Strategic Alliance Magazine Q2 2016 - 24

COVER STORY This provides both the stability and agility the partners need to ensure their solution is available and relevant to the customer-before someone else disrupts with a different solution or the technology changes. C O N N E C T E D TAKE THE MEDICINE Despite the need for speed, it is more important than ever to have defined roles, accountabilities, governance, and measurement across the connected ecosystem. Rules of engagement are needed across many dimensions and intersections to enable speed and also provide risk controls. E C O S Y S T E M S Companies must become digital in how they run their partner programs-to use data and analytics throughout the partnering lifecycle and help partners be more self-sufficient in the operational aspects of the relationship, such as enablement and certification. Rethink how technology-including out-of-the-box technologies such as distributed ledgers-can enable openness and build trust. This will increase a company's ability to partner at the scale and speed required. INNOVATE AND EXPERIMENT If you want your company to succeed at building the partnering ecosystems you need to compete today, then take a page from design thinking: Start with the experience of the end customer, and play that back to solution development. Those that succeed think similarly about the partner experience, making it easy to engage and drive down transaction costs. They think about partners from the perspective of the value they contribute to the customer, ensuring alignment between customer and partner value capture models. They do not lock onto any specific business or partnering model; rather they experiment and learn which models work best in which circumstances and build frameworks that can scale given a certain set of conditions. 24 Companies throughout the ecosystem, regardless of their role or roles, must be willing to take some risks and fund experimentation to determine what is repeatable and scalable, both in the business and partnering models and in how partnering operations are carried out. STRATEGIC ALLIANCE MAGAZINE | SUMMER * 2016 ARE YOU READY? Answer these questions: n How will the Fourth Industrial Revolution impact or how is it impacting your company's business model? Will you be a disrupter or be disrupted? n What are you doing to rethink the partnering strategy, operations, and execution required to satisfy today's always-on customer? n How are you preparing yourself for this brave new world? Your company requires a next-generation partnering capability to succeed at the scale, speed, and extent of partnering in the ecosystem. Make no mistake about it-get ready now, or be left in the dust by those who focus as much on getting the partnering right as they do on getting the technology right. n Jan Twombly and Jeff Shuman are the principals of The Rhythm of Business, Inc.; Lorin Coles is co-founder and CEO of Alliancesphere, LLC. They have joined forces to form the SMART Partnering™ Alliance, delivering executive suite-sponsored, enterprise-wide solutions to build nextgeneration partnering capability for connected ecosystems.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Strategic Alliance Magazine Q2 2016