7:50 AM -- NICE -- Management World 2010 -- Here in Nice, there's a lot of talk about network management, service management, performance management, and customer experience management.

But according to one European carrier CTO here at the show, there's another important strategic approach that's often ignored, but which is vitally important to systems deployment and operational efficiency: vendor management.

He says one of the most important things he teaches his team is that each supplier needs to be closely managed and tracked against the technology roadmaps outlined at the beginning of any procurement process, and that it's critical to establish exactly where each vendor says its product development path is going to go.

For those carriers that don't already have such a plan in place, it's probably time to hire a new member of the operations team, preferably one that carries a chair and a whip at all times.

— Ray Le Maistre, International Managing Editor, Light Reading