If you’ve ever worked in IT procurement in a very large organisation, there’s a certain factor you may have observed that used to surprise and annoy me. It was the ‘stickability’ of certain major suppliers. And in particular IT consultants, IT integrators and outsourcing type firms. It seemed that, no matter how hard you worked to reduce overall spend with them, they would pop up elsewhere in the organisation, doing something slightly different!

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that of course, but frustrating at times if we were in the middle of an IT cost reduction programme.  A similar observation applied to budgets; we’ve probably all seen consulting budgets slashed, only to see very similar looking spend suddenly classified as ‘contractors’, ‘training’ or the ubiquitous ‘miscellaneous’.

Consultants are taught to infiltrate all areas of a corporation and sow seeds such that they can continue to generate new business from that corporation even when the original consulting contract(s) has been completed. And when times are hard, consultants work even harder at embedding themselves into any on-going revenue stream.

So how do you stop them? Simply demand that they report regularly on what they are working on and what they are bidding for. That way, you can get visibility of their work and stop some of the more frivolous activities at source

Yesterday I had lunch with a CIO of a large London based business. He was pleased with some recent savings Silver Bullet Associates had helped him obtain during a negotiation with a large database vendor and had been in touch with a business colleague in another firm to recommend my services. He was surprised to be knocked back with a comment that ‘we don’t want his sort in here’. In asking for clarification, it soon became apparent that ‘cost reduction’ had become a four letter word in his colleagues’ business after a large well known IT consultancy company had recently promised the earth and delivered nothing but a huge bill of their own. Unfortunately, this happens more often than you might think as many buisnesses get embarassed when expensive consultants fail to deliver cost reductions and so cover up the  short-fall with bluster about ’uncovering intangibles and adding value to internal processes’ etc. At the end of the day, the only real measurable is how much cost was reduced or saved. So yes, maybe cost reduction can be a four letter word, so long as the word is ‘save’.