Chapter 14 – Creating Collaborative Partnerships

TEAMS, PARTNERSHIPS AND ALLIANCES

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

§  Undertake new initiatives

§  Address both minor and major problems

§  Capitalize on significant opportunities

Ø  Organizations create teams, partnerships and alliances both internally with employees and externally with other organizations

Ø  Collaboration system – supports the work of teams by facilitating the sharing and flow of information

Ø  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

Ø  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

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

COLLABORATION SYSTEMS

Ø  Collaboration solves specific business tasks such as telecommuting, online meetings, deploying applications, and remote project and sales management

Ø  Collaboration system – An IT- based set of tools that supports the work of teams by facilitating the sharing and flow of information.

Ø  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

Ø  Collaboration systems include;

§  Knowledge management systems

§  Content management systems

§  Workflow management systems

§  Groupware systems

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Ø  Knowledge management (KM) – involves capturing, classifying, evaluating, retrieving and sharing information assets in a way that provides context for effective decisions and actions

Ø  Knowledge management system – supports the capturing and use of an organization’s “know-how”

EXPLICIT AND TACIT KNOWLEDGE

Ø  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

Ø  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

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

Ø  CMS marketplace includes;

§  Document management system (DMS)

§  Digital assets management system (DAM)

§  Web content management system (WCM)

WORKING WIKIS

Ø  Wikis – web-based tools that make it easy for users to add, remove, and change online content

Ø  Business wikis – collaborative web pages that allows users to edit documents, share ideas or monitor the status of a project

WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Ø  Work activities can be performed in series or in parallel that involves people and automated computer systems

Ø  Workflow – defines all the steps or business rules, from beginning to end, required for a business process

Ø  Workflow management system – facilitates the automation and management of business processes and controls the movement of work through the business process

Ø  Messaging-based workflow system – sends work assignments through an email system

Ø  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

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

WEB CONFERENCING

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

VIDEOCONFERENCING

Ø  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

Ø  Email is the dominant form of collaboration application, but real-time collaboration tools like instant messaging are creating a new communication dynamic

Ø  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

Ø  Instant messaging application