A Conceptual Framework for Collaboration in Business Schools

Introduction

Collaboration can be easily defined as “matchmaking,” where either groups or individuals are searching for partners or groups that have similar interests or complimentary skillsets to share and with a common purpose in mind. According to Powell (2017), collaboration is a simple concept with sweeping implications for students and educators. Therefore, finding ripe opportunities for collaboration for majors such as Computer Information Systems (CIS) and Supply Chain Management appear timely and useful to both students and educators.

In today’s global economic business environment, collaboration has been touted by many businesses as their primary competitive edge. The demand for strong skills in technical competence as well as the “soft skills” of communication and increased collaboration with clients and colleagues has been significantly amplified. In a survey of 768 managers and executives (American Management Association, 2012), the majority believed that core competencies, such as collaboration and communication, were required for effective job performance. Such skills are necessary because increased collaboration necessitates increased interaction with others, and successful interaction with others is predicated on interpersonal competence (Bedwell et al., 2012). Business schools today must attempt to find ways to address the needs of collaboration and communication so that their graduates will be more adequately prepared to enter the global marketplace (Bedwell et al., 2014).

But collaboration can be difficult. No two departments in academia are alike and their educational strategies can be quite different. In addition, collaboration initiatives that come from different departments face the issues of differing budgets from within their college, different cultures, and different approaches to teaching and administration, goals, and measures of success. Academic departments can appear to be quite independent, even though they generally depend upon the college or university to provide guidance as to certain policies and procedures and budgetary funding. Therefore, their independence may only be within the department itself, as most must rely on outside sources.

To provide some context, examples from Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Computer Information Systems (CIS) are interspersed within the paper. There are substantive reasons to propose collaboration between the two areas of CIS and SCM. The definition of SCM by the global supply chain forum states “Supply Chain Management is the integration of key business processes from end-user through original suppliers that provides product, services, and information that add value for customers and other stakeholders” (Croxton et al., 2001). In that definition alone, the parallel of information and data gathering can be seen between SCM and CIS. Certainly, as institutions of higher learning increase the adoption of supply chain majors and minors, as well as job numbers increase in these two areas of study, collaboration between the two academic fields offer new and unique opportunities for both students, faculty and higher education institutions.

The construction of collaborative work can also offer to students the opportunity to begin enhancing their critical thinking, problem-solving, and decision-making skills. Certainly, business students are better prepared if their educational experiences are better aligned with real world scenarios within organizations. Students who are able to visualize the connectedness between majors like CIS and SCM, and can see how their actions affect other departments, organizations and people (coworkers, customers, and stakeholders), are also likely to be the visionaries for their organizations.

So if there is so much diversity in that of different departments and also among the faculty themselves, then how do we approach collaboration at least in the area of teaching successfully between two fields of study? Therefore, this paper addresses the need for collaboration between departments in business schools and proposes a conceptual framework to guide business schools in their collaboration efforts. Further, collaboration difficulties are discussed in order to improve inter-departmental collaboration success.