Kenneth C. Laudon,Jane P. Laudon Management Information System 12th Edition pdf

Changing scope of the firm

. The work of the firm has changed from a single

location to multiple locations—offices or factories throughout a region, a

nation, or even around the globe. For instance, Henry Ford developed the

first mass-production automobile plant at a single Dearborn, Michigan fac-

tory. In 2010, Ford expected to produce about 3 million automobiles and

employ over 200,000 employees at 90 plants and facilities worldwide. With

this kind of global presence, the need for close coordination of design, pro-

duction, marketing, distribution, and service obviously takes on new impor-

tance and scale. Large global companies need to have teams working on a

global basis.

•

Emphasis on innovation

. Although we tend to attribute innovations in busi-

ness and science to great individuals, these great individuals are most likely

working with a team of brilliant colleagues, and all have been preceded by a

long line of earlier innovators and innovations. Think of Bill Gates and Steve

Jobs (founders of Microsoft and Apple), both of whom are highly regarded

innovators, and both of whom built strong collaborative teams to nurture and

support innovation in their firms. Their initial innovations derived from

close collaboration with colleagues and partners. Innovation, in other words,

is a group and social process, and most innovations derive from collaboration

among individuals in a lab, a business, or government agencies. Strong col-

laborative practices and technologies are believed to increase the rate and

quality of innovation.

•

Changing culture of work and business

. Most research on collaboration

supports the notion that diverse teams produce better outputs, faster, than

individuals working on their own. Popular notions of the crowd 

(“crowdsourcing,” and the “wisdom of crowds”) also provide cultural support

for collaboration and teamwork.

BUSINESS BENEFITS OF COLLABORATION AND

TEAMWORK

There are many articles and books that have been written about collaboration,

some of them by business executives and consultants, and a great many by aca-

demic researchers in a variety of businesses. Nearly all of this research is anec-

dotal. Nevertheless, among both business and academic communities there is a

general belief that the more a business firm is “collaborative,” the more suc-

cessful it will be, and that collaboration within and among firms is more essen-

tial than in the past.

A recent global survey of business and information systems managers found

that investments in collaboration technology produced organizational improve-

ments that returned over four times the amount of the investment, with the

greatest benefits for sales, marketing, and research and development functions

(Frost and White, 2009). Another study of the value of collaboration also found

that the overall economic benefit of collaboration was significant: for every

word seen by an employee in e-mails from others, $70 of additional revenue

was generated (Aral, Brynjolfsson, and Van Alstyne, 2007).

Table 2-2 summarizes some of the benefits of collaboration identified by

previous writers and scholars. Figure 2-7 graphically illustrates how collabora-

tion is believed to impact business performance.

While there are many presumed benefits to collaboration, you really need a

supportive business firm culture and the right business processes before you

can achieve meaningful collaboration. You also need a healthy investment in

collaborative technologies. We now examine these requirements.

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Part One

Organizations, Management, and the Networked Enterprise

TABLE 2-2

BUSINESS BENEFITS OF COLLABORATION

BENEFIT

RATIONALE

Productivity

People working together can complete a complex task faster than the

same number of people working in isolation from one another. There

will be fewer errors.

Quality

People working collaboratively can communicate errors, and correct

actions faster, when they work together than if they work in

isolation. Can lead to a reduction in buffers and time delay among

production units.

Innovation

People working collaboratively in groups can come up with more

innovative ideas for products, services, and administration than the

same number working in isolation from one another.

Customer service

People working together in teams can solve customer complaints and

issues faster and more effectively than if they were working in

isolation from one another.

Financial performance (profitability, As a result of all of the above, collaborative firms have 

sales, and sales growth)

superior sales growth and financial performance.

FIGURE 2-7

REQUIREMENTS FOR COLLABORATION

Successful collaboration requires an appropriate organizational structure and culture, along with

appropriate collaboration technology.

BUILDING A COLLABORATIVE CULTURE AND BUSINESS

PROCESSES

Collaboration won’t take place spontaneously in a business firm, especially if

there is no supportive culture or business processes. Business firms, especially

large firms, had in the past a reputation for being “command and control”

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Chapter 2

Global E-business and Collaboration

59

organizations where the top leaders thought up all the really important matters,

and then ordered lower-level employees to execute senior management plans.

The job of middle management supposedly was to pass messages back and

forth, up and down the hierarchy.

Command and control firms required lower-level employees to carry out

orders without asking too many questions, with no responsibility to improve

processes, and with no rewards for teamwork or team performance. If your

workgroup needed help from another work group, that was something for the

bosses to figure out. You never communicated horizontally, always vertically,

so management could control the process. As long as employees showed up for

work, and performed the job satisfactorily, that’s all that was required. Together,

the expectations of management and employees formed a culture, a set of

assumptions about common goals and how people should behave. Many busi-

ness firms still operate this way.

A collaborative business culture and business processes are very different.

