How to Navigate the Complexities of Mission-Critical Vendor Management
In Summary:
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Today's average public safety agency has more than 30 vendor support agreements to manage.
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Vendor support agreements have become more difficult to understand given their size and complexity.
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Public safety organizations are looking for strategies to help navigate the complexities associated with today's increasingly complicated vendor environment.
It used to be much easier for public safety agencies to manage their vendors compared to a decade ago. At that time they were simple and easy to understand and they generally only involved the radio, computer-aided dispatch (CAD) and 911 call-handling system providers.
Today, the picture is much different. The average public safety agency has more than 30 vendor maintenance agreements to manage, ranging for systems such as records management (RMS), data storage, video surveillance, automatic vehicle location (AVL), gunshot location, geographic information (GIS), automatic license plate reader (ALPR), and voice and data logging and recorder systems.Vendor service and support has changed as well. It used to be much more personalized. Today, vendor service and support is often provided by impersonal network operations centers, help desks, or service depots with rotating technicians doing the work. Public safety vendor agreements have become dramatically more complex than ever before and more difficult to understand.
This whitepaper offers ideas and strategies for navigating all of this, as well as tips for building the agreement, managing network accountability and negotiating the agency's position. These ideas will help to make service agreements more effective and enhance the agency's ability to hold vendors accountable.
By downloading this whitepaper, you'll learn the following tactics:
- What to watch for when negotiating agency agreements
- Tips for how to keep vendors accountable during negotiations
- Pricing models to avoid
- Strategies to ease the complexities of vendor management