McGraw-Hill/Irwin © 2008 The McGraw-Hill Companies, All Rights Reserved

Chapter 15Chapter 15

Creating Collaborative Creating Collaborative PartnershipsPartnerships

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Learning Outcomes

15.1 Identify the different ways in which companies collaborate using technology

15.2 Compare the different categories of collaboration technologies

15.3 Define the fundamental concepts of a knowledge management system

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Learning Outcomes

15.4 Provide an examples of a content management system along with its business purpose

15.5 Evaluate the advantages of using a workflow management system

15.6 Explain how groupware can benefit a business

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Teams, Partnerships, and Alliances

• Organizations create and use teams, partnerships, and alliances to:– Undertake new initiatives– Address both minor and major problems– Capitalize on significant opportunities

• Organizations create teams, partnerships, and alliances both internally with employees and externally with other organizations

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Teams, Partnerships, and Alliances• Collaboration system – supports the work of teams by

facilitating the sharing and flow of information

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Teams, Partnerships, and Alliances

• 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

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Teams, Partnerships, and Alliances

• 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

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Collaboration Systems• Collaboration solves specific business

tasks such as telecommuting, online meetings, deploying applications, and remote project and sales management

• Collaboration system – an IT-based set of tools that supportsthe work of teams by facilitating the sharing and flow of information

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Collaboration Systems• 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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Collaboration Systems

• Collaborative business functions

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Collaboration Systems

• Collaboration systems include:– Knowledge management systems– Content management systems– Workflow management systems– Groupware systems

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Knowledge Management Systems

• 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”

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Explicit and Tacit Knowledge

• 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

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Explicit and Tacit Knowledge

• The following are two best practices for transferring or recreating tacit knowledge– Shadowing – less experienced staff

observe more experienced staff to learn how their more experienced counterparts approach their work

– Joint problem solving – a novice and expert work together on a project

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Explicit and Tacit Knowledge

• Reasons why organizations launch knowledge management programs

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KM Technologies

• 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

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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)

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Content Management• Content management system vendor overview

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WORKING WIKIS

• Wikis - Web-based tools that make it easy for users to add, remove, and change online content

• Business wikis - collaborative Web pages that allow users to edit documents, share ideas, or monitor the status of a project

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Workflow Management Systems• Work activities can be performed in series or in

parallel that involves people and automated computer systems

• Workflow – defines all the steps or business rules, from beginning to end, required for a business process

• 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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Workflow Management Systems

• 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

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Groupware Systems• Groupware technologies

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Groupware Systems• Groupware – software that supports team interaction

and dynamics including calendaring, scheduling, and videoconferencing

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VIDEOCONFERENCING

• Videoconference - a set of interactive telecommunication technologies that allow two or more locations to interact via two-way video and audio transmissions simultaneously

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WEB CONFERENCING

• Web conferencing - blends audio, video, and document-sharing technologies to create virtual meeting rooms where people “gather” at a password-protected Web site

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INSTANT MESSAGING

• E-mail is the dominant form of collaboration application, but real-time collaboration tools like instant messaging are creating a new communication dynamic

• 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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INSTANT MESSAGING

• Instant messaging application