CIOs say a principal part of their role is developing strong partnerships with external suppliers and internal colleagues. But what makes a good relationship and how do you maximise its effectiveness? My latest feature for silicon.com investigates:

Read the marketing bumf from most technology vendors and you would be forgiven for thinking that just about any technology system is a potential cure-all for the business’s ills.

Words such as ‘solution’ are allied to terms like ‘leverage’ to suggest a meaningful – but actually, meaningless – route to IT-enabled operations. If only IT could deliver everything that supplier’s promise. In most cases, it simply cannot.

“The industry’s not as bad as it was but there’s still an issue of over-promising,” says Neil Pamment, a technology veteran and IT director at legal firm Denton Wilde Sapte. With previous experience of working with vendors across various sectors, including manufacturing and healthcare, Pamment says over-zealous marketing assertions can create issues for CIOs.

For the full feature, click here.