Chapter 14 – Creating Collaborative Partnerships

Chapter 14 – 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

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 System

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

Unstructured collaboration (information collaboration) – includes document exchange, shared whiteboards, discussion forums, and email.
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;

• Explicit knowledge – consists of anything that can be documented, archived, and codified, often with the help of IT
• Tacit knowledge – knowledge contained in people’s heads

The following are two best practices for transferring or recreating tacit knowledge

• Shadowing – less experienced staff observe more experienced staff to learn how their more experienced counterparts approach their work
• Joint problem solving – a novice and expert work together on a project

Reason why organizations launch knowledge management programs: 

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT TECHNOLOGIES
•          Knowledge management systems include:
–      Knowledge repositories (databases)
–      Expertise tools
–      E-learning applications
–      Discussion and chat technologies
–      Search and data mining tools

•          Finding out how information flows through an organization
–      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
–      SNA provides a clear picture of how employees and divisions work together and can help identify key experts

SOCIAL NETWORKING

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)

Document management system (DMS)

Support the electronic capturing, storage, distribution, archival and accessing of documents. 

Digital assets management system (DAM)

Similar to DMS, generally works with binary rather than text files, such as multimedia files types. 

Web content management system (WCM)

Adds an additional layer to document and digital asset management that enables publishing content both to intranets and to public web sites. 

Content Management

Content management system vendor overview

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

BUSINESS WIKIS

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 – software that supports team interaction and dynamics including calendaring, scheduling, and videoconferencing

Videoconference - a set of interactive telecommunication technologies that allow two or more locations to interact via two-way video and audio transmissions simultaneously.

 Web conferencing - blends audio, video, and document-sharing technologies to create virtual meeting rooms where people “gather” at a password-protected Web site

Instant message

• 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

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