We recently finished some research into what clients need from our research – role “deep dives.” Those of you who are clients of the sourcing and vendor management (SVM) role might remember having done one for us a while back. When SVM piloted that research last year, we used the information to refine our research strategy and create an SVM Roadmap. We then shared that roadmap with our clients in a teleconference to get more feedback into what you needed (and didn’t) from us.

The Roadmap outlines how we think about our research, describes our priorities, and gives you more transparency into our approach. This transparency helps you give us more guidance and feedback to continually keep Forrester aligned with your needs. We’ll be doing a free webinar in January to unveil our 2010 Roadmap. I’d really love for that webinar to be interactive and get your feedback, so here’s a sneak peek to start you thinking about what recommendations you’d like to make.

In 2010 the Sourcing & Vendor Management team will:

• Answer the question “now what?” Many of us spent 2009 consolidating vendors and renegotiating our existing contracts, shoring up existing relationships. But 2010 is about new – changing the way we want our services delivered to us, revamping our contracts to be more in line with changing requirements, hiring new vendors we haven’t worked with before. SVM is going to be adding to our work on emerging vendors, new service delivery approaches, changing pricing models, and effectively working with your internal constituents to understand new user requirements.

• Get to the next level of vendor governance. We’ve received excellent feedback on our work here, but we also know you need more now. Many of you are still struggling to operationalize vendor management offices, and moving to managed outcome engagements also continues to be a focus for you. So these issues will also be a focus for us in 2010.

• Add to our category expertise. You already ask us a lot of contract and negotiation questions on software, services, telecom, and hardware. But we’re working to expand both the depth of our coverage, and number of specific vendors we track in order to give you even more support in this critical aspect of your role.

• Build more tools and templates. Our tools are always popular – the recently published Vendor Scorecarding tool has been at the top of our Most Popular research list for quite a while now. And you tell us that you want more. So we’re working to build a library of tools and templates to make doing your job a little more streamlined.

We’d love your thoughts on what you want from the Sourcing & Vendor Management research in 2010. Feel free to email me directly or to post comments below. And don’t forget to look out for an invitation to our Webinar in January.