How will you manage your vendors? IT vendor management is a new core competency requiring new skills and partnerships. Here's how Premier 100 IT Leaders will meet the challenge. (Premier 100 IT Leaders 2003).

CATHY BRUNE REMEMBERS planning a retirement party for a 26-year IT veteran several years ago, before she became chief technology officer at All-state Insurance Go. She also recalls her surprise when she discovered that he wasn't an employee of All-state; he was a contractor.

In those days, Brune says, it was hard to tell an employee from a vendor contractor without a program. Allstate had quite a few vendors, and she knew that managing them all drained staff time and energy away from focusing on the really strategic vendors. She needed to get vendor management under control.

Since then, Brune has pared the consulting cadre at the Northbrook, Ill.-based insurer from 50 firms to five strategic partners. She has formalized All-state's supplier program, developed a vendor management process and learned to trust her procurement people.

"We've learned a company our size has to have a very formalized program, or we'll spend way too much time with suppliers, and it may not be around the things that are very strategic to us," she says.

Today's IT leaders juggle many dozens of vendors, from commodity to strategic, products to services, internal to outsourced. Managing that portfolio is a new core competency in IT, often more akin to general contracting than technology No wonder vendor management tops many IT to-do lists for 2003.

Premier 100 IT leaders are tightening up how they deal with…