Letter L: The Letter of the Law brings death, but the spirit brings life - Corinthians (2 Cor 3:6)

The contract is the summon bonnum for an effective sourcing relationship. It is the Rule Book. Too often I hear that the best relationship is one where the contract is signed and then put into a draw and never referred to again. This is a delusion for both the provider and customer. The best relationships are those that have a contract which is aligned with the strategy of the firm. As the firm’s strategy changes over time one must therefore expect to change the contract to maintain the synchronicity. The healthiest sourcing relationships constantly amend/delete contract clauses to make them clearer to both parties. This is a natural and healthy reflection of a good and mature relationship.


“How successful would you be at football if you didn’t know the rules of the game?”
Sourcing is a commercial relationship. The rules of the relationship are detailed in the contract.

This aphorism is linked to ‘S’.

Letter K: Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does Knowledge – Charles Darwin

IT tends to be the playground of the young. Partly this reflects the tremendous rate of change in the IT environment. One of the side-effects of this is that there is a predilection to jumping in and testing the depth of the water with your head. Not a wise move.


This aphorism is linked to ‘B’.

Letter J: No methodology can substitute for good Judgement - McKinsey

The beauty of this aphorism lies in its author. In IT Management there exist a few methodologies, such as ITIL, COBIT, and CMM. It is important to understand what is critical to your firm’s success and how the methodology can best support or strengthen this. Slavishly or religiously applying a methodology for its own sake is fraught with problems. The biggest one being IT yet again violating aphorisms A and D.

Letter I: If you can't measure it you can't manage it - Unknown

In the second generation of sourcing, measurement was seen as the panacea. Three simple nouns helped to provide more credibility to sourcing management, Service Level Agreements (SLAs).


SLA riddle
The SLA riddle is that invariably the providers meet and exceed all their contracted SLAs yet the customer remains dissatisfied. In other words there is a low correlation between SLA performance and customer satisfaction.

The rule here is to simply measure what matters and make the move from technology centric metrics (server availability) to business valued metrics (regulatory compliance, revenue/cost per customer, time to money)

This aphorism is linked to ‘E’.