MGT 300 - Chapter 14

Creating Collaboration Partnerships

*Organizations create and use teams, partnerships and alliances to:

• ·         Undertake new initiatives
• ·         Address both minor and major problems
• ·         Capitalize on significant oppurtunities

*Organizations create teams, partnerships and alliances both internally with employees and externally with other organizations

Teams, Partnership and Alliances

*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 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 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, developing applications, and remote project and sale 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

• 1.      Unstructured collaboration (information collaboration) – includes document exchange, shared whiteboards, discussion forums and e-mail
• 2.      Structured collaboration (process collaboration) – involves shared participation in business processes such as workflow in which knowledge is hardcoded as rules

*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

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 marketplace includes:

• ·         Document management system (DMS)
• ·         Digital asset management system (DAM)
• ·         Web content management system (WCM)

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 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

Instant Messaging

·         E-mail 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