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Are you managing your suppliers or are they managing you?

Register readers pour fuel on the burning issues of the day

Reg Roundtable When it comes to answering the big questions in IT management, who do you ask? The big cheeses who read The Register, of course.

That’s why, following the success of our July Roundtable on IT Governance, we’re inviting our senior Reg readers to come to our next roundtable on 30 September at the Soho Hotel in Central London.

This time the topic is:

Are you managing your suppliers or are they managing you?

Once, vendor management meant choosing the restaurant when it was time to meet your supplier’s account manager. These days a CTO has to deal with distant outsourcers, bolshy contractors, rapacious software vendors and cloud service providers who won't even tell you where your data is.

How do you know you’re getting the best deal? Can you trust anything these guys tell you?

Well, whether you're looking for guidance, or want to share your tricks of the trade, our next roundtable is the place to be. You can sign up here.

The format is simple. We assemble a number of high-ranking Reg readers at the Soho Hotel in Central London. We have a formal discussion for 90 minutes, chaired by Reg contributor and former CIO Dominic Connor. We want to work out where we are now, where we should be in the future and what vendors and users need to do to get us to this new nirvana.

We then continue the discussion informally over wine and cocktails.

All of this is conducted under strict Chatham House rules, with all reports anonymised and approved by participants before being published.

The plan is to document what is and isn’t working in the view of real-world IT execs in real-world jobs. Over time, we want to build a manifesto, a call to arms if you will, for execs and suppliers who want to make technology work for the common good, not just for account managers.

So, whether you care about a brave new world of IT, or just care about swapping war stories and learning a few new tricks with your peers, come and join us by signing up here. ®

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