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Community colleges have long relied on informal and unstructured collaborations as a tool for both survival and success. Now that businesses and other organisations are entering into very sophisticated networks and alliances, community colleges will need to move into more structured forms of collaborations. As the pace of competition increases and we move into a complex knowledge industry, community colleges need to find alterations to traditional closed operations and limited collaborations. This article describes the need for more complex collaborative relationships with external constituents and examines how these collaborations will affect today's community colleges. Existing forms of collaboration will be described as traditional, centralised, unstructured modes of collaboration. Although these collaborations will continue to exist in the future, as the community college environment becomes more complex, more structured collaboration will become increasingly more common. Examples of some of the emerging types of structured collaborations will be discussed as will the different ways in which administrators, staff, and faculty will react.