BRM competing with other providers?

Are Business Relationship Managers going to be moving into an ever competing market? At the minute you might be happily providing your business with its solutions ensuring they meet requirements and are working towards the strategic aims, but what happens when an outside provider offers the same? Some will have tight controls and restrictions in place meaning business units cannot purchase IT consultancy or cloud based systems without going through the BRM function first to ensure they are strategically aligned but others might not have that luxury, also the restrictions still don't stop the offers of consultancy and cloud services come flooding in each day. Some of these offers might be useful and add value and others might not, come of the potential value might be better delivered from elsewhere, so what do we do with these requests? It’s important to educate the business to pass these requests to the BRM function if they think they might be worth investigating. It’s also worth reiterating the common phrase I have to often tell my business partners and that is, work out your problem, processes and requirements fully before looking at solutions, you can adjust them after looking at the capabilities but if you get drawn in by something you can often try and make the problem fit the solution. Now while this is good advice there are always exceptions, the main one being technological innovations which offer an improvement not previously thought possible, this solution will then fix a problem we never knew we had.

So as BRMs you should take heed to all the consultants offering services and consultancy as they might have a value to add. The BRM role is especially tricky when you think about trying to acquire the knowledge of not only all of your provider capabilities but all of the external capabilities you could potentially buy in especially with all of the latest advances in your field of expertise.

So in summary don't fear or try and block outside competitors/consultants/sales people try and utilize them for added value and for expanding the capabilities of your function.