CHAPTER 14: CREATING COLLABORATION PARTNERSHIP

CHAPTER 14: CREATING COLLABORATION PARTNERSHIP







⇒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 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 include:

↪Knowledge management systems

↪Content management systems

↪Workflow management systems

↪Groupware 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”

 ⇒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

↪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

⇒Knowledge management systems include:

↪Knowledge repositories (databases)

↪Expertise tools

↪E-learning applications

↪Discussion and chat technologies

↪Search and data mining tools

↪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

⇒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)

⇒Supports the electronic capturing, storage, distribution, archival,  and accessing of documents

⇒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

⇒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

⇒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

↪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 – software that supports team interaction and dynamics including calendaring, scheduling, and 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 - blends audio, video, and document-sharing technologies to create virtual meeting rooms where people “gather” at a password-protected Web site.

↪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