chapter 15- creating collaborative partnership

Organizations create and use teams, partnerships and alliances to:

1. -Undertake new initiatives
2. -Address both minor and major problems
3. -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.

Teams, partnerships 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 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.

2 categories of collaboration

1. Unstructured collaboration (information collaboration)- includes document exchange, shared whiteboard, 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 system

-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-support the capturing and use of an organization's ''know-how''

Explicit nd Tacit knowledge

• Intellectual and knowledge-based assets fall into two categories

1. Explicit knowledge- consists of anything that can be documented, archieved and codified often with the help of IT.
2. 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 staff to learn how their more experienced counterparts approach their work.

-Joint poblem solving- a novice and expert work together on a project.

KM Technologies systems included:

-Knowledge repositories, expertise tools, E-learning applicants, discussion and chat technologies.

KM and social networking

Finding out how information flows through an organization

• Social networking analysis (SNA)-  a process of mapping a group's contacts to identify who knows whom and who works with whom
• SNA provides a clear picture of how employees and division work together and can help identify key experts.

Content Management system (CMS)- provides tools to manage the creation, storage,editing and publication of information in a collaborative envitonment.

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

• Workflow-defines all the steps or business rules, from begining 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-sends work assignments through an e-mail system.
• Database-baesed workflow system-stores documents in a central location and automatically asks the team members to acess the document when it is their turn to edit the document.

Groups systems

• Groupware-software that supports team interaction and dynamics including calendaring, scheduling and videoconferencing.
• Videoconference-a set of interactive telecommunication technologies that allow two or more locations to interact via two-way video and 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- type of communications services that enables someone to create a kind of private chat room with another individual to communicate in real-time over the internet.