6 Rookie CIO Mistakes in Vendor Management

It is one of the CIO roles to effectively manage the vendors to get the most for his/her business. May 2009 edition of CIO Insight magazine has highlisted 6 mistakes common to rookie CIO in vendor management.

1. Failing to Speak With One Voice

CIOs make the biggest mistakes in vendor management when too many cooks get in the kitchen without putting an executive chef in charge, resulting in no one is held accountable, communication breaks down and suppliers don’t get good direction.

2. Skipping the Homework

The CIO must be clearly understand what is required from the vendor, before expecting the vendor to understand the requirements. Groundwork such as developing written requirements and going through formal RFP process is crucial.

3. Fixating on Price

Pricing is very important, but there are other equally important factors in vendor selection. The CIO must understand to get the right people doing the right thing at the right price.

4. Using Too Few Suppliers

Too much reliance on single vendor could be disastrous, as the negotiation power will be deteriorated.

5. Only Dealing With Large Vendors

Your deal could looks small for large vendors, but could be precious for small vendors. Therefore, the smaller vendors might provide better service, and at the same time you might have greater leverage in negotiation with them.

6. Signing and Forgetting

Successful CIOs review their partners regularly to ensure everything is going according to plan and to make adjustments to agreements when necessary. Signing is just the beginning rather than an end.

From RON97 to RON95?

The Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs Minister has just announced that the current RON92 petrol sold in the country will be replaced by RON95, and selling at the price of RM1.75 per litre. It will be made available nationwide by 1 September 2009.

The price of RON97 super-fuel will also be increased from the current RM1.80 per litre to RM2.00 from 1 September 2009 onwards, which is a rise of 11.11%. This is a drastic move to encourage the people to switch from current RON97 to RON95. It is argued that RON95 can be used in majority of the petrol-fueled cars on the road.

How will be the performance of RON95 compared with RON97? We have no idea yet until we have used the RON95 and benchmark it with RON97.

However, we can make reference to the comparison between Shell Super (RON97) and Shell V-Power (RON98). The information about Shell V-Power is RON98 can be confirmed in Shell Malaysia website (you can click the link to go to the "V-Power Fuel Composition" page in that website).

So what's the different between Shell V-Power (RON98) and Shell Super (RON97)? What will be the different between RON97 and RON95 then?

And no doubt, the Shell V-Power will also be priced higher by 1 September 2009, following the price increase of RON97.

It is a pity that we are told to downgrade the fuel we use in our car from RON97 to RON95, or have to pay a higher price to maintain the same after 1 September 2009. While the global world is moving forward, why we always have a feeling that we are moving backward?

The rise and fall of Borland

I have almost forgotten Borland if not the recent news about it being acquired by UK based Micro Focus for $75 million.

If you have been doing computer programming, especially since the 80's or 90's, there is a very high possibility that you used Borland's product before.

During the good-old DOS time, Borland had been famous with their Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, Turbo C++, SideKick, etc. When the Windows time come, Borland continued their popularity with Borland C++, Delphi, C# Builder, JBuilder, etc. They also produced software development tools for Linux, such as Kylix.

Beside being famous in programming tools, Borland had also been the company behind some office productivity products such as Paradox (vs MS Access), Quattro Pro (vs MS Excel), WordPerfect (vs MS Word). They had made attempt to combine these 3 products into Borland Office as rival to Microsoft Office. Later, this office productivity business was sold to Novell in the mid-90's.

During their time of glory, Borland also bought over Ashton-Tate, the company behind the once very famous database software -- dBase & Interbase.

Over the year, Borland gradually lost ground in their competition with Microsoft. Nowadays, Visual Studio succeed in engulfing their software development tools market, and Borland Office has long lost their market to MS Office.

The name of Borland faded in the 2000's, especially after the departure of their founder Philippe Kahn, and was almost forgotten by many programmers who once developing software with their superb products with nice Integrated Development Environment (IDE), especially during the DOS era.

Philippe continued to bring wonders to the world after his departure from Borland in the mid-90's. He has contributed to wireless devices data synchronization technology, invented the first camera phone, and is currently the CEO of Fullpower Technologies, a company focuses in converging life sciences, wireless technology, accelerometrics, nanotechnology and MotionX solutions.