Teams, Partnerships, and Alliances
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.
Organizations form alliances 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.
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:
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
~Collaborative business functions~
Collaboration systems include:
1)Knowledge management systems
2)Content management systems
3)Workflow management systems
4)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:
1)Explicit knowledge – consists of anything
that can be documented, archived, 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:
1)Shadowing – less experienced staff
observe more experienced staff to learn how their more experienced counterparts
approach their work
2)Joint problem solving – a novice and
expert work together on a project
Reasons why organizations launch knowledge
management programs
~KM Technologies~
Knowledge management systems include:
1)Knowledge repositories (databases)
2)Expertise tools
3)E-learning applications
4)Discussion and chat technologies
5)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)
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 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
~Groupware Systems~
Groupware technologies
Groupware – software that supports team
interaction and dynamics including calendaring, scheduling, and
videoconferencing
~VIDEO CONFERENCING~
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~
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~
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
Instant messaging application
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