Chapter 14 – Creating Collaborative Partnerships

Chapter 14 – Creating Collaborative Partnerships

Teams, Partnerships, and Alliances

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 from alliance 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 partnerships – 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 alliance and partnerships

Collaboration System

• 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 hard-coded 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

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 assets 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 allows 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 technologies

Web 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



Instant message

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

• Instant messaging – types 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