CIOs on procurement and upgrades: "United we stand"

Those heading IT departments are well aware of a common corporate message - do more with less. And it's a message that may come to worry some vendors that are currently sitting pretty.

At a discussion event billed as the 'CIO Conundrum' last night, organised by BusinessWeek and European Technology Forum, a sister business of silicon.com, leading IT chiefs spoke again of the need to be business people first, as well as how they are planning consolidation of suppliers.

Most agreed that they are pairing down hardware suppliers but that software means more and more choices, which can be a real headache.

One response is the use of open-source software. Peter Dew, group director information management at BOC Group, said: "The open-source push is coming mainly from the public sector but BOC has three trials around the world."

One such project involves a complete LAN environment of several dozen workstations made up using only open-source software.

Gareth Lewis, group IT services director at Virgin, said the approach is "an opportunity, where margins are tight and you're dedicated to open source".

On the subject of complexity and vendors always pushing upgrades, BOC's Dew added: "We have everything we need to become more productive; the next era is about exploitation… [To help achieve that] we need business-literate IT people."

The 'business head' that IT people possess is clearly important.

Margaret Smith, Legal & General IT director, said: "We need to teach our IT people a lot more about marketing, about presentation skills - and about talking normally."

For those heads of IT who have mastered core business skills such as negotiation, there was a warning for vendors. Darrell Stein, information systems director at Vodafone, was among those unhappy with the IT treadmill that many user organisations feel they have to be on and said that some major CIOs may well club together to get better deals from suppliers.

"We may look elsewhere as a threesome," he said.

Phil Pavitt, CIO at NTL, backed this position up, saying: "Vendors have used a divide and conquer approach. Unless we collectively stand up, we will always be on the same sort of treadmill. Once [vendors] realise we are educated, they will come around to what you want."