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