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 form alliances 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 partnership – 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 alliances and partnerships

•          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 e-mail

2.       Structured collaboration (process collaboration) - involves shared participation in business processes such as workflow in which knowledge is hardcoded as rules

•          Collaboration systems include:

1.       Knowledge management systems

2.       Content management systems

3.       Workflow management systems

4.       Groupware systems

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

•          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

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

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND SOCIAL SYSTEM

–      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

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 asset management system (DAM)

–      Web content management system (WCM)

DOCUMENT  MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Supports the electronic capturing, storage, distribution, archival,  and accessing of documents

WEB CONTENT MANAGEMENT

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

WORKING WIKI'S

•          Wikis - Web-based tools that make it easy for users to add, remove, and change online content

•          Business wikis - collaborative Web pages that allow users to edit documents, share ideas, or monitor the status of a project

WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

•          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 e-mail 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 TECHNOLOGIES

•          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.