Streamlining the onboarding of ecosystem partners for faster, successful outcomes

Finding the right partners and onboarding them can be a complicated process, but the Catalyst, Ecosystem Playbook Phase II - Collaborative Partner Onboarding, demonstrates how it can be simplified and accelerated for the benefit of all stakeholders. In particular, the proof-of-concept focuses on showing how having the right business capabilities in place can streamline the onboarding of ecosystem partners.

More and more, communications service providers (CSPs) are looking to build out their partner ecosystems to generate market-ready solutions and speed up time to market.

They are increasingly using partners to extend their own capabilities across product development, sales, delivery, and customer support.

Many CSPs around the world are working to formulate their ecosystem interventions, but only the largest are making headway. This Catalyst is designed to help the other 90% successfully follow their lead.

Setting up and running successful ecosystems requires participants to work together to create mutual benefit for all members, but finding and successfully collaborating with partners is often easier said than done. Typical stumbling blocks for CSPs include a lack of clarity about goals, vision, and opportunities – and the pace and timing of progress – as well as the massive effort required to agree and define capabilities.

These are compounded by a fragmented, regional market-based approach to projects that prevents players from mimicking successful deployments and executing business models that accommodate local strengths and weaknesses. Indeed, the success of ecosystems goes well beyond onboarding partners; participants must be able to collaborate and enhance value for the benefit of all the stakeholders in the ecosystem.

Simplify, streamline, succeed

Now, the second phase of the Ecosystem Playbook Project, Ecosystem Playbook Phase II - Collaborative Partner Onboarding aims to simplify and streamline

the onboarding journey. It proposes a framework and step-by-step guide to enabling both the CSP and prospective partners to understand ecosystem roles and required capabilities, assess how suitable they are to become members, and how viable their participation would be.

The team is championed by stc, and supported by participants CSG, Tata Consultancy Services, Tr3dent, and ZIRA. The team takes a structured approach to enabling ecosystem partnerships, from strategy to operations and self-assessment to agreement, based on the capability model defined in Phase I, Ecosystems: From opportunity to capability – A playbook approach for CSPs.

Each of the project participants brings their own perspectives on what they are experiencing around ecosystems and partnering in their respective market niches, as well as the questions and challenges their clients are increasingly asking them to help address and overcome.

This phase of the project focuses on identifying the business capabilities that will typically be required to establish and maintain a successful partner ecosystem. CSG and Tr3dent have concentrated on strategy and frameworks, Zira on the operational aspects and TCS has focused primarily on the onboarding facet. Together, they have built out what they have termed a Capability Map that is intended both to augment and complement the Ecosystem Playbook defined in phase 1.

Business architecture

For stc, the project is about further enabling its business architecture function to meaningfully address recurring pain points in the business; that is, the practical application of business architecture principles to solve real-world problems. stc has important initiatives in the pipeline which involve, and depend on, extensive partner participation. The work of this Catalyst will be instrumental in ensuring it is set up for success.

The first project phase showed how CSPs could visualize an ecosystem, model the potential opportunities, and then identify the business capabilities necessary to exploit them. The playbook can be downloaded from here.

“At stc, we have made extensive use of the business capability approach already laid out in the Playbook to provide structure to, and greatly accelerate, our ecosystem enablement strategy. We are confident that the partnering capability map from this phase of the project will prove equally impactful to this important work.” Dr. Mohammed A. Aljlayl

General Manager, Business Architecture, stc

This Catalyst is focused on business rather than technology, and so places particular emphasis on the strategic dimensions which are fundamental to ensuring

the success of the ecosystem. The capability map now being developed by the project team extensively leverages TM Forum and other standards to identify and scope ecosystem partnering capabilities. They include the TM Forum’s Business Capability Framework, Ecosystem Business Concepts and Principles, and

Zero-Touch Partnering Business Capabilities. Also leveraged is the Partner Ecosystem Maturity Model, developed and published by the Alliance Best Practice, a global non-telco specific body which has done extensive research in the area of partnerships and alliances.

The team is also constructing a prototype onboarding portal to show how the concepts explored in the project could be deployed in the real, commercial world. It aims to demonstrate the immense potential in improving time to market engendered by the collaboration between the CSP and the ecosystem partners using the playbook.

Visit the Catalyst space for more information from the team.