New ways of companies´ cooperation

Mária Pomffyová
(Banská Bystrica : Univerzita Mateja Bela, Ekonomická fakulta) [Bio]
Email: maria.pomffyova@umb.sk

Abstract

Entering to new markets both local and foreign or necessity to provide new services as product added value or to change orientation towards a completely different type of production in dependence on customers and market requirements bring a necessity to be able to orientate in business conditions. To ensure it is critical to have required actual and valuable information. They also must flexibly adapt to different economic, legislative, social, demographic and cultural environment. The solution can be found by developing of cooperation between firms by using of virtual working space through active support of multimedia technologies and tools of communication. In these ways of communication it is necessary to develop of knowledge and skills in the area of foreign languages and multicultural communicative abilities within the frame of different tasks concerning business and economic practice. It can be stated that information revolution did not bring only a change in information understanding – its consequence is a change in a way of manipulation with information and in a way of co-operation of its owners as well.

Introductions

Nowadays companies have to adapt quick changes in their surroundings and this is really a demanding process, where the way and speed of response condition the total success of doing business, it means whether a company strengthens its competitiveness or it may happen that a company loses its market place or fades. These influences and impacts make pressure on companies not only in a requirement to change the way of doing business but they often have to change the location, form or even line of business.

New forms of team co-operation are created where a necessity of co-operation of more experts exists: team members do not come only from the organization itself, but they often co-operate, partners are particular clients themselves, for whom the organization produces its products or provides services, or they are other experts from the surrounding. In such forms of co-operation number of decisive and managing roles at lower level of company management goes up, importance of personal responsibility and employees´ competency growths and at the same time number of administrative and repetitive tasks decreases and this brings higher demands towards support of teams management and their mutual co-operation. Necessity of team co-operation of more experts often requires different point of view to see the reality in a company – not from the personal point of view but in a context with the opinions of other team members that should be accepted and adapted to.

It means that it is necessary to know:

  • to distinguish and change long-lived ideas and effects which influence total understanding of reality and following decision – making of company management,

  • to overcome barriers in acceptation of opinions of colleagues in labour relations while the ultimate criteria should not be acceptance or non-acceptance of a particular opinion, e.g. due to the status, but based on knowledge and experience of team members what leads to increase of growth of learning organization.

They also must flexibly adapt to different economic, legislative, social, demographic and cultural environment.

To overcome these barriers they need actual and more precise information. It is due to the fact that management and decision making processes do not depend only on early and actual information but knowledge of managers and employees who prepare necessary documents are the most important. They are connected not only in the internal company’s environment (by intranet) as internal company workers (managers or front life staffs), but they all often co-operate by a virtual workspace to co-ordinate all firm´s activities – as office knowledge workers, task workers, contractors and offshore workers, mobile workers or workers from home.

Different users and IT requirements

In such cases it is more important to know all user requirements as well as their IT requirements to do organization design more effective as well as more users friendly.

As we can see on the Figure 1, the attributes of virtual organizing of enterprise environment are more different:

Figure 1: Attributes of virtual organizing and the implications for organization design

Creating of co-operation environment in such enterprise is expected to be rapid and customized in response to customer demands. The real power is realized when relationships among electronically connected people or firms produce new and/or qualitatively different communication or some new ways of co-operation that yields product or process innovation. It may be that electronic communication products, such as conversations and documents stored in knowledge repositories, can provide stability to otherwise tenuous relationships. Perhaps communication histories from one setting can be carried into the communication future of other settings via evolving databases. It is the way how electronic communication products might be used to support the evolutionary aspects of communication in dynamic networks and reconfigurable organizational settings. These databases may be somehow formalized and re-applied when groups are dissembled and re-arranged (knowledge databases). In such cases it is not enough just to make necessary information accessible, i.e. meet the requirement of quick information accessibility, but it is needful to change information understanding – its new dimension and value is not created through the fact that they are available more quickly, but through the fact that it is the base for knowledge development, while the most important share on knowledge quality has a human factor and its personal abilities. It can be stated that work with knowledge is equal to a necessity of change of utilized models of thinking, which presents a necessity of change of information interpretation in context with the actual state in a company and based on own knowledge and experience.

Changes in the management of such ways of co-operation

We know that people suffer from information overload; there’s much more information concerning any given subject than a person is able to access. The result is that people are forced to depend on each other due to their knowledge. Know-who information rather than know-what, know-how or know-why information has become the most crucial. It involves getting to know who has the required information and being able to reach that person and being able to know how and from whom the information can be achieved – to know information source (Singh, 2007).

Therefore it is necessary to:

  • contact the right person immediately (to achieve information about partners),

  • provide information they need quickly, accurately and helpfully (information about the

  • enterprise for partners),

  • be able to interact with partners in a way that suits them best, whether personally, over the phone, SMS, via email or a website.

Company information system utilizing available information technologies, as a key of high quality information base and communication system – ensures obtaining, processing, provision and distribution of information. It is critical to manage technologies used to cover information needs of environment in which they are spread and manage the way in which they are provided due to information needs of competent people through activities of which they change to knowledge. Both areas claim that this task is not simple due to the fact that it is not possible to define exactly all the factors which influence company knowledge management. An important part of this form of management is a human factor and ability of a company to utilize possibilities of information technologies the most effectively as well due to the fact mentioned above. The problem in such way of management is a big dependence on employees´ knowledge which must be willing to share it with the others and on their skills and abilities to apply available IT and tools supported by them.

Management of a system of such networks is very complicated especially when it is a must to consider the balance between costs ratio to solutions effectiveness since this is a very sensitive topic in the time of crisis´ impact.

Problem solution is the change of the information strategy based on a principle of virtual IT utilization – as a part of the company strategy that give more possibilities to get a view concerning situation in the company and make strategically important decisions, i.e. strategically manage development in a particular company.

