The design and development of effective partnerships and collaborations requires attention to leadership, governance, management and participation using reference models, standard setting, tools, and services and change management protocols to improve business & technical design and implementation.

We do this because:

• Evolving “horizontal communities” are more than “vertical organizations” lying down: organizations that come together to address issues beyond their separate capacities typically continue with an operationally-oriented top-down approach. But, sooner or later, these communities discover a need for “whole system thinking” that more solidly connects governance, design and development processes with the operational focus inherited from their separate pasts. Historically, separate organizations were “operationally focused stable state entities” whereas successful communities have a continuous capacity for design and evolution;

• Communities that become ecosystems or megacommunities are also more complex and volatile entities. Inherited and separate management, design, development, operations and maintenance processes not based on common information and technical standards, platforms and methodologies will fail, and likely result in extended and costly implementations that do not scale and are challenging to maintain;

• Ecosystems and megacommunities are also places where the effectiveness of traditionally separate management, accountability and reward mechanisms fade; and where new integrated approaches to peer engagement are needed;

• Eventually, community purpose drives community infrastructure, which in turn reinforces the need for connected governance and platform deployments utilizing new and evolving standards, methodologies and tools.

In viable ecosystems and megacommunities:

• Governance anchors culture and provides context; architecture and metadata enable platforms; and tools to execute the subsequent operations;

• Users express their needs and manage their relationships with providers using community tools with an expectation of a comprehensive and focused response; and

• Evolution is the purposeful incrementation of governance and platforms in innovative ways that maintain community relevance.

Many public, private and non-profit partnerships and collaborations have been designed and developed using structures, methods and tools inherited from traditional organizations.  When partnerships and collaborations are contained and well focused, it is possible to use singular authority and reward mechanisms and infrastructure approaches from traditional organizations and deliver immediate and acceptable results - at least for a while.

But such early communities encourage larger and more complex builds. The continued use of traditional solutions tends to result in implementations that are more costly than expected, take longer to put in place, and are more fragile than hoped for.

The early design and development of governance regimes and platforms for strategic partnerships and collaborations enables them to successfully scale and extend.

Two sets of slides that you can use to provide a high-level introduction to communities.

These slides describe how to design innovative communities (S1) and how to energize them for the longer term (S2).

Perspective #1: Governance, Operations and Change Management

Developing comprehensive partnerships and collaborations with management processes and process-oriented systems inherited from traditional organizations may not be viable.

Perspective #2: Communities and Services

How a community reaches its users is a function of its maturity. The more mature a community, the more thought it gives to structuring its user relationships so that they can evolve in response to needs.

Perspective #3: The Evolution of Services

After a decade or more of provider sponsored service innovation, we are now seeing the emergence of independent application providers.

Perspective #4: Working Together

In future, business, governments and civil society will increasingly come together in an array of virtual partnerships and collaborations to innovatively address complex issues, create opportunities, and achieve efficiencies that cannot be gained in isolation.

Perspective #5: Business & Technologists Need to Understand each other

If future generations of more innovative peer-to-peer partnerships and collaborations are to be successful we need better methodologies and tools. But can Business and Technology participants have the discussion that will enable them?

Perspective #6: Innovation and Productivity

Entity and community hosting strategies that support collaboration may be stifling the outcomes they strive to achieve.

Perspective #7: Making Progress - Barriers to Successful Transformation

Partnerships and collaboration are transformational. We need to better understand the dynamics that drive successful transformations, and the consequences of not fully rising to the challenge - because sooner or later - somebody else will.

Click here for the meaning of terms we use in these perspectives