Chapter 15: Creating Collaborative Partnership
TEAMS, PARTNERSHIPS AND ALLIANCES
Ø Organizations
create and use teams, partnerships and
alliances to:
i.
Undertake
new initiatives
ii.
Address
both minor and major problems
iii.
Capitalize
on significant opportunities
Ø Organizations create teams,
partnerships and alliances both internally with employees and externally with
other organizations
Figure 1: teams, partnerships and
alliances within and external to an organization
§ Organizations from alliance and
partnerships with other organizations based on their core competency
1. Core competency: An organization’s key strength, a
business function that it does better than any of its competitors
2. Core competency strategy: Organization chooses to focus
specifically on its core competency and forms partnerships with other
organizations to handle nonstrategic business processes
3. Information partnerships: Occurs when two or more organizations cooperate by
integrating their IT systems, to provide customers with the best of what each
can offer.
§ Information technology can make a
business partnership easier to establish and manage
§ The internet has dramatically
increased the ease and availability for IT – enabled organizational alliance
and partnerships
COLLABORATION SYSTEMS
Collaboration
system: an IT-
based set of tools that supports the work of teams by facilitating the sharing
and flow of information.
Ø It solves specific business tasks
such as telecommuting, online meetings, deploying applications, and remote
project and sales management
Ø It allows people, teams and
organizations to leverage and build upon the ideas and talents of staff,
suppliers, customers and business partners.
Categories of collaboration:
i. Unstructured collaboration (information collaboration): includes document exchange,
shared whiteboards, discussion forums, and email.
It
can improve personal productivity, reducing the time spent searching for
information/chasing answer.
ii. Structured collaboration (process
collaboration) – involves shared participation in business processes such as
workflow in which knowledge is hard coded as rule
Figure 2: Typical Collaboration
Business Function:
Types of collaboration systems include:
a) Knowledge management systems
b) Content management systems
c) Workflow management systems
d) Groupware systems
a)
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
Ø Knowledge
management (KM): involves capturing, classifying, evaluating,
retrieving and sharing information assets to provide context for effective
decisions and actions.
Ø Knowledge
management system (KMS)/ know-how: supports the capturing, organization and know-how through an
organization. It to determine what information qualifies as knowledge and
provide information contained in spreadsheets, databases and doc.
EXPLICT AND TACIT KNOWLEDGE
Intellectual and knowledge-based assets fall into two
categories;
1. Explicit
knowledge: consists
of anything that can be documented, archived and codified with the help of IT. Examples:
patents, trademarks, business plan and customers list.
2. Tacit
knowledge: knowledge
contained in people’s heads. Examples are how to recognize, generate and manage
information that arises in people’s head
Two best practices for transferring or recreating
tacit knowledge
a) Shadowing:
less experienced staff observe more
experienced staff to learn how their more experienced counterparts approach
their work
b) Joint problem
solving: new
employees and expert employees work together on a project which will bring out
the details on how the expert handles responsibilities and work issues.
Key reasons why organization launch knowledge
management system:
b) CONTENT
MANAGEMENT
Ø Content Management System (CMS): provides tools to manage the
creation, storage, editing and publication of information in a collaborative
environment.
Types of CMS:
i.
Document
management system (DMS)
Ø Support the electronic capturing,
storage, distribution, archiving and accessing of doc.
·
It
to optimize the use of doc within an organization independent of the publishing
medium and provides a doc repository with information about other information
ii.
Digital assets management system (DAM)
·
Through
similar to doc management, DAM works with binary rather than text files such as
multimedia files types. It emphasizes file manipulated and conversation. E.g.,
converting GIF files.
iii.
Web
content management system (WCM)
·
Adds
an additional layer to doc and digital asset management that enables publishing
content both to intranets and to public websites
WORKING WIKIS
Ø Wikis: web-based tools that make it easy
for users to add, remove, and change online content
Ø Business
wikis: collaborative
web pages that allows users to edit documents, share ideas or monitor the
status of a project
c) WORKFLOW
MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
Ø Workflow:
defines all the steps or business
rules, from beginning to end, required for a business process.
Ø Workflow
management system: facilitates
the automation and management of business processes and controls the movement
of work through the business process. Work activities can be performed in
series or in parallel that involves people and automated computer systems
Types of workflow systems:
i.
Messaging-based workflow system: sends work assignments through an
email system. It where each time a step is completed, system automatically
sends the work to the next individuals in line. Example: each time the member
complete the project, the systems automatically sends the document to the next
team member.
ii.
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
d) GROUPWARE
SYSTEMS
Ø Groupware:
software that supports teams’
interaction and dynamics including calendaring, scheduling and
videoconferencing. It used to communicate, cooperate, coordinate, solve problem
and negotiate.
Figure
3: Groupware systems
Figure 4: Groupware systems advantages
i. VIDEOCONFERENCING/ VISUAL
COLLABORATION
Ø
A set of interactive
telecommunication technologies that allow two or more locations to interact via
two-way video and audio transmissions simultaneously
ii. WEB CONFERENCING
Ø Blends
audio, video and document-sharing technologies to create virtual meeting rooms
where people “gather” at a password-protected website
iii. INSTANT
MESSAGING
a) Email: the dominant form of collaboration application, but
real-time collaboration tools like instant messaging are creating a new
communication dynamic
b) Instant messaging: types 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
§ Features of IM:
i.
Web links: share
links to favorite websites
ii.
Images: look at
an image stored on someone else’s computer
iii.
Sounds: play
sounds
iv.
Files: share
files by sending them directly to another IM
v. Talk: use the
Internet instead of a phone to talk
vi.
Streaming
content: receive real time/ near real time stock quotes and news
vii.
Instant messages:
receive immediate text messages
Fugure
4: Instant messaging application
