Chapter 15: 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

Collaboration systems : supports the work of teams by facilitating the sharing and flow of information

• Organization 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.

COLLABORATION SYSTEMS

An  IT based set of tools that supports the work of teams by facilitating the sharing and flow of information.

2 categories of collaboration :

·         Unstructured collaboration (information collaboration) : includes documents exchange, shared whiteboards, discussion forums and email.

·         Structured collaboration ( process collaboration) : involves shared participation in business processes such a workflow in which knowledge is hardcoded as rules.

Collaboration systems include :

•  Knowledge management systems
• Content management systems
• Workflow management systems
• Groupware systems

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTMES

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 systems – supports the capturing and use of an organization’s “know-how”

EXPLICIT AND TACIT KNOWLEDGE

Explicit knowledge – consists of anything that can be documented, archived, and codified, often with the of IT.

Tacit knowledge – knowledge contained in people’s heads.

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 notice and expert work together on a project

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND SOCIAL NETWORKING

Social networking analysis (SNA) – a process of mapping a group’s contacts (whether personel or profesional) to identify who knows whom and who works with whom.

SNA provides a clear picture of how employees and divisions works together and can help identify key experts.

CONTENT MANAGEMENT

Provides tools to manage the creation, storage, editing and publication of information in a collaboration environment.

CMS marketplace includes :

·         Document management systems (DMS)

·         Digital asset management systems (DAM)

·         Web content management systems (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

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 trough the business process

Messaging -based workflow systems – sends work assignments through an e-mail system

Database-based workflow systems – stores documents in central location and automatically asks the team members to access the document when it is their turn to edit the document.

GROUPWARE SYSTEMS

• Software that supports team interaction and dynamics including calendaring, scheduling and 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.

Web conferencing – blends audio, video, and documents 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.