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.