Chapter 14 - Creating Collaborative Partnerships

Second last chapter, here we go~

TEAMS, PARTNERSHIP AND ALLIANCE

vOrganizations 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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vOrganizations create teams, partnerships, and alliances both internally with employees and externally with other organizations

vCollaboration 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 processe

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 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

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 includes 

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

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

KM TECHNOLOGIES 

Knowledge management systems include:

Knowledge repositories (databases)

Expertise tools

E-learning applications

Discussion and chat technologies

Search and data mining tools

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 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

INSTANT MESAGING 

E-mail is the dominant form of collaboration application, but real-time collaboration tools like instant messaging are creating a new communication dynamic

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