Maintaining a mutually beneficial contract throughout the full term, once dissatisfaction with the supplier is experienced, can be a challenge and often past the point of recovery. The recurrent reason for this is the stage at which the contract is brought in. Concerns usually fester long before they are raised.

If you type ‘distressed relationship management’ into a search engine, the result is 1,330,000 web pages returned in a very impressive 0.24 seconds. But does this apply to outsourcing relationships; are there really that many distressed relationships and, if so, why is this happening?

In response to growing CIO concerns about multi-sourcing and service integration and management (SIAM), Quantum Plus sponsored CIO Connect to carry out a survey to ascertain the current thinking and view point on multi-sourcing and SIAM. A six month research project was undertaken with thirty leading IT executives and twenty IT vendors.