Chapter 14 : Creating collaborative Partnership

Teams, Partnerships and Alliances

i) Organization create and use teams, partnerships and alliances to :
- Undertake new initiatives
- Address both minor and major problems
- Capitalize on significant opportunities
ii) 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 the flow of information

 

 

 

 

• Organizations from 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 - organizations 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

• Two categories of collaboration :

i)  Unstructured collaboration ( Information collaboration ) - includes document exchange, shared whiteboards, discussion forums, e-mail

ii)  Structured collaboration (process collaboration) - involves shared participation in business processes such as workflow in which knowledge is hard coded as rules 

• Organizations from 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 - organizations 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

• Two categories of collaboration :

i)  Unstructured collaboration ( Information collaboration ) - includes document exchange, shared whiteboards, discussion forums, e-mail

ii)  Structured collaboration (process collaboration) - involves shared participation in business processes such as workflow in which knowledge is hardcoded as rules 

Knowledge Management Systems

• Knowledge management (KM) - involves capturing, classifying, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing information assets in a way that provide 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 :

i) Explicit knowledge - consists of anything that can be documented, archived, and codified, often with the help of IT
ii) Tacit knowledge - knowledge contained in people's heads

• The following are two practices for transferring or recreating tacit knowledge :

- Shadowing - less experienced staff observed 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 :

- Increase profits and revenues
- Rotain key talent and expertise
- Improve customer retention and/or satisfaction
- Defend market share against new entrants
- Accelerate time to market with products
- Penetrate new market segments
- Reduce cost
- Develop new products and services

KM Technologies

• Knowledge management systems include :
  - Knowledge repositories (database)
  - 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
- SNA provides a clear picture of how employees and divisions work together and can help identify key experts

Social networking

Content Management system

provides tools to manage the creation , storage, editing, publication of information in a collaborative environment

CMS marketplace includes  :

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 System

• Workflow - defines all the steps or business rules, from beginning to the end, required for a business process
• Workflow management system - facilitates the automation and management of the 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 management 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

  

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 document-sharing technologies to create virtual meeting rooms where people "gather" at a password-protected Web site.

Instant messaging

-instant messaging : type of communications services that enables someone to create a kind of private chat room with another individual to communicate in real-time over the internet

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