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


VIDEO CONFERENCING

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