The team explored potential scenarios like customer engagement scenarios, long term relation-building scenarios (between company, partners and customers), feedback scenarios (how company X could receive feedback about its products and technology from partners and customers), customer adoption scenarios all of which could be used for performing what-if analyses and developing further understanding of the competencies they needed to achieve their business success. (See Figure 3.) Please note that each of the scenarios have one missing corner.

Fig: 3

The consultants then began to explore the tensions between various constituents of the ecosystem. For example, there is tension between what company wants and what partners want. Similarly what customers want and what partners or company wants. When these tensions are managed between each polarity new competencies are developed between that set of corners. This work resulted in the development of six strategic competencies for accomplishing the Company X's success:

• Developing products and creating markets for those products with the new technology from the acquired company.

• Empowering and leveraging partners to help company X and the product to become industry leaders

• Partners selling, installing and implementing new products and solutions from Company X.

• Customers deploying the products in different divisions of their own company and making them part of their work processes

• Partners investing in learning the new products and technology and gaining market share for the product and the company

• Customers adopting technology and deploying the products from Company X

If any of the six competencies were not developed in the company, then the ultimate goal could not be reached. Each competency connects two of the cornerstones identified above. For example, Competency #1 was developed between Company and technology; Competency #4 is between partners and customers. While we only indicated one way relationship in the competencies above, those relationships are reflexive between the two linked cornerstones. (See Figure 4.)

Fig: 4

The small group came back to entire team and presented the strategy model, which was modified slightly and subsequently adopted by the entire team. An action plan was developed to build the competencies in Company X in a systemic way. The action plan is shown below in Table 2. Finally, a control mechanism was identified to review the progress on a monthly and quarterly basis. Then another group of IT professionals sat together with the consultant to come up with system architecture for each of the scenarios (engagement, feedback, customer adoption, long term relationships). For each scenario to be successful, three competencies have to be well developed. For example, Customer Engagement scenario requires that Company X empower and leverage partners, develop products and create markets for the new technology, and for partners to invest in new technology and gain early market share. The systems and architecture design was developed to make sure that there are mechanisms that aggregate customer and partner use of knowledge to identify potential markets, feature needs, competition, progress etc. The Table 1 lists the four scenarios and associated competencies. Please note that same six competencies show up twice under the four scenarios.

These scenarios drive the system architecture that was designed. So business success was the leadership criteria. Cultural enablers and impediments of Company X gave the leaders an ability to create rewards and recognition structures that would motivate their people. Strategy was devised using systems thinking approach paying attention to the needs of the company, type of technology, selling and delivery model through external partners and the needs of the customers and marketplace. Finally structures are put in place (in this case system architecture) for its web based sales software to complete the picture.

In this way, the Company X built a business model based on systems perspective and then from that high level conceptual model created a strategic action plan to guide their day to day actions. (See Table 2.) This exercise helped the participants to understand different structures in which each group works, cultural impediments and enablers that make them work together effectively (like compensation for sales people vs. engineers vs. customer support professionals). It also allowed the company to create a coherent strategy that is consistent with its overall business strategy and gain a leadership position in the new market.

Later this process was documented and used in assessing partnership opportunities, company and subsidiary relationships (replace partners with the name of the subsidiary) etc. Because the business model is built based on how things actually work in Company X, it represented the genetic code of that company and could be used to understand why some things work and why some things don't, what is needed to change and what could be preserved when they merge with other companies.

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