Blog.
What we have learned across 500+ IT sourcing, vendor management and transformation engagements — written by the people who ran them. Filter on the right.
The complete guide to IT vendor management.
Strategy, frameworks, and what works — from 500+ engagements and €3B in negotiated contract volume.
IT vendor spend optimization: recover 10–40% of your IT budget.
The 8 categories where overpayment hides, the renegotiation envelope, the 30/60/90 playbook.
How to run a complex IT tender in 6–8 weeks.
Zero Vendor Deviation™: the methodology that makes vendor responses comparable line-for-line.
From 47 vendors to 5 strategic partners.
Why vendor sprawl isn't a procurement problem, and the architecture rationalization lands on.
From signature to savings: a practical guide.
The 7-stage lifecycle, the 8 renewal traps, and what AI contract analysis actually finds.
SRM: the CRM you don't have for your vendors.
The asymmetry between how customers and suppliers get managed — and how to close it.
Find and eliminate the 20% your processes waste.
The IT operational excellence pillar: landscape assessment, process mining, application rationalization.
The framework that keeps vendors accountable.
Three-tier vendor governance, scorecards that actually drive behaviour, and the cadence that produces decisions.
Digital transformation without vendor chaos.
The IT leader's sourcing guide: cloud governance, hyperscaler management, transformation that scales.
Vendor management software: the 2026 buyer's guide.
SRM vs CLM vs VMS, the evaluation criteria that matter, the 5 failure modes that recur.
What is IT vendor management? A CIO's complete definition.
The function, the scope, the five capability pillars. What makes vendor management different from procurement.
The 7-stage IT vendor management lifecycle.
Practical framework, not theory. Each stage with its failure modes and the controls that catch them.
How to build a Vendor Management Office, step-by-step.
A 12-month build path. Scope, structure, capabilities, tooling — in the order that produces early value.
The Three-Tier Vendor Governance Model explained.
Three layers, three cadences, three sets of decisions. Skipping any layer is the most common cause of governance decay.
15 IT vendor management KPIs that actually measure performance.
Five dimensions: delivery, commercial, risk, relationship, innovation. Plus the metrics that look authoritative but tell you nothing.
Vendor management vs supplier management.
Used interchangeably. They shouldn't be. In mature organizations they're different functions with different scopes and governance.
The hidden cost of poor IT vendor management.
Across 500+ engagements: 15–25% of vendor spend leaks through seven specific channels. Almost none shows up in the budget.
Vendor management maturity: where do you actually stand?
25 diagnostic questions. The honest scoring most self-assessments don't produce.
How to choose the right vendors for your IT portfolio.
Five evaluation dimensions. The framework that surfaces real differentiation. Plus the four failure modes.
Vendor management for mid-market DACH companies.
Too complex for SME approaches, too small for enterprise VMOs. The hybrid model that actually fits.
The Vendor Governance Vacuum™.
Where 15–25% of IT vendor spend leaks. The structural gap between contract signature and contract delivery. Named, sized, and closeable.
A practical framework for IT vendor risk.
Seven categories. Five scoring signals each. Three escalation thresholds. Operational from day one.
Vendor performance reviews that actually drive improvement.
Most reviews are theatre. Here's how to run one that produces decisions instead of slide decks.
Why you're overpaying your IT vendors by 10–40%.
Not an exceptional finding. The structural baseline. Where it hides, and why you almost never see it without external benchmark.
The auto-renewal trap.
The most reliable mechanism for converting one-time decisions into permanent overpayments. Hides in 60%+ of mid-cap portfolios.
What is a Vendor Management Office (VMO)?
The function that owns the supplier portfolio across the lifecycle. Often confused with procurement.
What is Zero Vendor Deviation™?
Aventario's RFP methodology. Built so vendors cannot deviate from the structure of the question.
SLA vs OLA vs KPI: the differences that matter.
Three terms, three jobs. The confusion between them is where most SLA disputes actually live.
What is the Kraljic Matrix?
The default supplier-segmentation tool, applied to IT. Four quadrants, four approaches, one critical mistake.
What is IT vendor risk?
Seven categories. Each has a different signal, a different cadence, and a different forum.
What is a frame contract in IT sourcing?
A master agreement that pre-negotiates terms. The leverage tool when designed well; the lock-in trap when designed badly.
Strategic vs tactical supplier — the difference.
Two different jobs, two different management models. Mistaking one for the other reliably destroys value.
What is vendor sprawl?
The residue of many reasonable local decisions, made in the absence of a global view. Invisible until it isn't.
What is IT outsourcing governance?
The buyer-side capability that holds an outsourcing provider accountable. Frequently assumed to come with the deal.
What is process mining?
Reconstructing actual process behaviour from system event logs. The documented process and the real one are different.
What is change request management?
The mechanism that handles in-flight scope change. Reliably the largest source of uncontrolled cost growth in IT outsourcing.
What is a weighted evaluation matrix?
The scoring tool that turns qualitative responses into a defensible ranking. Also where most RFPs introduce bias.
What is supplier segmentation?
The discipline of grouping vendors by strategic value so management effort matches relationship value.
What is Contract Lifecycle Management for IT?
The structured process of managing IT contracts from request to renewal. Most organizations think they have it; few actually do.
The Vendor Management Maturity Model.
Five stages: reactive, defined, managed, integrated, optimized. Most DACH mid-caps sit at stage 2.
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