Chapter 15: Creating Collaborative Partnerships

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TEAMS, PARTNERSHIPS AND ALLIANCES

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

      1. Undertake new initiatives. 
      2. Address both minor and major problems. 
      3. 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”.

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:

  1. Document Management System (DMS).

  2. Digital Assets Management System (DAM).

  3. 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.