Chapter 15 – Creating Collaborative Partnerships

TEAMS, PARTNERSHIPS AND ALLIANCES

• Organizations create and use teams, partnerships and alliances to;

§  Undertake new initiatives

§  Address both minor and major problems

§  Capitalize on significant opportunities

•   Organizations create teams, partnerships and alliances both internally with employees and externally with other organizations
•   Collaboration system – supports the work of teams by facilitating the sharing and flow of information

Information partnerships with other organizations

•   Organizations from alliance and partnerships with other organizations based on their core competency

§  Core competency – An organization’s key strength, a business function that it does better than any of its competitors

§  Core competency strategy – Organization chooses to focus specifically on its core competency and forms partnerships with other organizations to handle nonstrategic business processes

•   Information technology can make a business partnership easier to establish and manage

§  Information partnerships – Occurs when two or more organizations cooperate by integrating their IT systems, thereby providing customers with the best of what each can offer

•   The internet has dramatically increased the ease and availability for IT – enabled organizational alliance and partnerships

COLLABORATION SYSTEMS

•   Collaboration solves specific business tasks such as telecommuting, online meetings, deploying applications, and remote project and sales management
•   Collaboration system – An IT- based set of tools that supports the work of teams by facilitating the sharing and flow of information.
•   Two categories of collaboration

1.        Unstructured collaboration (information collaboration) – includes document exchange, shared whiteboards, discussion forums, and email.
2.     Structured collaboration (process collaboration) – involves shared participation in business processes such as workflow in which knowledge is hard-coded as rules

Collaborative business functions 

•   Collaboration systems include;

§  Knowledge management systems

§  Content management systems

§  Workflow management systems

§  Groupware systems

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

•   Knowledge management (KM) – involves capturing, classifying, evaluating, retrieving and sharing information assets in a way that provides context for effective decisions and actions
•   Knowledge management system – supports the capturing and use of an organization’s “know-how”

EXPLICIT AND TACIT KNOWLEDGE

•   Intellectual and knowledge-based assets fall into two categories;

1.       Explicit knowledge – consists of anything that can be documented, archived, and codified, often with the help of IT

2.       Tacit knowledge – knowledge contained in people’s heads

•  The following are two best practices for transferring or recreating tacit knowledge

1.       Shadowing – less experienced staff observe more experienced staff to learn how their more experienced counterparts approach their work

2.       Joint problem solving – a novice and expert work together on a project

Reasons why organizations launch knowledge management programs 

CONTENT MANAGEMENT

•   Content management system (CMS) – provides tools to manage the creation, storage, editing and publication of information in a collaborative environment
•   CMS marketplace includes;

§  Document management system (DMS)

§  Digital assets management system (DAM)

§  Web content management system (WCM)

WORKING WIKIS

•   Wikis – web-based tools that make it easy for users to add, remove, and change online content
•   Business wikis – collaborative web pages that allows users to edit documents, share ideas or monitor the status of a project

WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

•   Work activities can be performed in series or in parallel that involves people and automated computer systems
•   Workflow – defines all the steps or business rules, from beginning to end, required for a business process
•   Workflow management system – facilitates the automation and management of business processes and controls the movement of work through the business process
•   Messaging-based workflow system – sends work assignments through an email system
•   Database-based workflow system – stores documents in a central location and automatically asks the team members to access the document when it is their turn to edit the document

GROUPWARE SYSTEMS

Groupware technologies

•   Groupware – software that supports teams interaction and dynamics including calendaring, scheduling and videoconferencing 

WEB CONFERENCING

•   Web conferencing – blends audio, video and document-sharing technologies to create virtual meeting rooms where people “gather” at a password-protected website

VIDEOCONFERENCING

•   Video conference – A set of interactive telecommunication technologies that allow two or more locations to interact via two-way video and audio transmissions simultaneously 

 INSTANT MESSAGING

•   Email is the dominant form of collaboration application, but real-time collaboration tools like instant messaging are creating a new communication dynamic
•   Instant messaging – types of communications service that enables someone to create a kind of private chat room with another individual to communicate in real-time over the internet
•   Instant messaging application