chapple directs programs that assess and increase the business value of relationships with industry analysts and sourcing advisors.

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