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

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

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

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;

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

           - 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:

- Knowledge repositories (databases)
- 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

- 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)

• 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