Creating Collaborative Partnerships
Organizations create and use teams,
partnership, and alliances to undertake new initiatives, address both minor and
major problems and also capitalize on significant opportunities.
Organizations create teams,
partnerships, and alliances both internally with employees and externally with
other organizations.
Collaboration system - support 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 – an organization chooses to focus specifically on its core
competency and forms partnerships with other organizations to handle
nonstrategic business processes.
Information partnership – occurs when two or more organizations cooperate by
integrating their IT systems.
The internet has dramatically
increased the ease and availability for IT enabled organizational alliances and
partnerships.
Collaboration systems – an IT based set of tools that supports the work of teams by
facilitating the sharing and flow of information.
Collaboration solvespecific business
tasks such as telecommuting, online meetings, developing applications, and
remote project and sales management.
Categories of collaboration
Unstructured collaboration (
information collaboration)
Structured collaboration (process
collaboration)
§ Collaboration business functions
Collaboration systems include:
- Knowledge management systems
- Content management systems
- Workflow management systems
- Groupware systems
Knowledge management systems
Supports the capturing and use of an
organization’s “know-how”.
Knowledge management –involves capturing, classifying, evaluating, retrieving, and
sharing information assets in a way that provides context for effective
decisions and actions.
Explicit and Tacit
knowledge
Individuals must determine what information qualifies as
intellectual and knowledge-based assets.
Intellectual and knowledge-based assets fall into two
categories:
Explicit knowledge – consist of anything that can be
documented, archived, and codified, often with the help of IT.
Examples: patents, trademarks,
business plans, marketing research, and customer list.
Tacit knowledge – knowledge contain in people’s heads.
Several years to know the knowledge.
Two ways 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.
Benefit using knowledge
management systems:
Knowledge management
systems:
- Knowledge repositories (databases)
- Expertise tools
- E-learning applications
- Discussion and chat technologies
- Search and data mining tools
Knowledge management
and social networking
Finding out how information flows through an organization.
Social networking
analysis (SNA) – a
process of mapping a group’s contact (whether personal or professional) to
identify who works with whom.
SNA provides a clear picture of how
employees and divisions work together and can help identify key experts.
They also search the information about a person or
organizations before do the collaboration with them.
- Social networking
Content management
systems (CMS)
Provides tools to manage the creation, storage, editing, and
publication of information in a collaborative environment.
CMS marketplace:
- Document management system (DMS)
- Digital asset management system (DAM)
- Web content management (WCM)
Document management
system (DMS)
Supports the electronic capturing, storage, distribution,
archival, and accessing of documents.
Digital asset
management (DAM)
Similar to DMS, work with binary rather than text files, such
as multimedia file types.
Adds an additional layer to document and digital asset
management that enables publishing content both to intranets and to public web
sites.
Web content management
(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 to 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 process and controls the movement of work through the
business process.
Messaging based workflow system – send work assignment
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 support team interaction and dynamic including
calendaring, scheduling, and videoconferencing.
Videoconference – a set of interactive
telecommunication technologies that allow two or more location to interact via
two-way video 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 of collaboration application, but
real-time collaboration tools like instant messaging re creating a new
communication dynamic.
Instant messaging – type of communications service that
enables someone to create kind of private chat room with another individual to
communicate in real-time over the internet.
