Partnering With the CIO: The Future of IT Sales Seen Through the Eyes of Key Decision Makers

Crank Up Your Empathy

Thornton May is one of our favorite IT thought leaders. If you’re not familiar with his work, you’re missing out on some genuinely useful intelligence about the current state of IT management. May is an executive education faculty member at the Anderson Graduate School of Management at U.C.L.A.; the Haas School of Business at U.C.-Berkeley; and Carnegie-Mellon University. He also serves on the Curriculum Advisory Committee at Babson College.

His work has appeared in the Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, the M.I.T. Sloan Management Review, American Demographics, U.S.A. Today, and BusinessWeek. He’s even testified before Congress, speaking as an expert witness on large technology implementations.

We mention all of this because it’s important for you to know that when he talks, CIOs listen. May and his research team produce CIO Habitat, a monthly report on trends and patterns in IT strategy. A recent issue focused on IT vendor management, and its findings support our central contention that CIOs aren’t looking for the best price when they go shopping for IT. They’re looking for the best partners.

May wrote about a CIO who described his inner circle of trusted suppliers as “soul mates on a journey to the same destination.” He also quotes an exchange between a CIO and a CEO, in which the CEO rebukes the CIO for referring to IT suppliers as vendors. The CEO tells the CIO that vendors “fill candy machines.” Suppliers, on the other hand, “are trusted ...