Sustainable IT vendor management

Now that you have learned about some of the sustainable IT procurement requirements you can impose on your vendors and how you can drive the process from end to end, let us look at the broader perspective and how to work with sustainable IT vendor management. Vendor management is the discipline of managing, administering, and guiding product and service vendors in an organized way to drive vendor behavior and optimize IT or business outcomes. The vendor management discipline emerges once a contract has been signed with a vendor. However, given the vendor classification, the vendor may or may not fall within the scope of vendor management.

A typical vendor management function is often challenged to unlock business value beyond incremental cost savings. As we have seen in previous chapters, software and hardware vendors comprise a large portion of scope 3. As more services are moving to the cloud, scope 3 emissions will continue to increase unless...