This is a guest post from Kerry Bodine, a Forrester vice president and principal analyst serving Customer Experience Professionals. Kerry will deliver a keynote on the critical role Sourcing & Vendor Management Professionals play in customer experience at Forrester's Sourcing & Vendor Management Forum on Nov. 7-8 in Miami and Nov. 30-Dec. 1 in London.

Many customer experience initiatives don't meet their full potential — or worse, fail completely — because companies don’t have a complete picture of the dynamics that go into creating it. In order to break from their tunnel vision, companies need to understand their customer experience ecosystem: the complex set of relationships among a company’s employees, partners, and customers that determines the quality of all customer interactions.

In their quest to seek out the root causes of customer experience issues, companies often overlook the impact of sourcing and vendor management (SVM) professionals — often referred to as “procurement” by the rest of the organization. That’s too bad, because these decision-makers influence the customer experience in two key ways.

They influence which technologies and tools will be purchased. Some of these technologies are used internally. One example is: customer relationship management software, which enables employees across the organization to better understand customers and their ongoing relationships with the company. Other tools — like content management systems — directly affect the information that customers can access through digital touchpoints like the Web and mobile devices.

With Halloween just around the corner, it’s time to get creative about how you can scare the pants off of the people in your IT organization. I’ve been attending a fair amount of CIO events recently, and in the spirit of Halloween I put together a few costumes that I can guarantee will keep your CIO up at night. 

• A Storm Cloud. While “The Fog” might have scared your CIO in 1980, thirty years later it's the cloud that is scaring him. Despite all of the hype around "as-a-service technologies" over the past two years, Forrester has found 48% of IT decision makers still say they are “not interested” or “have no plans to adopt” software-as-a-service -- a number that rises for other cloud-based offerings. Why the lack of interest?  Security, integration, and lack of customization top the list of key SaaS concerns.  Yet, as the cost savings and purchasing flexibility benefits becomes increasingly obvious, IT professionals know they have to get comfortable with their fears to reap the cost-saving and flexibility benefits that cloud-based offerings provide. (Extra costume points: Grab a lunch tray and say you are a cloud-based “server”.  A full 59% of IT decision-makers say they are not interested or have no plans to adopt infrastructure-as-a-service.)

As many readers know, I have a strong interest in understanding the practical realities of innovation and want to help companies define what that "buzzword" means -- what it is, who manages it, and why it's important (see my just-published report on the ecosystem of innovation services providers). 

I believe Sourcing and Vendor Management (SVM) can and should play a critical role in the innovation process. However, my biggest disappointment when I speak to many technology vendors, IT professionals, and business users is when they tell me that they avoid working with SVM when purchasing (or in the cases of vendors, selling) a new technology. Fairly or unfairly, they see SVM's involvement as a bureaucratic stumbling block that will stifle their ability to move quickly or pick the technology vendor they want. For these people, SVM acts as a barrier, not an enabler, of innovation.

I’ve written before that this view is short-sighted: we know that SVM can play a pivotal role in protecting the long-term interests of the organization, SVM is a critical part of the technology purchasing process, and there are plenty of reasons to believe that the power of SVM organizations will only grow in the future.  To some of the more progressive SVM organizations, contributing to businenss innovation is an even more important priority than cutting costs.

I’m back to blogging after a busy month of travel. Two weeks ago I attended Forrester’s IT Forum in Las Vegas, and I am preparing for IT Forum EMEA in Lisbon later this week. 

Unfortunately, this week’s IT Forum is at the same time as the World Innovation Forum, which many of my professional colleagues are attending. But Forrester’s IT Forums still give me a much great opportunity to interact with people who are working on innovation initiatives, so I'm not complaining.  I’m looking forward to reporting on my experience in Lisbon next week. 

 Here are a few of my observations from the Vegas event:

In my recent report, “Contracting for Innovation With Service Providers,” I argue that many sourcing and vendor management professionals have difficulty contracting for innovation, because the term “innovation” itself is elusive and subject to interpretation.

In my research, I note that for sourcing professionals to effectively contract for innovation, they need to be able to understand the business objectives of a broad base of internal innovation stakeholders – and consider whether their service providers can align with these objectives.  In the report, I considered the needs of three primary stakeholders – IT, business, and executive-level stakeholders.

But there are far more innovation stakeholders. After writing that report, I decided to review all of Forrester’s inquiries related to innovation over the past year to see if I could identify other innovation stakeholders.  After a review of about 500 detailed client inquiries about innovation, I’ve compiled a list of categories I have seen.

This list of innovation interests is quite diverse (and this is just a preliminary summary!). But the exercise helps us see how innovation is interpreted differently by different parts of the organization.  With this information, we can identify unique innovation objectives and have a much more informed discussion about what innovation is and how it is generated (eventually leading us to conversations about specific topics like structures, metrics, and goals).