It’s Here: New Handbook Supplement Covers IT Partnering Principles and Practices

Nothing remains static for long—not in alliances and partnering, and not in most industries today. Take your eye off the ball, and you may miss an important trend with far-reaching implications. Drift away from strategy and lose focus, and your competitive edge may be eroded as well. Continue doing things “the way we’ve always done it” and you might find yourself eclipsed, left in the dust by more innovative, less hidebound competitors.

Standing still is not an option—nor is sticking your head in the sand. Here at ASAP we’ve been busy moving forward, looking ahead, and responding to both the latest partnering trends and what many of our members have been asking for. So we’re thrilled to announce the release of our new IT supplement to The ASAP Handbook of Alliance Management: The ASAP Guide to Information Technology Partnering, now available in electronic format.

Most of our ASAP members already know about The ASAP Handbook of Alliance Management—some of them even contributed to it! Since its publication, the Handbook has proved a valuable, comprehensive resource for alliance professionals and their teams, providing a wealth of information, guiding principles, and best practices that take readers through the stages of the alliance life cycle and beyond, into emerging areas of alliance practice.

One of those emerging areas is information technology—a huge part of all our lives and one whose effects and implications go way beyond the “usual suspects” in Silicon Valley. As Forrester’s Jay McBain tells us in the Q1 issue of Strategic Alliance Quarterly, today, “every company is becoming a technology company.”

What does that mean for alliance professionals? What adjustments will they need to make to their thinking and vision going forward? What roles will they play in this massive digital transformation happening everywhere, across industries? How will they manage, orchestrate, and navigate the complex technology partnerships that encompass everything from multipartner go-to-market efforts to vast platform ecosystems (and everything in between)?

We set out to find the answers to those questions—and many more—and present them in a form that our members can readily and easily use. Hence the publication of The ASAP Guide to Information Technology Partnering, which contains the latest and most advanced thinking on leading, managing, and deriving revenue from alliances, partnerships, and complex ecosystems in the high-tech field. This supplement has been specifically tailored to the needs of the IT field and its pressures, concerns, and fast-moving trends. To create it, we reached out to a wide range of ASAP members and others—respected alliance leaders, successful consultants, industry analysts, widely published researchers, and more—to collect and synthesize their knowledge and insights. The result is the compilation and distillation of that thinking, from academic research to real-world, in-the-trenches experiences and proven partnering principles.

The ASAP Guide to Information Technology Partnering explores the challenges of working in a continually changing IT landscape marked by ecosystems, strategic alliances, channels, and other partnering arrangements. It’s a world of competition, collaboration, coopetition, and constant technological disruption, where agility and speed are essential and the next big innovation is likely to hit the market tomorrow.

This supplement and updated guide dives deep into such critical subjects as:

• The evolution of the IT channel
• The rise, spread and functions of ecosystems
• How ecosystems relate to the Alliance Life Cycle
• The role of alliance professionals as ecosystem orchestrators and facilitators
• Collaboration and competition in IT partnering
• Revenue-generating, customer-focused go-to-market guidelines and collaborative selling methodologies
• Alliance metrics in an ecosystem context
• Today’s alliance professional as entrepreneurial leader, driver, and strategic visionary
• Alliances as an essential enterprise function in the high-tech world

In addition, it features descriptions of best practices, frameworks, and checklists for IT partnering; key questions and qualities that are essential for IT alliance professionals today; resources for further reading; a helpful glossary; and fillable online worksheets and forms.

We’re pretty confident that The ASAP Guide to Information Technology Partnering will soon be required reading for anyone who is embarking on or transitioning into an alliance management role in technology, and that it will aid more experienced practitioners with advanced insights as well. Along with another Handbook update for the biopharmaceutical field—coming soon—this supplement, I think, represents a welcome addition to our growing storehouse of helpful and thought-provoking content for our ASAP member community.

How do you get a copy? Easy. Right now you can purchase copies for yourself and your team at the introductory special member price of $47.20 per copy. Just visit our website at https://www.strategic-alliances.org/page/store click on the Publications button and scroll down to The ASAP Guide to Information Technology Partnering. And let us know what you think—we value your feedback, and your thoughts and concerns are greatly appreciated! It’s what makes the ASAP community such a powerful vehicle for networking, knowledge, and education for all of us.