Chapter 15

Creating Collaborative Partnership

TEAMS, PARTNERSHIPS & 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 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

• 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 rule

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

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)

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


VIDEO CONFERENCING

Video conference – 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 where people “gather” at a password-protected website

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