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
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
Web 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
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
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