Channel Management Strategies: Digital Partnering Thought Leadership Summit on Digital Strategies August 6, 2002 - San Jose, CA This roundtable discussion focused on the promise of using digital technologies to redefine channel management strategies.

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On August 6, 2002, the Center for Digital Strategies at the Tuck School of Business hosted its second Thought Leadership Summit on Digital Strategies. The subject of this day-long roundtable was "Channel Management Strategies: Digital Partnering." The event was co-hosted by Cisco's Thought Leadership Network at the Cisco headquarters in San Jose, California.

The summit examined how manufacturing/producer firms and retailers/channel partners are reinventing their relationships by exploiting technologies that enhance collaboration, coordination, and rapid two-way exchange of critical information.

Participants included CIOs and key functional vice presidents from Whirlpool, Sun Microsystems, Lowe's, General Motors, and Eaton Corporation, who joined Cisco's CIO Brad Boston and his channels colleague, Surinder Brar. Added to the executives were a select group of senior professors, including Eric Johnson from the Tuck School of Business, Gary Frazier from the Marshall School of Business at USC, and Das Narayandas of Harvard Business School. The day was kicked off by Paul Mountford, Cisco's vice president of worldwide channels. John Marshall, executive vice president & global leader, strategy and analysis, Digitas, moderated the roundtable discussion.

Key learnings from the day included:

• Collaborative channel investments must be tailored to the partner; digital collaboration can be used to enhance revenue by enriching important partnerships and to reduce costs by automating less significant relationships.
• Much customer information is available to retailers, but the risks of damaging a brand with an unanticipated privacy violation-real or perceived-are great and therefore much valuable data is not shared with channel partners.
• Combining eLearning for channel partners along with the right incentive structure effectively aligns channel partners.
• The potential opportunity for manufacturers to collaborate on product design with suppliers may be as large as the opportunity for manufacturers to collaborate with distribution channel partners.

The theme of the Thought Leadership Summit on Digital Strategies is to stimulate the creation of the ideas that drive the development of the networked enterprise of the future. The ability to communicate and share information across organizational boundaries-whether internal functional silos or between firms in a value chain-is becoming increasingly important. The CIO must be the enabler of corporate flexibility and real-time visibility and response. The CIO must also be in tune with changing business processes, sculpting networks and linked applications that enable process changes, and giving executives visibility into all aspects of the enterprise. The summit series is designed to provide CIOs and their functional vice president colleagues the opportunity to gain insights to drive these changes and learn from each other in a participative, cross-industry format.

"Many of us, although in very different industries, share the same challenges," says Brad Boston, Cisco's CIO. "The Summit Series reinforces that it is the business processes and practices that are the important issues and technology enables and supports them."

	To link to summit related articles in Cisco's IQ newsletter, click here
	Click here to listen to an interview with John Marshall on Radio Tuck.
	To link to the Thought Leadership Summit on Digital Strategies website, click here.