It is interesting to note the ongoing difficulty/inability/reluctance of technology suppliers in the UK Financial Services sector to either embark upon, or to make ‘partnerships’ work. I say this whilst acknowledging my own past failure to do so when I was at Focus! The situation before my time with Focus was similar. Indeed, I can recall first hand experience whilst being a customer of several different IT companies whilst I was at AXA. In fact, I witnessed an almost childish reluctance for some personnel of certain companies to even be in the same room as some of the personnel of other companies! Why was this? Well, the excuses I was given at the time were ‘a lack of trust’ or a ‘fear that sharing what they did would result in copying’… To say that, as the customer, I found this irritating would be an understatement and I eventually had to ‘insist’ on cooperation rather than have it offered as part of the service.
My subsequent experience of partnering whilst at Focus was disappointing despite believing that it should be possible to work openly and productively with partners. Despite trying, we experienced – and won – two significant court cases over breaches of our copyright (in one case they had even copied some errors in our code too!) Added to this, another company with which we had agree to do a joint bid, then approached the customer claiming that they could do the deal without us! So although we failed to partner as much as I would have liked and believed we should, it was not for a want of trying to overcome some of the inevitable and sometimes justified suspicion.
So have things improved? Unfortunately there are still hurdles to overcome, whether that is an ‘ambition’ of certain companies to do ‘everything’ that others do, or a fear of the partnership leading to ideas and opportunities being compromised [stolen]. That having been said, I do still believe that with an open, honest, positive and fair attitude supported by integrity and trust, it is possible to work collaboratively even with people who have overlapping solutions. If the customers needs are to be met with the most effective ‘best of breed’ solutions, then there will be occasions when partnering is the right thing to do – a win, win, win. However, it may need some independent and objective help or facilitation!