Senior managers are responsible for achieving results but rely on teams of

employees to achieve and implement the results. Policies, products, designs,

processes, and systems are much more dependent on teams at all levels of

the organization to devise, to create, and to build products and services.

Teams are rewarded for their performance, and individuals are rewarded for

their performance in a team. The function of middle managers is to build the

teams, coordinate their work, and monitor their performance. In a collabora-

tive culture, senior management establishes collaboration and teamwork as

vital to the organization, and it actually implements collaboration for the

senior ranks of the business as well.

TOOLS AND TECHNOLOGIES FOR COLLABORATION AND

TEAMWORK

A collaborative, team-oriented culture won’t produce benefits if there are no

information systems in place to enable collaboration. Currently there are hun-

dreds of tools designed to deal with the fact that, in order to succeed in our jobs,

we are all dependent on one another, our fellow employees, customers, suppli-

ers, and managers. Table 2-3 lists the most important types of collaboration soft-

ware tools. Some high-end tools like IBM Lotus Notes are expensive, but power-

ful enough for global firms. Others are available online for free (or with

premium versions for a modest fee) and are suitable for small businesses. Let’s

look more closely at some of these tools.

TABLE 2-3

FIFTEEN CATEGORIES OF COLLABORATIVE SOFTWARE TOOLS

E-mail and instant messaging

White boarding

Collaborative writing

Web presenting

Collaborative reviewing/editing

Work scheduling

Event scheduling

Document sharing (including wikis)

File sharing

Mind mapping

Screen sharing

Large audience Webinars

Audio conferencing

Co-browsing

Video conferencing

Source:

mindmeister.com, 2009.

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Part One

Organizations, Management, and the Networked Enterprise

E - m a i l   a n d   I n s t a n t   M e s s a g i n g   ( I M )

E-mail and instant messaging have been embraced by corporations as a major

communication and collaboration tool supporting interaction jobs. Their soft-

ware operates on computers, cell phones, and other wireless handheld devices

and includes features for sharing files as well as transmitting messages. Many

instant messaging systems allow users to engage in real-time conversations

with multiple participants simultaneously. Gartner technology consultants

predict that within a few years, instant messaging will be the “de facto tool” for

voice, video, and text chat for 95 percent of employees in big companies.

S o c i a l   N e t w o r k i n g

We’ve all visited social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, which

feature tools to help people share their interests and interact. Social networking

tools are quickly becoming a corporate tool for sharing ideas and collaborating

among interaction-based jobs in the firm. Social networking sites such as

Linkedin.com provide networking services to business professionals, while

other niche sites have sprung up to serve lawyers, doctors, engineers, and even

dentists. IBM built a Community Tools component into its Lotus Notes collabo-

ration software to add social networking features. Users are able to submit ques-

tions to others in the company and receive answers via instant messaging.

W i k i s

Wikis are a type of Web site that makes it easy for users to contribute and edit

text content and graphics without any knowledge of Web page development or

programming techniques. The most well-known wiki is Wikipedia, the largest

collaboratively edited reference project in the world. It relies on volunteers,

makes no money, and accepts no advertising. Wikis are ideal tools for storing

and sharing company knowledge and insights. Enterprise software vendor SAP

AG has a wiki that acts as a base of information for people outside the company,

such as customers and software developers who build programs that interact

with SAP software. In the past, those people asked and sometimes answered

questions in an informal way on SAP online forums, but that was an inefficient

system, with people asking and answering the same questions over and over.

At Intel Corporation, employees built their own internal wiki, and it has

been edited over 100,000 times and viewed more than 27 million times by Intel

employees. The most common search is for the meaning of Intel acronyms

such as EASE for “employee access support environment” and POR for “plan of

record.” Other popular resources include a page about software engineering

processes at the company. Wikis are destined to become the major repository

for unstructured corporate knowledge in the next five years in part because

they are so much less costly than formal knowledge management systems and

they can be much more dynamic and current.

V i r t u a l   W o r l d s

Virtual worlds, such as Second Life, are online 3-D environments populated by

“residents” who have built graphical representations of themselves known as

avatars. Organizations such as IBM and INSEAD, an international business

school with campuses in France and Singapore, are using this virtual world to

house online meetings, training sessions, and “lounges.” Real-world people rep-

resented by avatars meet, interact, and exchange ideas at these virtual loca-

tions. Communication takes place in the form of text messages similar to

instant messages.

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Global E-business and Collaboration

61

I n t e r n e t - B a s e d   C o l l a b o r a t i o n   E n v i r o n m e n t s

There are now suites of software products providing multi-function platforms for

workgroup collaboration among teams of employees who work together from

many different locations. Numerous collaboration tools are available, but the

most widely used are Internet-based audio conferencing and video conferencing

systems, online software services such as Google Apps/Google Sites, and corpo-

rate collaboration systems such as Lotus Notes and Microsoft SharePoint.