How to reduce friction with technology vendors

When multiple systems depend on different vendors, incidents often end up in no-man’s land. Each party looks at its own component and no one coordinates the whole picture. The internal team ends up as the link between vendors, without enough technical information to resolve the issue and without authority over anyone’s timelines.

Complexity does not come from having multiple vendors. It comes from not having a clear model of what each one does, how they relate to each other and who coordinates when something fails in the space between them. An incident in the integration between the ERP and the payment provider may be nobody’s contractual responsibility.

• No clear inventory of which vendor manages which system
• SLAs defined per isolated system, not per complete business flow
• No escalation process that crosses vendor boundaries
• Separate follow-up meetings with each vendor, with no consolidated view
• Internal team absorbs coordination without the technical context to do it efficiently

The answer is to establish a control point: who leads the conversation, what information is collected and how escalation works without losing context. It also helps to consolidate reporting, inventory and priorities. Technology stops being a collection of contracts and becomes a governed operation.

• Single inventory showing which vendor manages which system and what their real SLAs are
• An internal owner who acts as the control point for all vendors
• Documented escalation process that covers how to coordinate when two vendors are involved
• Monthly joint review (or at least a status check) with all relevant vendors
• Consolidated status dashboard that does not require asking each vendor separately
• Annual contract review aligned with current needs, not those from when they were signed

Governing vendors is not about controlling them — it is about having enough visibility to detect problems before they affect the business and coordinating them without the internal team losing time and energy acting as a bridge between contracts that should communicate directly.