ABSTRACT
Enterprise Relationship Management is a target operating model containing all of the management processes for coordinating the business activities that are essential to the success of a joint/multi-party endeavor. Although there are subtleties of managing relationships within different contexts, the underlying principles of collaboration remain the same. The reasons are many, but overall the lack of clear focus on what the value proposition is and how it is to be achieved leads to unreality in the way that the relationships develop. Companies freely enter into relationships in order to work together using their specialized resources innovatively to achieve aims and objectives that they could not realize on their own and at an acceptable cost. Relationships between organizations, such as partnerships, alliances, and collaboratives, are a prevalent way of working in these days of globalized, outsourced, and specialized networks of organizations.
