Nearly half of IT professionals spend weeks, or months, renegotiating vendor contracts: Survey

Vendor management and contract negotiation are particularly time-consuming endeavors for IT professionals. Half (50%) reported they work with 11 or more different vendors and nearly half (48%) claim they can spend weeks, or months, renegotiating vendor contracts each year, according to Ivanti’s survey. The survey studied IT challenges and the benefits of taking a unified approach to IT management.

Findings from the survey also show that Unified IT – which is most typically defined as the practice of having a unified experience across endpoint management, security and enterprise service management – remains an ambitious goal, not a reality, for most IT organizations. Even so, the majority of IT professionals agree that Unified IT benefits are compelling. Top benefits recognized include:

• 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%

Unified IT strategies will be adopted by respondents as they demonstrate value in helping IT meet priorities and initiatives. Among the initiatives IT organizations report they are trying to balance, the following were top of mind:

• Improved patching and security: 62%
• Cutting down time to resolve incidents, patch systems, etc.: 61%
• Improved IT reporting: 47%
• Unifying IT: 39%
• IT governance: 30%

“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.”

As they work to achieve their priorities, IT organizations employ an extensive list of vendors. In fact, half (50%) report working with more than 11 vendors, while 20% work with between five and seven, and 16% work with between eight and 10.

The number of vendors IT professionals manage is impacting contract negotiation time. Only 19% of IT professionals spend just hours negotiating their vendor contracts. That compares to 33% that spend days, 35% that spend weeks and 13% that spend months.

Operations reports are also time consuming for IT professionals. Only 20% spend minutes producing IT operations reports while 52% spend hours, 22% spend days and 6% spend weeks.