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:

• 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
• Collaboration Systems

• 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

• KM Technologies

• 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 

• 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:
• Document management system (DMS)
• Digital asset management system (DAM)
• 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 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
• 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 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