Just like hothouse yoga, domestic vacations and $2 bottles of cabernet (from Charles Shaw vineyards in California, affectionately called "two-buck Chuck"), partnering is all the rage.

Looking past the hype, however, it’s easy to understand why partnering is a trend that deserves its favorable press. "Everybody’s looking for growth and cost savings," says Larraine Segil, cofounder and partner of The Lared Group, which specializes in strategic alliances. "When doing the two things simultaneously, partnering is an excellent vehicle." It’s also a resourceful vehicle—by going it alone, many companies miss out on the synergies that partnerships can generate. For example, they can help organizations gain expertise in areas that aren’t their core competencies, help large companies gain the entrepreneurial skills offered by a startup, and allow a startup to expand its distribution or gain the marketing power of the larger partner. On a global scale, partnering is often a necessity to break into new markets.

However, few companies attempt or successfully manage partnerships. Segil cites research from the California Institute of Technology, where she teaches an executive education alliance program, that shows an eye-opening 60 percent of companies fail in their partnerships. So yes, alliances are good, but they’re awfully hard to do (for more on why, see "Building Alliances That Stick," this page).

Some of our Resourceful 100 honorees have gathered the right mix of ingredients to cook up successful partnerships. Kutztown University of Pennsylvania is one of 14 schools in the state system that has implemented a shared ERP system; the CIO of the Virginia Department of Corrections participates in a tight, informal network of CIOs from the state’s public safety agencies; and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) hosts risk management software for the Port Authority of Allegheny County (Pennsylvania), a benefit for both organizations. At a time when cash-strapped CIOs are forced to do more with less, these winners are partnering to leverage scarce resources and save money.

Finding Common Ground

An alliance between a university and a county port authority seems, at first glance, to be a rather odd pairing. In the case of the Port Authority of Allegheny County, which encompasses the greater Pittsburgh area, and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), a phone dialogue system brought the two together.

The Language Technologies Institute at CMU received a $650,000 grant from the National Science Foundation Universal Access Foundation to study the use of phone dialogue systems by elderly and nonnative speakers. The university’s goal is to build a system that recognizes the requests from those callers and can automatically provide scheduling information to them. The Institute contacted the Port Authority, which was a ready source of data because many of its callers are from those populations. The Port Authority records calls from customers asking for scheduling information, then sends the recordings as wave files to CMU, where they’re analyzed. In return, CMU is building a customer information system for the Port Authority that will improve its service to the elderly and nonnative speakers (many of whom don’t own computers and therefore can’t access scheduling information online, says Port Authority CTO Maureen Bertocci) and will be available 24/7—a huge improvement since workers currently staff the phones six days a week and not at night.