UNIT 3: CHAPTER 14

 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.