TEAMS, PARTNERSHIP AND ALLIANCES
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Organizations
create and use teams, partnerships, and alliances to:
– Undertake new initiatives
– Address both minor and major
problems
– Capitalize on significant
opportunities
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Organizations create
teams, partnerships, and alliances both internally with employees and
externally with other organizations
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Collaboration system – supports the work of teams by facilitating the sharing and flow of
information
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Organizations
form alliances 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
•
It
is just as important for an organization to form teams, partnerships, and
alliances with other organizations
•
An
organization that uses a core competency strategy will focus on its core
competency and form partnerships with other organizations to handle
nonstrategic business processes
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The
most common example of this is outsourcing payroll or accounting functions
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Many
organizations want to focus on the marketing and selling of a unique product or
service. These organizations do not want
to incur the expense of maintaining accounting or tax experts on staff, hence
they will outsource these functions to a business partner
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This
is a great time to refer back to the opening case
•
Discuss
how Levi’s core competency is brand-name differentiation and recognition, while
Wal-Mart’s core competency is retail cost leadership
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The
partnership between these two organizations enables cost-leadership selling of
a widely recognized brand name
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Information
technology can make a business partnership easier to establish and manage
– 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
– The Internet has dramatically
increased the ease and availability for IT-enabled organizational alliances and
partnerships
COLLABORATION SYSTEMS
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Collaboration
solves specific business tasks such as telecommuting, online meetings,
deploying applications, and remote project and sales management
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Collaboration
allows people, teams, and organizations to leverage and build upon the ideas
and talents of staff, suppliers, customers, and business partners
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It
involves a unique set of business challenges that:
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Include
complex interactions between people who may be in different locations and
desire to work across function and discipline areas
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Require
flexibility in work process and the ability to involve others quickly and
easily
•
Create
and share information rapidly and effortlessly within a team
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Increasingly,
organizations are extending their focus from internal operations like planning
and scheduling, enterprise resource planning and sales force automation, toward
operations beyond their own four walls with external customers and suppliers
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Collaboration system – an IT-based set of tools that
supports the work of teams by facilitating the sharing and flow of information
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Two
categories of collaboration
1. Unstructured collaboration
(information collaboration) - includes document exchange, shared whiteboards, discussion forums,
and e-mail
2. Structured collaboration (process
collaboration)
- involves shared participation in business processes such as workflow in which
knowledge is hardcoded as rules
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Collaborative
business functions
•
Collaboration
systems include:
1. Knowledge management system – supports the
capturing and use of an organization’s “know-how”
2. Content management system (CMS) – provides tools to manage the
creation, storage, editing, and publication of information in a collaborative
environment
3. Workflow management system – controls the movement of work
through a business process
4. Groupware – software that
supports team interaction and dynamics including calendaring, scheduling, and
videoconferencing
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
Knowledge management system – supports the
capturing and use of an organization’s “know-how”
•
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
•
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
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Knowledge
management systems include:
§ Knowledge repositories (databases)
§ Expertise tools
§ E-learning applications
§ Discussion and chat technologies
§ Search and data mining tools
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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)
Working wikis
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Wikis - Web-based tools that make it easy for users to add,
remove, and change online content
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Business wikis
- collaborative Web
pages that allow users to edit documents, share ideas, or monitor the status of
a project
Workflow Management
Systems
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Work
activities can be performed in series or in parallel that involves people and
automated computer systems
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Workflow – defines all the steps or business rules, from
beginning to end, required for a business process
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Workflow
management system – facilitates
the automation and management of business processes and controls the movement
of work through the business process
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Messaging-based
workflow system – sends work
assignments through an e-mail 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
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Groupware
technologies
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Groupware – software that supports team
interaction and dynamics including calendaring, scheduling, and videoconferencing
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Groupware
system advantage
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Groupware
falls into two categories:
1. Users of the groupware are working together at the
same time or different times (time difference)
2. Users are working together in the same place or in
different places (physical location difference)
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Videoconference
- is a set of interactive telecommunication technologies that allow two or
more locations to interact via two-way video and audio transmissions
simultaneously. It has also been called visual collaboration and is a type of
groupware. Videoconferencing uses telecommunications of audio and video to
bring people at different sites together for a meeting. This can be as simple
as a conversation between two people in private offices (point-to-point) or
involve several sites (multi-point) with more than one person in large rooms at
different sites. Besides the audio and visual transmission of people,
videoconferencing can be used to share documents, computer-displayed
information, and whiteboards
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Web
conferencing - blends audio, video, and document-sharing technologies
to create virtual meeting rooms where people “gather” at a password-protected
Web site. There, they can chat in conference calls or use real-time text
messages. They can mark up a shared document as if it were a blackboard, and
even watch live software demos or video clips. Perhaps the biggest surprise
about Web conferencing is its simplicity. Users only need to set up an account
and download a few small software files. The best part about a Web conference
is that attendees do not have to have the same hardware or software. Every
participant can see what is on anyone else’s screen, regardless of the
application being used
•
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
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