Expert Voice: Lynne Markus on Integrating with Business Partners - ' Overcoming Obstacles to Integration '

What do you see as the major obstacles to integration?
One is lack of technical knowledge, and skills and resources of various kinds, in partner organizations—particularly with smaller partners. That's a very significant barrier, and that's where I think these collaborative, shared infrastructures are particularly useful. However, there are some very significant barriers on the other side, too. The reason that some organizations are offering, or imposing, proprietary solutions on their partners is that those organizations themselves do not have very integrated, Web-enabled infrastructures that would allow them to use a more open type of interface with the partners. Even when systems are relatively integrated, another problem can be organizational complexity. If your organization has many different units interacting with people on the partner's side, chances are that it will be very difficult to integrate smoothly.

Some of the biggest problems, though, are mental. The belief is still fairly commonplace that we don't really need to collaborate, or that the goal is to benefit at the expense of our partners. In many industries, there's a very long history of adversarial relationships between companies and their partners, and these get translated into how they work together around IT.

There's one more obstacle: Too often, in our own organizations, we do not take an integrated approach to the improvement efforts we make. Many companies are quite excellent in this regard, but the vast majority of approaches to integration or organizational improvement are balkanized. The organizational-development people on the one hand are proposing certain kinds of solutions, while IT people are doing their own thing. Meanwhile, the alliance professionals—the people whose job is to worry about strategic partnerships and how to manage them—are not working with the technology people either.

Are today's technologies capable of enabling companies to -integrate the way they would like to integrate?
Oh, probably not. The problem is that you can't buy it in a box. You can integrate. You can integrate internally and you can integrate externally. But generally speaking, these are very complex solutions that require many different technology components, and there's a great deal of time, money, expertise and effort required to put all of those pieces together effectively. We have those capabilities, generally speaking, in large organizations. We don't have them in smaller ones.

It's hard enough to manage a conventional IT project well. How tough is it for two organizations with -different goals and interests to work together?
Collaboration of this sort is extremely challenging to do, and organizations have to work very, very hard at it if they're going to succeed. Given that, you need to be clear that this is something you want to do.

It's very important to think of these interorganizational collaborations facilitated by IT as cross-disciplinary change efforts. This is not just an IT project. This is not just an alliance situation. This is not just an organizational development or change-management issue. It's all of those things at the same time. If I could give advice to organizations, I would suggest that they spend time thinking about how to take an integrated approach to their efforts to work with their partners.