Like many other companies, your business distinguishes clearly between the worlds of "development" where you support and work with communities, and "business", where you have adopted hierarchical controlled structures.

This mirrors a traditional business approach, where interacting with communities members is analagous with customer service, a sub-branch without real power to change the rest of the business.

Sometimes from a historical evolution, this separation is comprehensible. Unfortunately, we can't always explain these histories so they makes sense in the modern context where open community organizations act in a more integrated manner.

A key community growth initiative that will benefit the bottom line is to make growing various types of communities (customers, sales, partners, etc.) a top-level strategic goal. Agree that you need to include community interaction as part of the feedback loop that improves your business and processes.

Think of every way that "customer" and "customer service" have integrated with various parts of successful customer-focused businesses. Then substitute "community" and "community enablement".

There are examples out there, where companies successfully integrate community principles into their business and gain benefits from their customer and partner contributions as they do from development.

A good exercise is the comparison of community integration on the web sites between http://www.redhat.com and http://www.jboss.com JBoss on one hand and http://www.oracle.com Oracle, http://www.sap.com SAP, http://www.novell.com Novell, and http://www.ibm.com IBM on the other hand. You can see the strength of the stand-alone community, but in the former you don't see obvious community offered for customers and partners. In the larger, traditional, proprietary companies, they have put forth the face of having learned they need to be a leading member in the community of their customers and partners.

A similar exercise can be done with smaller pure and mixed open source ISVs. The community is forefront and listening to/interacting with users is a key to their growth.

Ironically, applying the open source way via community principles is sometimes more evident in companies that do not practice open source development. Twitter, for example, builds on open technologies, has a rapid and iterative approach to incorporating user ideas, and otherwise shows a high level of listening to and learning from end-users that is similar to how open source listens to end-users.