By all accounts, strategic alliances are on the rise in today's economy. Attractive rates of internal growth are hard to sustain, and lower share prices in a down market make it tougher to acquire companies through stock swaps.

When it comes to managing IT activities, a growing number of companies are expecting greater value from forging relationships with key technology providers than from developing software in-house.

So, how do alliances measure up? Industry experts agree that most fail to meet the expectations of one or more partners. "Seventy-five percent of alliances are failing or underperforming," says Stuart Kliman, director of Vantage Partners LLC, a consulting firm in Boston.

Vantage Partners recently surveyed 150 corporate alliance managers to explore the reasons and remedies for alliance failures. For the purposes of Vantage's study, alliances included a continuum of relationships, ranging from joint ventures to outsourcing.

Kliman and others have found that the relationship aspects of alliances as opposed to their substantive performance are what trips up companies most often. "Fifty-two percent of those surveyed named poor or damaged relationships as the cause of failure," says Kliman. "This involves factors such as a breakdown in trust and a buildup of negative perceptions."

Companies often enter alliances in the same way many consumers buy used cars -- without knowing what they're getting into. The better approach, say alliance experts, is to regard the relationship like a tenuous marriage: Prodigious effort and a mature attitude will yield either an improved relationship or a civil parting of the ways.

Vantage Partners has found that most companies lack a significant institutionalization of alliance-building and maintenance capabilities. Instead, companies hand off those responsibilities to "people persons" and neglect to develop processes designed to promote alliance values on an organizational basis. For example, only 29 percent of the respondents in Kliman's study reported that alliance managers are consistently assigned to manage such relationships.

Alliance practitioners echo Kliman's conclusions. "Our problems with alliances have stemmed mainly from communications," says Kevin Bott, vice president for product and technology management at Ryder System Inc., a logistics provider in Miami. Four years ago, Ryder stopped developing software in-house and started developing strategic partnerships with technology providers such as i2 Technologies Inc., Manhattan Associates Inc. and Qualcomm Inc.

"We're a US$5.5 billion company with many operating locations around the world," says Bott. "We could overwhelm our providers by having 50 people calling them at one time." Instead, Ryder channels communications through two key managers one from business and one from the technical side who act as contact points for managing the relationships.