CHAPTER 14 : CREATING COLLABORATION PARTNERSHIP

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

Information partnerships 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

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 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

Reasons why organizations launch knowledge management programs

 

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

 

WEB CONFERENCING

·         Web conferencing – blends audio, video and document-sharing technologies to create virtual meeting rooms where people “gather” at a password-protected website

VIDEOCONFERENCING

·         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 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