CHAPTER FOURTEEN : CREATING COLLABORATIVE PARTNERSHIPS

TEAMS, PARTNERSHIPS AND ALLIANCES

Organizations create and use teams, partnerships and alliances to;

o   Undertake new initiatives

o   Address both minor and major problems

o   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

o   Core competency – An organization’s key strength, a business function that it does better than any of its competitors

o   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

o   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

KM TECHNOLOGIES

Knowledge Management system include

-          Knowledge repositories

-          Expertise tools

-          E-learning applications

-          Discussion and chat technologies

-          Search and data mining tools

How information flows:

o   Social Networking Analysis (SNA) – a process of mapping a group’s contacts (whether personal or professional ) to identify who knows whom and who works with whom.

o   SNA provides a clear picture of how employees and division work together and help identify key experts.

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;

o   Document management system (DMS)- support the electronic capturing, storage, distribution, archival, and accessing of document

o   Digital assets management system (DAM)- similar with DMS generally works with binary rather than text files, such as multimedia files types

o   Web content management system (WCM)- adds an additional layer to document and digital asset management that enables publishing content both to intranet and to public websites

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