Description of a strategic partnering engagement

Whilst telecommunication and computing technology (TCT) is considered to be an important factor in the forces both necessitating and enabling the quest for new forms of organisation, there is another, paramount, key to the attainment of these new forms and levels of performance. Without the recognition and fostering of the appropriate personal and organisational attitudes and operating principles, new enterprise forms will also fail, no matter how clever or powerful the technologies they adopt. The attitudes and principles espoused are not new but their representation in organisations of the old form has been much less than will be required for survival in the ´new world order´. One aspect of the changes lies in the recasting of the customer-supplier relationship. This recasting is appropriate for all types of business partners, but is of particular interest for the providers of TCT. This paper describes a typical strategic learning partnering engagement between two enterprises. It is set out working backwards over time, starting with the end state and then describing the body of the engagement that brought it about and finally showing how the arrangement ever came to be entered into. The last section summarises key differences from today´s practice that this seeks to highlight