In Seth Earley’s interesting blog post “What’s in Store for 2016,” he mentions a Frog Design report that lists “Friendship as a Service” as one of the coming technology trends. A less cynical view of the interest in (and benefits of) connectedness with others encompasses our concept of “return on partnership,” which we believe is just as valuable as “return on investment.”

Frog Design predicts that “purchasing connections based on career development (or) star power will be a lucrative service” and they cite platforms such as WeChat that have “integrated transactional capabilities.” People do a lot of things for the common good, though, not just for money – and working in partnership with others offers results, which although they cannot necessarily or easily be quantified, are often extremely valuable and productive.

Partnership in practice covers any collaboration where there is mutual benefit, whether internally between team members, between departments (e.g. IT and the Library, Marketing and the Library, Finance and the Library, etc.) or even between a vendor and an organization - if that vendor has a bias toward a commercial relationship rather than simply an opportunistic transactional approach.

Think about it: you can partner with your IT department to deliver valuable content through the organizational intranet, provide competitive intelligence that helps Marketing develop clients, furnish valuable reports to Finance that help them analyze operating expenses and develop budgets, and work with a content vendor to negotiate pricing that allows you to purchase a critical resource even if it appears to be beyond your means at first glance.

Partnership is one of Lucidea’s 6 Principles that govern the way we manage ourselves, interact with our clients, and develop our products. We believe strongly that there is a mutually beneficial return on that partnership that includes a bilateral consultative and advisory element.

• We bring years of experience looking at and solving clients’ challenges that we can apply to your situation, helping you solve your library automation, collections management and knowledge management challenges more quickly, easily and effectively
• You give us wise counsel that helps us develop new and innovative solutions for the professions and sectors we support, to continually improve our customer service and technical support, and refine our messaging and outreach

Ideally, whenever you invest capital, you’ll see a good return on that investment, but success is equally defined by the returns you reap from partnership. Figure ROP into the equation daily, and you may not need to resort to “Friendship as a Service!”