MGT300 - CHAPTER 14

               CREATING  COLLABORATIVE  PARTNERSHIP

Teams, Partnership and Alliance

Ø  Organizations create and use teams, partnership and alliances to:

*Undertake new initiatives

*Address both minor and major problems

*Capitalize on significant opportunities

Ø  Organizations create teams, partnership and alliances both internally with employees and externally with other organizations

Ø  Organizations forms alliances and partnerships with other organizations based on their core competency

*Core competency – an organization’s key strength, a business function that is does better than any of its competitors

*Core competency strategy – organization choose to focus specifically on its core competency and forms partnerships with other organizations to handle nonstrategic business process

Ø  Information technology can makes a business partnership easier to establish and manage :

*Information partnership – occurs when two or more organizations cooperate by integrating their IT system, thereby providing customer with the best of what each can offer

Ø  The internet has dramatically increased the ease and availability for IT enabled organizational alliances and partnerships

Collaboration System

Ø  Collaboration solves specific business tasks such as telecommuting, online meeting, deploying application and remote project and sales managements

Ø  Collaboration system – an IT-based set of tools that supports the work of teams by facilitating the sharing and flow of information

Ø  Two categories of collaboration :

*Unstructured collaboration (information collaboration) – includes documents exchange, shared whiteboards, discussion forums and e-mail

*Structured collaboration (process collaboration) – involves shared participation in business processes such as workflow in which knowledge is hardcoded as rules\

Ø  Collaboration system includes :

*Knowledge Management (KM) – involves capturing , classifying, evaluating, retrieving and sharing 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”

*Intellectual and knowledge-based assets falls into two categories:

  -Explicit knowledge – consist of anything that can be documented, archieved and codified, often with the help of IT

  -Tacit knowledge – knowledge contained in people’s head

*The following are two best practices for transferring or recreating tacit knowledge

  -Shadowing – less experienced staff observed more experienced staff to learnt how their more experienced counterparts approach their work

  -Joint problem solving – a novice and expert work together on a project

KM Technologies

Ø  Knowledge repositories (databases)

Ø  Expertise tools

Ø  E-learning applications

Ø  Discussion and chart technologies

Ø  Search and data mining tools

KM and Social Networking

Ø  Social networking analysis (SNA) - a process of mapping a group’s contacts (whether professional or personal ) to identify who knows whom and who work with whom

*SNA provides a clear picture of how employees and divisions work together and can help identify key experts

Content Management

Ø  Content management system (CMS) – provide 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

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 allow users to edit documents, share ideas or monitor the status of a project

                                         

Workflow Management Systems

Ø  Work activities can be performed in series or in parallel that involves people and automated computer 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 control the movement of work through the business process

Ø  Messaging-based workflow system – sends work assignments through an e-mail system

Ø  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

Ø  E-mail is the dominant form of collaboration application, but real-time collaboration tools like instant messaging are creating a new communication dynamic

Ø  Instant messaging – types 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