MGT300: Chapter 14 - Creating Collaborative Partnerships

TEAMS, PARTNERSHIPS AND ALLIANCES

Organizations create and use teams, partnerships, and alliances to: undertake new initiatives, address both minor and major problems and capitalize on significant opportunities. Organizations create teams, partnership, and alliances both internally with employees and externally with other organizations

Organizations from 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 system, 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

• Collaboration solves specific business tasks such as telecommuting, online meetings, deploying applications and remote project and sales management.
• Collaboration system- supports the work of teams by facilitating the sharing and the flow of information

Identify the different ways in which companies collaborate using technology:

• Companies must be able to collaborate. Without collaboration companies simply would have a very difficult time operating. Companies collaborate in a number of ways including document exchange, shared whiteboards, discussion forums and e-mail.

Compare the different categories of collaboration technologies:

Two categories of collaboration:

Unstructured collaboration (information collaboration): includes document exchange, shared whiteboards, discussion forums and e-mail.

Structured collaboration (process collaboration): involves shared participation in business processes such as workflow in which knowledge is hardcoded as rules.

Collaboration systems also include:

                ⇒Knowledge management systems

                ⇒Content management systems

                ⇒Workflow management systems

                ⇒Groupware systems

KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Define the fundamental concepts of a 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”

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’ heads

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

KM TECHNOLOGIES

Knowledge management systems include:

                ↣Knowledge repositories (databases)

                ↣Expertise tools

                ↣E-learning applications

                ↣Discussion and chat technologies

                ↣Search and data mining tools

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