Strategic Alliance Magazine Q2 2016 - 58

THE Close Déjà Vu At the Last Conference I Attended, I Discovered that Partnering and Collaboration Truly Are Everywhere By John W. DeWitt One conference speaker and one conversation after another hit the same core themes. Partner- ing matters more than ever. How can we partner and collaborate more-with more partners, more speed, more efficiency? Unexpected competitors and outsiders are disrupting the industry. We're trying to figure out how to partner around new technologies, from bots, wearables, and digital healthcare to video collaboration, IBM's Watson, and the Internet of Things. Collaborative capacity, capability, communications, KPIs, culture, caring (yes, caring). Another recurring question: How do we identify and leverage new sources of value, wherever they can be found? "You have to think differently today. You have to think so far out of the box because it's so competitive," insists one CEO in his plenary address, as he describes radical changes coming from the intersection of life sciences, healthcare, and technology. "We're going to start being monitored from the day we're born, monitored by systems like Watson that are intelligent and can learn," he adds. "This health records stuff will be game changing." "What's keeping business leaders up at night? It's remarkable the consistency of the challenges they face, the disruption of industries," says the IBM Watson executive. She offers a travel and hospitality example. "You used to see the competition, now it's Airbnb, you don't know where they are." She then proclaims, "We see everyone in this room as great partners and potential partners to take solutions to our clients," as she projects IBM's formula for unlocking the potential of its cognitive computing platform: Success = Watson + New Way to Work + Engaged Employees + Partners. 58 Next, an EVP of strategy and cloud services is stalking around the stage explaining: "Customers are less tolerant, and their dialogue has grown. Look at the ratings. You used to get the glossy book at the car dealership to make decisions. That doesn't work anymore. People don't accept STRATEGIC ALLIANCE MAGAZINE | SUMMER * 2016 brand marketing. Omni-channel to me simply means any way your customer wants to connect to you, you support them on the channel they want to connect on." Now it's Polycom's VP of global alliances onstage. "It's time to enable collaboration across and between organizations," he exclaims. "Your customers and employees experience collaboration very differently today," he continues, as numerous heads nod agreement. "The workplace of the future really is not a place, it's a state of mind. How do you embed collaboration to drive top-line and bottom-line performance?" Then he asks, "What's the value to your customers if they can collaborate across the entire supply chain?" The above describes, if you weren't there, the tenor and flavor of keynotes and conversations I heard at the 2016 ASAP Global Alliance Summit. But this wasn't March in Maryland-it was May in Orlando, Fla., at Perspectives 16, the annual conference for customers and partners of Genband, a global provider of communications and telecom equipment, software, and services. The CEO is David Walsh, the chief strategy officer is Paul Pluschkell, both from Genband. The IBM Watson exec is Katrina Troughton, GM of social and smarter workforce sales. Paul Davis is Polycom's chief alliance officer. Different stage, very similar players and conversations. For me, covering Genband's conference on the heels of the Summit was incredible déjà vu-and a harbinger of partnering's future as the once-specialized alliance management and business collaboration conversation has morphed today into a ubiquitous general business conversation. Serial tech entrepreneur Margaret Heffernan, the most riveting business speaker I've heard in years, put it this way in her keynote: "Every company I'm working with, regardless of industry, they're all going through a sea change [and] trying to make a cultural transition from a competitive mindset to a collaborative mindset." n

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