CHAPTER 14: CREATING COLLABORATIVE PARTNERSHIPS

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 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- 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 other
• 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 exchanges, 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:
• 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"
• 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

Explicit and Tacit knowledge:

• 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 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:

• content management system (CMS) - provides tools to manage the creation, storage, editing, and publication of information in a collaborative environment
• CMS marketplaces includes:
• Document management system (DMS)
• Digital asset management system (DAM)
• Web content management system (WCM)
• 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

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 - send 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 edit the document

Groupware Systems:

• groupware technologies

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

Instant Messaging:

• e-mail is the dominant from of collaboration application, but real-time collaboration tools like instant messaging are creating new communication dynamic
• 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

FRIDAY

15 DECEMBER 2017