Global Partners CIO Ken Piddington, a Forum on World Class IT participant, highlights the role of World Class IT principle 5, External Partnerships, in an article about how he has aimed to establish partnerships with his vendors.
Article by John Dix of Network World
08-22-2011
“Ken Piddington, CIO of Global Partners LP, an $8 billion energy company in the Northeast, recently implemented an innovative vendor partnership program that he hopes will improve the product and services the company gets from suppliers while helping those suppliers more efficiently serve the company and benefit from the relationship. He recently outlined the plan with Network World Editor in Chief John Dix.”
Within the article, Ken describes an event earlier this year in which he brought all of his vendors together to share Global Partners’ company and IT strategy with them. The purpose of this event was to make sure that the various vendors could better understand how they can serve and align with Global Partners. Peter High, President of Metis Strategy, was invited to the event to speak to the group about the mutual benefit that can be derived when vendors are positioned more as external partners, rather than merely sellers of services, in order to ensure that vendors can deliver targeted, strategic value that aligns to the direction of the company.
In the article, Ken mentions Peter’s participation in the excerpt below:
“Then our CEO got up and presented an overview of where we have been the last five years, how we’ve grown, what his vision is and where we are heading. And we had Peter High from Metis Strategy, author of World Class IT, talk about one of his principles, Principle 5: Develop a collaborative relationship with external partners. And that was very well received, so I thought the night went really well.”
To read the entire article, please visit Network World.
To listen to Ken’s podcast interview with us, please visit The Forum on World Class IT.
