CHAPTER 15 : CREATING COLLABORATION
TEAMS, PARTNERSHIPS AND ALLIANCES
- Organizations create and use teams, partnerships and alliances to;
Ø Undertake new initiatives
Ø Address both minor and major problems
Ø 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 SYSTEMS
Two categories of collaboration
§ Unstructured collaboration (information collaboration)
§ Structured collaboration (process collaboration)

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
§ Knowledge management (KM) – involves capturing, classifying, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing information assets in a way that provides context for effective decisions and actions
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
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

GROUPWARE SYSTEM
INSTANT MESSAGING· 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.