Chapter 15 – 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
  • Capitalize on significant opportunities


  • Organizations create teams, partnerships and alliances both internally with employees and externally with other organizations
  • Collaboration system – supports the work of teams by facilitating the sharing and flow of information






Organizations from alliance 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
  • Information technology can make a business partnership easier to establish and manage
  • Information partnerships – 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 alliance and partnerships



Collaboration System

  • 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 supports the work of teams by facilitating the sharing and flow of information.
Two categories of collaboration
  • Unstructured collaboration (information collaboration) – includes document exchange, shared whiteboards, discussion forums, and email.
  • Structured collaboration (process collaboration) – involves shared participation in business processes such as workflow in which knowledge is hard-coded as rules

Collaborative business functions





Collaboration systems include;

  • Knowledge management systems
  • Content management systems
  • Workflow management systems
  • Groupware systems


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”


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’s heads


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


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 assets management system (DAM)
  • Web content management system (WCM)


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 allows users to edit documents, share ideas or monitor the status of a project




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
  • Messaging-based workflow system – sends work assignments through an email 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

Groupware technologies





Web conferencing
Video conference – A set of interactive telecommunication technologies that allow two or more locations to interact via two-way video and audio transmissions simultaneously



Instant message

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

  • Instant messaging – types 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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