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