TEAMS, PARTNERSHIPS AND ALLIANCES
Ø Organizations create and use teams, partnerships and alliances to;
§ Undertake new initiatives
§ Address both minor and major problems
§ Capitalize on significant opportunities
Ø Organizations create teams, partnerships and alliances both internally with employees and externally with other organizations
Ø Collaboration system – supports the work of teams by facilitating the sharing and flow of information
Information partnerships with other organizations
Ø 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
Ø 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
Ø The internet has dramatically increased the ease and availability for IT – enabled organizational alliance and partnerships
COLLABORATION SYSTEMS
Ø Collaboration solves specific business tasks such as telecommuting, online meetings, deploying applications, and remote project and sales management
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
1. Unstructured collaboration (information collaboration) – includes document exchange, shared whiteboards, discussion forums, and email.
2. Structured collaboration (process collaboration) – involves shared participation in business processes such as workflow in which knowledge is hard-coded as rules
Collaborative business functions
Ø Collaboration systems include;
§ Knowledge management systems
§ Content management systems
§ Workflow management systems
§ Groupware systems
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
Ø Knowledge management (KM) – involves capturing, classifying, evaluating, retrieving and sharing information assets in a way that provides context for effective decisions and actions
Ø Knowledge management system – supports the capturing and use of an organization’s “know-how”
EXPLICIT AND TACIT KNOWLEDGE
Ø 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
Ø 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
CONTENT MANAGEMENT
Ø Content management system (CMS) – provides tools to manage the creation, storage, editing and publication of information in a collaborative environment
Ø CMS marketplace includes;
§ Document management system (DMS)
§ Digital assets 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 allows 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 controls the movement of work through the business process
Ø Messaging-based workflow system – sends work assignments through an email 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
GROUPWARE SYSTEMS
Groupware technologies
Ø Groupware – software that supports teams interaction and dynamics including calendaring, scheduling and videoconferencing
WEB CONFERENCING
Ø Web conferencing – blends audio, video and document-sharing technologies to create virtual meeting rooms where people “gather” at a password-protected website
VIDEOCONFERENCING
Ø 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 MESSAGING
Ø Email 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 service that enables someone to create a kind of private chat room with another individual to communicate in real-time over the internet
Ø Instant messaging application
