Wanted: Outsourcing Relationship Managers

Computerworld - It's 3 p.m. on July 3, a few hours before the long Fourth of July weekend, and Jill Fosmire is fully engaged in her most serious crisis since taking her job nine months ago.
FMC Corp., a $2 billion Philadelphia-based chemical company, outsources its global wide-area network and telecommunications to Plano, Texas-based Electronic Data Systems Corp., and EDS relies on the communications networks of now-bankrupt WorldCom Inc. Her biggest question is, Will WorldCom's communications systems fail? If so, what then?
"We're having daily, sometimes hourly conversations with EDS on this. We can't afford to have our network down," Fosmire explains. She asks EDS for a contingency plan, and her own team sketches out alternatives.
In this newly created position of "manager, IT outsourcing and contracts," Fosmire's job is to handle outsourcing crises such as these, as well as daily communication with service providers. A 20-year IT and business veteran, she's part marriage counselor, part quality-control maven, part saleswoman and exactly what FMC needed to keep its four IT outsourcing relationships focused on business results.
"We realized we spent a lot of time managing our internal resources through development discussions and performance feedback, but we were missing that same type of relationship from our outsourcing partners," says Dave Kotch, director of enterprise systems and programming, who was part of the team that hired Fosmire from her previous job as manager of business information systems at FMC.
Outsourcing relationship manager positions are on the rise as outsourcing agreements become more complex and business environments more unpredictable. "The average outsourcing deal is seven years," says Dennis McGuire, CEO of TPI Inc., an outsourcing consultancy in The Woodlands, Texas. With the current pace of organizational change, most deals need to be renegotiated within three years, he adds.
This has created a serious need for seasoned negotiators on the enterprise side who have a combination of IT experience, business savvy, salesmanship, problem-solving skills and a tight relationship with executives.
The Right Stuff
Industry watchers say that CIOs are looking for relationship managers with 15 to 20 years of senior-level technical and business experience plus a host of problem-solving techniques. "The best relationship managers understand how problems get created and how likely deficiencies have multiple causes. They can set up joint problem-solving sessions and mediate disputes with multiple parties," says Stuart Kliman, a founding partner at Vantage Partners LLC, a consultancy in Boston.
For example, if a service provider isn't meeting a service level in one area but is delivering more value in another, the relationship