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 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 processes
❤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 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 e-mail
- 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:
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Knowledge management systems
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Content management systems
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Workflow management systems
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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
KM Technologies
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Knowledge management systems include:
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Knowledge repositories (databases)
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Expertise tools
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E-learning applications
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Discussion and chat technologies
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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
- SNA provides a clear picture of how employees and divisions work together and can help identify key experts
Social Networking
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:
π§Document management system (DMS)
π§Digital asset management system (DAM)
π§Web content management system (WCM)
❤ Document management system (DMS)
Supports the electronic capturing, storage, distribution, archival, and accessing of documents
❤ Digital asset management system (DAM)
Similar to DMS, generally works with binary rather than text files, such as multimedia files types.
❤ Web content management system (WCM)
Adds an additional layer to document and digital asset management that enables publishing content both to intranets and to public Web sites
❤ Content Management
Content management system vendor overview
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
❤ Business wikis
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
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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
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Same
time
“Synchronous”
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Different
time
“Asynchronous”
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Same
place
“collocated”
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Presentation
support
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Shared
computers
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Different
place
“Distance”
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Videophones, chats
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Email, Workflow
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❤ Groupware – software that supports team interaction and dynamics including calendaring, scheduling, and videoconferencing
VIDEOCONFERENCING
❤ Videoconference - 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 Web site.
INSTANT MESSAGING
❤ 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
Instant messaging application
THE END OF CHAPTER 14