Practical advice for trust boards

The role of NHS boards including digital leaders like chief information officers (CIOs), is expanding. Beyond overseeing critical operations and transformation programmes, they now also need to shape supplier strategy, engage with external innovators, and guide board-level decisions on technology investments.

As a leadership team, how do you choose how to spend your time? How much of the last month did you spend as a board looking to the horizon? What did you learn, and how are you preparing your team for what’s coming?

Practical ideas

Below are some practical steps trust leaders might wish to take to better strategically manage their digital suppliers. 

• Embed supplier management in your operational team: Stop treating procurement as a detached, transactional gatekeeper. Instead, empower your digital teams to cultivate strong supplier relationships directly, fostering shared intelligence and collaboration. Procurement should be a strategic partner and enabler, not just a compliance hurdle. By embedding supplier management as a core capability within digital teams, you'll rebalance power dynamics and develop the skills to execute prioritised management plans with your most strategic suppliers.

• Develop and maintain a robust contracts register: Know what you’ve bought, the value, and when contracts expire. Ensure it is discoverable, accessible and understandable to different stakeholders.

• Understand your local ecosystem: Identify opportunities to collaborate on procurement with neighbouring trusts to do locally relevant procurements which bring better value to the NHS, enable services to scale and meet local needs.

• Rationalise your supplier base: Most trusts have more suppliers than they can manage effectively. Streamlining relationships makes strategic management possible.

• Invest in horizon scanning: Allocate time to explore emerging tech and market changes - and work in the open to structure how this insight is shared within your organisation or system partners.

• Avoid creating hurdles for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs): Avoid procurement practices that inadvertently lock out smaller, agile suppliers. This includes overly complex tender requirements and bundling contracts into monolithic deals that only the largest firms can bid for. This contributes to the NHS lagging behind other parts of the public sector on SME spend.