Sometimes the other side would flat out refuse to get involved. Moreoften - and worse, by Lowry's lights - the partner would agree tocollaborate but then not do anything. "They'd drag their feet. Theywould wait it out because they knew there would be a change inmanagement, and it would someday go away," he says. Just months beforeGoldman filed for bankruptcy in February 2002, Lowry finally found apartner willing to go beyond the pilot stage on a far-reachingcollaboration project in which the companies agreed to directly linktheir manufacturing systems. But before the venture could get going,the recession caught up with Goldman. You can't help but wonder ifLowry had had more success earlier whether the company would be aroundtoday.

Lowry was a visionary. He had much more than minimal collaboration inmind and only early stage technology to pull it off. In fact, he wasattempting the deepest degree of collaboration, in which the majorityof interactions between partners involve shared applications. Thepromise of such integration is that partners redesign their businessprocesses so that activities naturally shift to the appropriate party,eliminating much waste. Today, there are many technology solutions onthe market or on the way (such as Web services) that can helpcompanies achieve this. It's the people issues that stillloom large.

Scott Griffin, vice president and CIO at Boeing, is running up againstthe trust barrier. Boeing engineers have long shared product designdata electronically with their supply chain partners. At that basiclevel of collaboration, trust has not been a big issue because thearrangement is covered by standard nondisclosure agreements. But ahigher level of collaboration, in which the company will integrate itsbusiness processes with its partners, holds both the promise of fatterprofits and the peril of greater risks, Griffin says.

In the near future, Boeing engineers and their partners won't justpass design documents back and forth but will actually share the sameproduct data management system with their partners, as if there wereno corporate boundaries. "In this high-level collaboration we willhave designers [from all sides] working concurrently. Someone isbuilding the components; someone is designing the assembly; someone isfiguring out how to make the assembly; someone is figuring out how theassemblies will go together into subassemblies and then finally intoan airplane. That is nirvana as far as collaboration," says Griffin,speaking from Boeing's new headquarters in Chicago.

Even at such an advanced level of collaboration, technology is nolonger a barrier. "The technology is getting to the point where youcan literally work together as if you were in the same company. Theonly rules are nontechnical rules about who gets to work together, howdo they work together, what information can they share, whatinformation can't they share, who owns the intellectual property,"Griffin says.