Tags Collaboration, Growth

When collaboration means business

There’s a difference between suppliers and business partners and a truly collaborative business approach. Mark McDowall highlights what can be achieved when people work towards a common goal.

How often have you heard a company claim it’s all about “relationships”? How many do you know that look for “partners” rather than “customers”? A wild guess would suggest quite a few – after all, when it costs more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one, these laudable sound-bites seem little more than plain business sense. So when an organisation suggests it works “collaboratively” with its customers, it’s worth asking what exactly that might mean.

For Amby Hitchcox, financial and administrative manager of Stichting Oxfam International, it’s an important question: “We have to co-ordinate a lot of information and need reliable communications and IT services.”

It’s not enough to have a partner paying lip service for the sake of a sale – they need to be prepared to put in some extra effort. Actually going that extra mile John Lindley, managing director of IT management consultant firm Altis, agrees. When he helped set up the firm in 1992, there were other companies who covered the same market: helping organisations manage Lotus Notes, Domino and related software environments, as well as supporting IT infrastructures and developing bespoke applications. But most rivals were simply working to defined contractual obligations – that’s where Lindley saw a value in taking a fresh approach.

“We try to be very proactive in managing our customers,” he says of the Altis philosophy, “so as well as doing what we are contracted to do, we’re always talking to them, looking six to 12 months ahead, not just in terms of what they tell us they might want but what we think they might need: new product releases, technologies, up-grades and so on.”

It’s a commitment that customers appreciate. Oxfam International, for example, has been using Altis for the past six years. A co-ordinating and liaison body between 12 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) based around the world, Oxfam International’s Oxford office relies on IT systems and software that includes Lotus Notes, a passwordprotected intranet and a Domino server that handles the entire organisation’s email from around the world.

Altis supports Oxfam’s network, both remotely and through regular office visits. Crucially, Altis also helps them plan for the future by offering informed advice Oxfam can trust.

“We’ve got a contract that covers certain things but there is plenty of room to ask questions and find out if there is anyone in their group who can answer them,” says Hitchcox, “and they have proven their ability to pull someone out of a hat and bring them along to do completely different work for us if we need it, whether it is software or contract development or hardware building.”

It hasn’t always been like this: “We sacked a couple of IT companies before because they just did not come up to scratch – but Altis made a real effort to understand our business, to dedicate particular staff in their support team to knowing what we are about, getting to know our staff and how we work.” For Oxfam, this means any advice they’re given comes with an assurance of quality. “I know they won’t recommend something that’s off my track so I don’t risk spending precious resources on something we don’t really need.”

Altis is certainly working hard for its customers, but in what way is this relationship a partnership? To be “collaborative” suggests joint goals, a process working both ways. What, in other words, does Oxfam give Altis, aside from work, and what does Altis get for its extra investment in time?

“I think we’ve provided a useful insight to a relatively small office with an international dimension that has seen fast growth, from eight or nine people when Altis first started to around 20 now” says Hitchcox, adding that they regularly provide training time to new Altis consultants.

What’s more, they have been able to embark on a number of mutual research projects. “For example, we were looking at new enterprise-wide virus solutions and I knew that Altis were looking around at the same time as we were, so we decided to adopt a common solution, with a bit of experimentation from our end and theirs.”

Understanding organisations at that level feeds directly into the consultancy work of Altis: “We always work this way, so we get to see all sorts of problems and have built up a great store of knowledge that we can share with other customers,” says Lindley. “If you’re doing this kind of work internally or with a non-specialist, what are the chances you or they will have seen some arcane problem with a particular version of, say, Domino running on a particular version of Red Hat Linux in a low-bandwidth scenario? Whatever you might think up, we will have seen it.”

For better, not worse

For a business working this way there are, of course, costs. Managing a relationship takes time and some businesses may instinctively flinch at giving away anything for free. But Lindley thinks in terms of investment.

“When we formed Altis back in 1992, we thought long and hard about this,” he said, “but we think it is not a real risk, because whatever we give away for free tends to pay for itself ten-fold in terms of extra work the customer might generate or opportunities we might see together.”

There are other benefits too. Altis doesn’t need to feed off an aggressive selling model – their customers trust what they tell them about what they might need. As Hitchcox says, “I try to encourage this way of working with other suppliers – it’s a clear contractual relationship, obviously, but our previous supplier didn’t work like this, they did not appear interested either – so you’re less forgiving when those little things go wrong.”

“One of the main benefits of working collaboratively is reduced stress in the work-place,” agrees Lindley. “In any business there will be a problem at some time, working in this way minimises that – and having happy and contented customers who we aren’t constantly having to react to makes the whole working environment more pleasant.” And how many businesses would put a price on that?

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