ALLIANTIST

Successful alliances are about teams, collaboration and sharing. Throughout the alliance lifecycle, ideas, information and people come together to form better solutions than they could achieve alone. Yet rarely is the appropriate technology and process infrastructure in place to drive success within organizations let alone across external boundaries. And it's not just any kind of technology that's needed for partnering success. There are typically two common challenges as regards processes, tools and systems for partnering:

• No explicit processes or a one size fits all approach built from traditional sales or purchasing methodologies
• Using the wrong tools and systems to get the job done

In April 2008 Gartner published a report after surveying the Association of Strategic Alliance Professionals. It concluded that organizations should establish a consistent set of processes for alliance management that enables them to create high-performance partnerships, and, search for technologies that will reduce dependence on e-mail. 75% of the organizations didn't allow partners through their firewall and three of the top 5 tools mentioned were email, spreadsheets and paper. No wonder up to 70% of alliances fail to deliver on their promise!

A sales organization may attempt to use traditional direct sales processes and systems like customer relationship management (CRM) to drive their partnering activity. Even poorly defined 'partner relationship management' systems are rarely more than a rebranding of a CRM system. These are more appropriate for traditional high volume low touch transactional activity but not the sort of strategic relationship management and breakthrough alliances often being attempted by organizations today.

From a procurement perspective e-sourcing applications like e-auctions and e-rfx tools have offered spectacular results for 'commodity' type categories. However the value being destroyed is also immense when firms start using these tools inappropriately for more strategic and critical categories where the relationship and innovation may be far more important sources of value than pure price negotiation.

To be fair, partnering in its purest form is still a nascent discipline and few organizations have mastered the art and turned it into a repeatable scientific process and tool kit that can be used by all their stakeholders. Using inappropriate processes, tools and systems for partnering is a common issue we encounter. Most of the organizations that turn to us have a desire to move away from spreadsheets and can't get value from basic document management or collaboration tools. It's why we invented PAM, the partnering software from alliantist that helps you get better results, together. Take a look at PAM now to see how it can help you get what you deserve from your partnering activity.