- 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
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
- 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
Collaboration Systems
- 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
KM Technologies
- Knowledge management systems include:
- Expertise tools
- E-learning applications
- Discussion and chat technologies
- Search and data mining tools
KM and Social Networking
- Finding out how information flows through an organization
- 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)
- Supports the electronic capturing, storage, distribution, archival, and accessing of documents
Digital Asset 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
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
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
- Web conferencing - blends audio, video, and document-sharing technologies to create virtual meeting rooms people "gather" at a password-protected Web site
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