Who do we call to manage our IT vendors?

Vendor management means when something involves a third party, we open the ticket, provide the logs and diagnostics they ask for, stay on the call, and chase it. Your office manager stops being the person in a queue explaining a problem she did not cause.

The vendors this usually covers: your line of business software, internet provider, phone system, copier and print vendor, camera and access control, and any specialist equipment on your network.

The most valuable part is the argument. When a vendor says the problem is your network and we believe it is their software, we produce evidence rather than opinions and take it up their escalation chain. You should not be adjudicating a dispute between two technical vendors, and without someone doing this the default outcome is that you give up and live with the problem.

We also keep the list itself: what each vendor does, what it costs, who owns the relationship, and when it renews. That inventory alone frequently finds auto-renewals nobody remembers agreeing to and subscriptions for services you stopped using.