Chapter 15: Creating Collaborative Partnerships

Teams, Partnerships and Alliance

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 non-strategic 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 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 exchange, shared whiteboards, discussion forums, and email.
• 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”.

Explicit and Tacit Knowledge

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.

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.

Content Management

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)

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 – sends work assignments through an email 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 – software that supports team interaction and dynamics including calendaring, scheduling, and video conferencing.

Groupware technologies.

Video Conferencing

Video conference - a set of interactive telecommunication technologies that allow two or more locations to interact via two-way video and audio transmissions simultaneously.

Web Conferencing

Web conferencing - blends audio, video, and document-sharing technologies to create virtual meeting rooms where people “gather” at a password-protected website.

Instant Messaging

Email 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.

Instant messaging application.