CHAPTER 14 : CREATING COLLABORATIVE PARTNERSHIPS

TEAMS, PARTNERSHIP AND ALLIANCES

•          Organizations create and use teams, partnerships, and alliances to:

–      Undertake new initiatives

–      Address both minor and major problems

–      Capitalize on significant opportunities

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•          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

–      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

COLLABORATION SYSTEMS

•          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

•          Collaborative business functions

•          Collaboration systems include:

1.       Knowledge management system 

2.       Content management system (CMS)

3.       Workflow management system

4.    Groupware 

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”

•          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

2.       Joint problem solving – a novice and expert work together on a project

            Reasons why organizations launch knowledge management programs

•          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

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)

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 allow 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 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 Systems

•          Groupware technologies

  

•          Groupware system advantage

•          Groupware falls into two categories:

1.       Users of the groupware are working together at the same time or different times (time difference)

2.       Users are working together in the same place or in different places (physical location difference)

•          Videoconference -  is a set of interactive telecommunication technologies that allow two or more locations to interact via two-way video and audio transmissions simultaneously. It has also been called visual collaboration and is a type of groupware.

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

•          Instant messaging - type 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