Chapter 15 : Creating Collaborative Partnerships

Teams, Partnerships, and Alliances :

• The core competency of an organization is its key strength, a business function that it does better than any of its competitors.
• A core competency strategy is one in which an organization chooses to focus specifically on what it does best ( its core competency ) and forms partnerships and alliances with other specialist organizations to handle nonstrategic business processes.
• An 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.

Collaboration Systems :

• Is an IT-based set of tools that supports the work of teams by facilitating the sharing and flow of information.
• Collaboration systems meet unique business challenges that :

1. include complex interactions between people who may be in different locations and desire to work across function and discipline areas.
2. require flexibility in work process and the ability to involve others quickly and easily.
3. call for creating and sharing information rapidly and effortlessly within a team.

• Collaboration systems fall into one of two categories :

1. unstructured collaboration.
2. structured collaboration.

Knowledge Management Systems :

• Knowledge management (KM) - involves capturing, classifying, evaluating, retrieving, and sharing information assets in away that provides context for effective decisions and actions.
• A knowledge management system (KMS) supports the capturing, organization, and dissemination of knowledge throughout an organization.

Explicit and Tacit Knowledge :

• Explicit knowledge consists of anything that can be documented, archived, and codified, often with the help of IT.
• Tacit knowledge is the knowledge contained people's heads.
• Shadowing and joint problem solving are two best practices for transferring or re-creating tacit knowledge inside an organization.

                                 

Content Management Systems : 
=> Provides tools to manage the creation, storage, editing, and publication of information in a collaborative environment.

Working Wikis :

=> Are web-based tools that make it easy for users to add, remove, and change online content.

Workflow Management Systems :

Workflow - all the steps or business rules, from beginning to end, required for a business process.

Workflow management systems - facilitate the automation and management of business processes and control the movement of work through the business process.

Messaging-based workflow systems - send work assignments through an e-mail system.

Database-based workflow systems - store documents in a central location and automatically ask the team members to access the document when it is their turn to edit the document.

Groupware Systems :

=> Is software that supports team interaction and dynamics including calendaring, scheduling, and videoconferencing.

Groupware systems fall along two primary categories :

1. users of the groupware are working together at the same time or different times.

2. users are working together in the same place or in different places.

Videoconferencing :

=> Is a set of interactive telecommunication technologies that allow two or more locations to interact via two-way video and audio transmissions simultaneously.

Web Conferencing :

=> Blends audio, video, and document-sharing technologies to create virtual meeting rooms where people 'gather' at a password-protected website.

Instant Messaging :

=> Is a type of communications service that enables someone to create a kind of private chat room with another individual in order to communicate in real time over the Internet.

Most of the popular instant messaging programs provide a variety of features, such as :

1. web links.

2. images.

3. sounds.

4. files.

5. talk.

6. streaming content.

7. instant messages.