Digital polygamy

Without question the Cloud offers organisations the chance to give technology management to specialist providers who unlike your organisation live to manage technology. This frees up the IT function to focus on digitally-fuelled value creation.

But the idea of outsourcing your nervous system requires a high degree of trust. In fact it requires more than trust it requires care. I need to know that provider cares enough about my enterprise such that if we have a technology failure they will leap into action with the same vigour as if it was a threat to their own organisation.

To some extent any service failure is a threat to the supplier’s organisation but sometimes the response may be more correlated to the next contract renewal date than to anything else.

My suggestion is that where relationships have a neurological significance it is simply unwise to operate along a buyer supplier commercial framework. A partnership is needed.

Partnerships require compromise, shared risk and an entwined destiny. In my view this could involve a sharing of profits or even payment in the form of share ownership. This way the supplying partner not only cares about the service level agreement but the manner in which those services are optimised to increase the chances of success for the buying partner.

In an era of high volatility this feels like a risky proposition. However there is safety in numbers and those organisations that become entwined in symbiotic ecosystems are most likely to survive.

But of course there is no reason why such relationships should be monogamous.