These claims result from the need:

  • to ensure unique approach to required information from the point of view of more experts, what requires a need to unite technological platform of information systems,

  • to change the way of management of setting for work with information and it requires:

  • to know exactly how to determine necessary activities connected with coverage of information needs,

  • to determine exactly who and for what type of activities is responsible,

  • to know the way how inspection of their execution will be carried out,

  • to co-ordinate of more activities so that they present integrated sequence of processes and activities based on precise specification of their claims.

It requires precise identification of executed tasks, where process management has got its place. It does not concern only individual production processes but also process management of information processes and activities connected with creation of needful information and communication support. To find such solution that assures an effective utilization of enterprise communication network supported by common information and communication technologies (ICT) where the right information is always available to managers and front line staff to make right decision in their knowledge management processes. Virtual IT utilization supported by unified technologies helps to eliminate barriers between voice, email, conference, video and instant messaging.

It means to bring solutions that support:

  • clear and consistent processes for handling partners interactions,

  • back office systems accessible through a common interface – so partners and product

  • or service information are instantly retrievable,

  • highly motivated staffs who come across as helpful and well informed.

It is required to achieve unified communication that provides an integrated access to people, information and other knowledge sources.

Open systems utilization

Optimization of information and communication systems in the enterprise brings more opportunities optimally to manage not only information flows as well as an environment where information can be exploited. It means to look such solution which enables effective utilization of information technologies as a support of the company information system. The solution is – using of open system management where technologies are shared by all users in the unified environment. It is the way how to make investment more effective where the solution is based on a consolidation and virtualization of existing information technologies used to building of information and communication system infrastructure.

However, solutions based on the virtualization to date may only address part of the problem, but has done so by savings of capital and operational expenses, infrastructure complexity, and risk. Efficiency improvement by utilization of virtualization in IT operations is described in the Figure 2:

Figure 2 Efficiency improvements in IT operations by virtualization

The capital expense savings of such solutions are:

  • Reduced amount of servers

  • Reduction of capital commitment

  • Reduction of capital cost

  • Physical consolidation, reduced floor space

  • Cost reduction for infrastructure and operations

  • The operational expanse savings are:

  • Improved flexibility

  • Reduced human resources

  • Complexity reduction of operation processes

  • Reduced maintenance costs

Such solution enables utilization of unused capacity in a company, while network access and virtualization of working premises allow its management from a server. To do such ways of management it is necessary to build common configuration management database containing all configuration items of enterprise information systems. It allows providing such services as a configuration management service, focused on establishing and maintaining consistency of a system or product’s performance and its functional and physical attributes with its requirements, design, and operational information throughout its life as well as service as Information Technology Services Management (ITSM), that use an Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) interpreted as a set of concepts and best practices for ITSM, IT development and IT operations. ITIL gives their detailed descriptions and provides comprehensive checklists, tasks and procedures that any IT organizations can design to their needs by using of participation external partners as well as specialists in the IT area. Number of its implementation in the Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) in Slovak republic increased from 30 % by 2009 to 64 % by 2010, despite of that we can state it is not enough due to low level of management utilization of information systems in SMB.

Advantages of virtualization

Virtualization has been promised as the answer to IT challenges. Enterprises based on using of consolidation and virtualization of ICT are characterized by

  • Highly dynamic processes

  • Contractual relationships among entities

  • Edgeless, permeable boundaries, and

  • Reconfigurable structures.

Opened information technologies used by support of information and communication systems´ building help to remove the barriers between existing used communication tools to do claimed decisions. Consequently, communication and collaboration processes would be more effective due to creating of an opened and optimized communication structure that supports on-line exchange of information necessary for more flexible and operative decision-making and managing processes. Unified communication solutions have to aggregate people, as well as systems and ICT to unified communication systems which create a unified decision support. Effective exploring of enterprise information sources brings the possibility how to increase the competitive advantages. All the terms and rules must be set strictly; they are supposed to reflect a real situation, support assignment and transfer of several changes in and out of the enterprise in accordance with changes in enterprises goals. For an effectively hyper-connected enterprise this means to achieve reduction of time to make a decision, increase of productivity and the ability to provide simple and consistent user experience by means of all types of communications. Generally, such solutions allow having right information to succeed in communication with their partners where managers can make claimed decision in expected reaction time. What is not good? It is situation when managers as well as employees do not want to cooperate by such models of IT virtualization. It is often due to a must work with various information technologies where their own skills and abilities play an important role.

Conclusion

Utilization of possibilities of information technologies in the process of information support development gradually modified the process of preparation of true and reliable information as well as the ways of doing business and it raised companies´ expectations concerning effectiveness of amount incurred to get and to innovate them. But as a real practice shows these expectations were not always met and low benefit resulting from their implementation was influenced by several factors. But because there is no exact way and form of information requirement providing – in practice various implementation of tools and supportive means aimed at the support of execution of company activities and processes occurred and it resulted in unequal development in the area of company information systems development and this had an impact on unequal development of companies management where different forms of organizational structures with different claims concerning information provision rose.

Since several factors and influences may cause failures in the entire process we have to paid attention to their selection. We can state the impact of information revolution on the way and opportunities of doing business evoked various effects. It is needed focused on specification of such information strategy which would support the most efficient utilization of information technologies opportunities and at the same time it is necessary to solve the problem of integrity of technologies which the company owns or has an access to – in accordance with the requirements and claims of the units of organizational structure considered as the best form to determine company information requirements and claims. Ways how to optimize information systems´ utilization consists in using of an opened network structure management based on optimization of management of sources and flows of information provision of the net. Creating of an opened and optimized communication structure that supports on-line exchange of information necessary allows more flexible and operative decision-making and managing processes.

References

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