Infrastructures for collaboration in virtual organisations

Abstract

Many organisations are currently forced to collaborate with others in renewing their products and processes to stay competitive, to enter new or to retain their current markets, or to get easy access to new knowledge. Management of collaboration between two or more organisations is, however, still not well understood, given that about half of the collaborative endeavours fail. A methodology to support management of collaboration is still lacking. To build such a methodology, knowledge is needed on the process of collaboration. Much research has been devoted, however, to understanding the relationships between initial conditions and outcomes of a collaboration initiative. The results of this research are sometimes contradicting or not very well comparable because of differences in conceptualisation or ignorance of moderating factors. Moreover, a good design of initial conditions is necessary, but not sufficient. Conditions change during the process of collaboration. We need knowledge on the dynamics of the collaboration process to understand why and how conditions change and how they can be influenced. In this paper an approach will be presented that can support the gradual building of knowledge on the process of collaboration. The approach, which resulted from the Esprit IV project 23286 FREE (Fast Reactive Extended Enterprise), can be viewed as a first step towards building a methodology to support management of collaboration. The concept of infrastructures for collaboration will be introduced stressing the integral nature of management of collaboration.

SMEs' Management in the 21st Century

“…Analysing the respective production sheets together with scientific literature would open new product opportunities. More examples for product innovation in VEs may be found in (Popplewell and Harding, 2005) and (Wognum and Faber, 2002).…”

“…Capabilities and willingness of staff, efficient processes, availability of relevant information or a high proportion of repeat customers are factors of which the welfare of cluster depends. It has therefore the Federal Ministry of Economics and Labour mission is to promote knowledge management and intellectual capital and actively in the implementation especially in the SME sector (Wognum, 2002).…”

Smart Information System Capabilities of Digital Supply Chain Business Models

“…On the other hand, there is a common view by the participants that customer satisfaction and trust as a basis for good partnership relates to a high extent to qualities resulting from good SCM practices such as reliable order delivery to promised dates, which has finally, a significant impact on the market share from the long-term perspective. Collaboration is seen a company's ultimate core capability, providing benefits such as revenue enhancement, flexibility and cost reduction, but, levels of collaboration have not reached as aimed so far (Fawcett and Magnan, 2001;Wognum and Faber, 2002). Based on the impact from qualities of good SCM practice, the experts identified the S&OP domain with the highest impact on relationship management.…”

Maturity of IT-Business Alignment

“…An architectural view on an organisational system for a manufacturing organisation is depicted in figure 1, which can be considered an enterprise architecture. The model has been used Accepted for Enterprise System Architecture in Practice, edited by Dr. Pallab Saha, Published by Idea Group Publishing, Inc. USA as a component in an architecture of a virtual organisation to identify essential capabilities needed for mature performance (Wognum and Faber, 2002). In the enterprise architecture as presented in figure 1, the processes have not been explicitly subdivided into management, primary and support processes.…”