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
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
Teams,
Partnerships, and Alliances
v Organizations
create and use teams, partnerships, and alliances to:
§Undertake
new initiatives
§Address
both minor and major problems
§Capitalize
on significant opportunities
§
v Organizations
create teams, partnerships, and alliances both internally with employees and
externally with other organizations
v 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
v 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
v The Internet has dramatically increased
the ease and availability for IT-enabled organizational alliances and
partnerships
Collaboration
Systems
v Collaboration
solves specific business tasks such as telecommuting, online meetings,
deploying applications, and remote project and sales management
v Collaboration
system – an
IT-based
set of tools that supports
the
work of teams by facilitating the
sharing and flow information
v 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
v Collaboration systems include:
§Knowledge
management systems
§Content
management systems
§Workflow
management systems
§Groupware
systems
Knowledge
Management Systems
v Knowledge
management (KM) – involves capturing, classifying,
evaluating, retrieving, and sharing information assets in a way that provides
context for effective decisions and actions
v Knowledge
management system – supports the capturing and use of an
organization’s “know-how”
Explicit
and Tacit Knowledge
v 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
v 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
KM
Technologies
v Knowledge management systems include:
§Knowledge
repositories (databases)
§Expertise
tools
§E-learning
applications
§Discussion
and chat technologies
§Search
and data mining tools
INSTANT
MESSAGING
v E-mail is the dominant form of
collaboration application, but real-time collaboration tools like instant
messaging are creating a new communication dynamic
v 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
