#75 Jan Twombly: Using Strategic Alliances to close the Gap between Business and Technology

No one goes to market alone.

It takes partners to deliver results.

Finding the right partner can be a challenge.

However, when this is intentionally built into your business model it allows your company to work collaboratively and make the most of your resources.

Jan Twombly is the President of the Rhythm of Business. She works in partnering with organizations as a strategic alliance consultant, educator, and researcher.

Relationships provide the most value

According to Jan, businesses need to value external relationships more. Her company prides itself on helping to guide and foster these types of relationships.

They’ve been enhancing their newest program, partner readiness, which preps companies to be in a good position to partner. Most companies don’t take the time to actually set up their partnerships beforehand to make them work.

In order to be successful, partnering has to be embedded in every aspect of the business.

This includes several key components that Jan helps companies to think about such as strategy, operations, mindset, and execution.

If you look at the way that organizations are reshaping their partnering teams, you’ll notice that what’s actually driving that alignment are partnerships that are going on behind the scenes.

For example, Jan works with a very agile organization in China that does amazing things for them.

One of their most notable statistics is that they’ve reduced their concept to production time by more than 70%. That’s a testament to the amazing partnerships that they’ve set up as an organization. In fact, their agile collaboration has led to them completely turning their business around.

The biggest challenge that ROB faces with their clients is addressing the question of how to foster communication between independent entities. For instance, how do you make sure that you get the right people together?

One of the consistent points that have come up repeatedly for them, is that the job of the tech alliance manager is changing. These roles are requiring more skills, and are more challenging than ever before.

However, because of the adaptability required to fulfill the requirements of the role, such as having to figure things out, the job is much more fun today than ever before. As a result, technology has become more prominent in configuring the right relationships.

Bridging business and technology

Bringing business along with the technology has been a great challenge,  but it is something that has driven alliance managers to focus on putting partnerships together faster.

Recognizing where your company should be a leader, a follower, and where your organization should commit resources is important. Then, it’s much easier to focus on P2P (partner-to-partner) where you can leverage your company’s strengths the best to help your partners.

The fundamentals of managing partnerships and alliances have remained the same, but the competitive environment means that business has to catch up to the technology.

Between APIs, the cloud, and other technological advancements the MVP (minimal Viable Partnership) is easier than ever to accomplish--but plug-and-playing the right partners isn’t always as easy as integrating tech.

Companies need to have a great collaborative effort in order for the partnership to work.

When things are moving at the speed that they are today, they have to find the right fit.

Every company has its own culture, but when you have a single point of reference everyone is on the same page.

Moving forward Jan and her company is doing a lot to build out training, risk management processes, and working with companies such as Workspan and others who are creating systems of records.

Additionally, she will be facilitating a lot of additional writing and communication to help businesses find the right fit for the partnerships they create.

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To contact the host, Chip Rodgers, with topic ideas, suggest a guest, or join the conversation about alliances, he can be reached by:

• Email: chip@workspan.com
• Twitter: @chiprodgers
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/chiprodgers