Scenario -
A financial services organization has undergone a period of rapid expansion. From its operating base it has expanded to serve customers in over 25 countries spread around the globe. There are plans to enter more markets in the next 12 months.
The key stakeholders involved in the global expansion project have briefed the chief information officer (CIO) on the plans. They have identified IT service performance as one of the major threats to the plan. The CIO has been under pressure from the board due to poor IT service performance in the previous six months. The chief concern has been significant performance variations in network connectivity and communications.
The organization currently has three contracts with different local external suppliers in operating markets supporting three IT network hubs. Whilst the suppliers are all happy to follow local internal IT processes, getting the three to work together on incidents or changes has proved increasingly difficult.
A number of outages have resulted in a blame culture where even the local internal IT departments have been sympathetic to their service providers, resulting in strained relationships between these internal departments at an operational level.
Other issues encountered at one or more locations have included:
✑ Long-term service improvements have been sacrificed in favour of short-term fixes that avoid the payment of contract penalties by the suppliers
✑ Changes in ownership of the customer relationship by the suppliers
The CIO believes that a lack of communication between suppliers has been the key cause of failures.
All three supplier contracts are due for renewal in the next 12 months. After consultation, a decision to re-tender for network services has been taken by IT, and approved by the CIO and the board of directors.
Refer to the Scenario.
When considering suppliers, which one of the following options would BEST ensure that network issues are addressed in order to meet the needs of the financial services organization?
Rickross73
4 years, 1 month ago