Strategic Alliance Magazine Q2 2019 - 54

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The Chief Partnering Officer
With technology in hand, will alliances take a seat
with sales, marketing, and other chiefs in the C-suite?
By John W. DeWitt

Almost overnight, technology has become the alliance manager's new best friend.
"We are using technologies to support that shift in
mindset, and that's how we better connect partners' capabilities and the needs of our customers," explained
Jimmy Hwang, principal manager, alliance partner program, at National Instruments, one of four companies
profiled in this issue's special report on digitizing alliance management. Added Penny Wright, global
enablement manager on NI's sales and partner enablement (channels) team, "These efforts have put us in a
really good place and position to support the global goto-market strategy."
AbbVie's "unified system is really critical to our business," said Anna Maroney, AbbVie's vice president and
head of alliance management. "It puts all that information under the corporate strategy office umbrella, and
that has obvious efficiency. ... One of our standards of
excellence is that we are highly integrated. ... That continuum of engagement is reflected in the information
technology that we utilize."
Digital capability is crucial as alliance functions mature and increase in strategic importance. "Global
alliances require executive attention. We know that we
have moved to the next maturity stage, directly reporting into the executive committee of the company,"
emphasized Laurent Valroff, worldwide global alliance
lead for systems integrators at Dassault Systèmes.
Amit Sinha, chief customer officer at WorkSpan, believes technology provides the visibility, predictability,
and scalability into the partnering function that justifies
a seat at the executive suite table for alliance management. He argued the point during his talk at the 2019
ASAP Global Alliance Summit.
"One of the assumptions that we are making is that, for
the ecosystem, there has to be somebody like a chief partStrategic Alliance QUARTERLY

| Q2 2019

ner officer to the right or to the left of the CEO coming in
the C-suite," he said, then turned to the audience.
"I just want to throw this question out to you guys:
Do you see the head of partnering in the C-suite in the
next few years? By a show of hands. All right-maybe
five to 10 percent," Sinha estimated, obviously surprised by the broad skepticism. "Most companies are
not collaborative companies," piped up one attendee,
seeming to echo the room's sentiment. Sinha, alliance
leader for more than a decade at SAP, barely skipped a
beat. "This is a big need, lot of evidence for change, but
your point is culturally, mindset wise, we are not at
that point."
Sinha argued that "without a system of record that
quantifies the work, the hard work that alliances put together ... there is no scale, there is no predictability in
this." He cited other enterprise leadership roles that
have risen to the executive suite, in part at least, because
they've been able to quantify and predict their performance and impact on the business.
"I remember a time when sales used to report to the
chief operating officer," Sinha said. "As marketing became more quantified, the value of the CMO rose.
Today you cannot imagine a C-suite which doesn't have
a CMO," he said, before returning to the chief partnering officer.
"We are predicting that alliances will go through a
similar process. It will go from being unstructured to
being really organized. ASAP is a great forum for that.
You already have the best practices, the discussions
around this intellectual thing called alliance management, ecosystem management. If you can quantify it
and if you can get predictable about it, I think as larger
percentages of revenue come through the alliance function, through the ecosystem function, the rise to the
C-suite will happen." n

Strategic Alliance Magazine Q2 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Strategic Alliance Magazine Q2 2019