Your Partner Network is an Asset. If You Can See It.
There is a particular kind of question that comes up constantly in large partner ecosystems.
Who do we know who can do this?
Sometimes the answer is immediate: “I know Cindy.”
Cindy knows the customer. Or the industry. Or the systems integrator. Or the person inside the systems integrator who actually understands this particular workload. Fantastic.
But I've started to think there is something strange about this: the company may have relationships with thousands of partners employing hundreds of thousands of people with an extraordinary range of technical, industry, geographic and customer expertise.
And our query interface is:
I know Cindy.
The network possesses the capability, but the organization has trouble seeing it.
Having a network and being able to use one are different things
Researchers have described network competence as an organizational capability: not simply possessing relationships, but being able to develop and manage relationships with customers, suppliers and other organizations while dealing effectively with the interactions among them.
Alliance research has similarly moved from studying individual relationships toward the challenge of managing entire alliance portfolios. Werner Hoffmann's work on multi-alliance management, for example, identified portfolio-level tasks including strategy, monitoring, coordination and the creation of alliance-management systems.
And ecosystem research pushes the problem another step further.
Ron Adner defines an ecosystem around the multilateral set of partners whose alignment is required for a particular value proposition to materialize. That matters because an ecosystem cannot always be understood as a large pile of independent bilateral relationships. The relationships interact.
That describes the environment many technology companies now operate in.
But there is another practical capability I think we need to examine:
Can the organization see the possible configurations contained inside the network?
The option set is hidden
Imagine a customer facing a sovereign-cloud requirement.
Somewhere in the ecosystem may be exactly the right combination of infrastructure, software, security expertise, regional capability, regulatory knowledge and services capacity to solve it.
Or a customer may be trying to migrate away from a legacy virtualization environment.
Again, the pieces may already exist; the problem isn't necessarily capability. It's legibility.
Who has done this before?
Which partners are technically compatible?
Which have relationships in this account?
Which sellers cover it?
Who has delivery capacity in the relevant geography?
Which commercial models work together?
Which companies have successfully worked together before?
Who is actually good at this?
Most large organizations can answer pieces of those questions. Few can query the network as easily as the question implies.
So humans traverse it. We ask around. We call Cindy.
Sometimes we literally architect the relationships ourselves
I once worked on a motion that required aligning sellers across companies to a common set of accounts.
Conceptually, this is straightforward:
Here are the accounts.
Here are the sellers at Company A.
Here are the sellers at Company B.
Find the relevant people and connect them.
In practice, it became an Excel exercise followed by meetings designed to introduce the humans to one another.
We were, quite literally, architecting seller friendships.
This isn't because anyone involved was incompetent. It's because the information necessary to assemble the motion lived in different organizational systems.
Account ownership lived somewhere.
Territory information lived somewhere else.
Customer relationships were partly documented and partly tacit.
Partner expertise lived somewhere else again.
And context was distributed across humans.
The network knew, the individual didn't.
But the network had no reliable mechanism for making what it knew accessible to the individual.
“Seller Matchmaking.” The network may already contain the right people and capabilities. The hard part is knowing where they are—and connecting them. Concept and direction by Megan Arnold; image created with ChatGPT.
This is going to matter enormously for AI
There is an understandable tendency to imagine AI eventually solving this problem: ask an agent to identify the ideal partner configuration for an opportunity.
Great.
But AI doesn't make an invisible network visible by magic. It can reason across information it can access and interpret. It can make previously expensive matching and synthesis dramatically cheaper. But the underlying capabilities still need to become sufficiently legible.
Identity matters, permissions matter, account ownership matters. Capabilities need descriptions, relationships need representation, customer context needs to be accessible.
Different systems need enough shared semantics for a useful answer to exist. The prerequisite to intelligent orchestration may therefore be something more basic:
The ecosystem has to become queryable.
A good ecosystem operating layer should make valuable relationships easier to discover, form and activate. Humans should still build trust, understand nuance, negotiate interests and recognize opportunities that weren't obvious from the data. But we should stop requiring years of accumulated personal experience just to know which capabilities exist inside a network the organization already has.
A network can be extraordinarily valuable, but the first requirement for exploiting an asset is being able to see what you own.
Research behind this essay
Ritter, Wilkinson & Johnston, Measuring Network Competence: Some International Evidence (2002); Hoffmann, How to Manage a Portfolio of Alliances (2005); Adner, Ecosystem as Structure (2017).
