CHAPTER 15 – CREATING COLLABORATIVE PARTNERSHIPS

TEAMS, PARTNERSHIPS AND ALLIANCES

 >>> Organizations create and use teams, partnerships and alliances to:

Ø~Undertake new initiatives.

Ø~Address both minor and major problems.

Ø~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

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 

>>> 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”.

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).

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 .

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: 

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.

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.