Example Business Application

Effectively Leveraging External Networks
(e.g., alliances, supply chain, key opinion leaders)

Executives increasingly employ cross-organizational initiatives such as alliances or other forms of strategic partnerships to leverage their organizations' unique capabilities. However, leaders in one organization usually have minimal insight into their counterpart's organization, and collaboration can be heavily conditioned by legal restrictions, cultural and leadership differences as well as differences in each company's level of expertise. ONA can tell executives whether appropriate points of connectivity exist across organizations and whether governance is restricting collaboration.

Challenge: Consider the network below of an alliance between two well-known organizations that came together to bring a product to market. One organization held a patent and understood the science behind the product. The other had manufacturing and distribution expertise. It was presumed that the product could be introduced much more effectively and efficiently if the two organizations worked together. Of course this required effective collaboration, which our ONA showed to be less than desirable.

Key Findings: The network diagram reveals that the healthcare distribution company was very much dominating the alliance with most members of the pharmaceutical company peripheral to the network. There were a couple of exceptions to this, in particular TC and PT, who were playing boundary-spanning roles between the two organizations. In general though the analysis revealed a very hierarchical network that was not enabling collaboration at the appropriate points across the organizations. Further, while we did find effective collaboration between the organizations' sales and technical groups, minimal connections existed between people in the two marketing groups, who desperately needed to collaborate to attain the alliance's billion-dollar sales goal.

Changes: A variety of actions helped promote better collaboration. First, decision-rights were re-allocated within the group and the governance agreements restructured to promote network flexibility. Second, tasks were re-allocated from several senior members who had become over-loaded and, through no fault of their own, bottlenecks. Third, face-to-face meetings and virtual forums were put in place to develop connectivity at key network juncture (e.g., across marketing groups in each company). These and other relatively simple changes had a substantial impact on the speed with which the alliance delivered the product to market as well as innovations identified for future collaborative endeavors.

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