Novica Zarvić

Dependency-based IT Governance practices in inter-organisational collaborations: A graph-driven elaboration

Abstract In an ever more globalised world IT (Information Technology) managers increasingly have to support value creation within inter-organisational collaboration settings. Such organisational forms with their inherent complexity require specific approaches for their IT management within. Especially important for unleashing the chances of networked arrangements is the right form of IT Governance. Choosing the right arrangement for IT Governance is heavily dependent on understanding the concepts on which such business constellations are built. In this paper we provide therefore first a systematically derived, graph-based perspective on the key terms of inter-organisational collaboration. Based on this understanding of concepts and structured representations of inter-organisational dependencies we present interorganisational governance practices for IT. Specifically, we assign accountabilities to top executive roles from both IT and business. By keeping a holistic perspective, the insights gained in this study are highly relevant for strategic information management in terms of Business-IT Alignment as well as monitoring and controlling of inter-organisational information infrastructures in a rapidly changing business environment.

Value-based requirements engineering for value webs

Since the 1980s, requirements engineering (RE) for information systems has been performed in practice using techniques (rather than the full method) from Information Engineering (IE) such as business goal analysis, function- and process modeling, and cluster analysis. Recently, these techniques have been supplemented with portfolio management, which looks at sets of IT projects and offers fast quantitative decision-making about continuation of IT projects. Todays networked world, though, poses challenges to these techniques. A major drawback is their inability to adequately specify the requirements for IT systems used by businesses that provide services to each other in a value web. In this paper, we analyze this problem, and propose a solution by coupling IE and portfolio management with value-based RE techniques at the business network level. We show how these techniques interrelate, and illustrate our approach with a small example.

Towards Sustainable IT by Teaching Governance Practices for Inter-Organizational Dependencies

The issue of sustainability has been among the top concerns of IT practitioners for some time now. Although sustainability of and through IT can only be reached if all stakeholders work together, current teaching and on-the-job training approaches do not provide the required understanding of how to govern the cooperation. Furthermore, there is a general gap between IS academia and practice regarding skill teaching, stakeholder informing and contributions towards sustainable business practices. In this paper, we adopt a design science research methodology to develop and evaluate a first approach to close this threefold gap.

Towards the explanation of goal‐oriented and opportunity‐based networks of organizations

Purpose – Collaborative networks (CN) are organizational forms that are especially enabled by innovations in the area of information and communication technologies. For an in‐depth understanding of CN a theoretical foundation is required. The purpose of this paper is to explain goal‐oriented and opportunity‐based CN with the help of existing and well‐known organization theories. A detailed overview about frequently mentioned concepts and theories in network studies is given and then a structured selection of theoretical approaches that are aiming to explain CN is discussed in detail. Finally, ten aspects for the existence and efficiency of CN are derived.Design/methodology/approach – The approach taken in this work is based on a literature review and an impact analysis of the investigated organization theories along the life cycle of CN.Findings – The result of the analysis shows that none of the investigated theories is able to describe the complex phenomenon of CN entirely and to clear all knowledge def...

Understanding Process Quality in the Context of Collaborative Business Network Structures

Demanding customer requirements have led to the situation where products are realised in collaborative business networks by different cooperating companies. In an extreme case such networks exist only for one specific customer order. Such temporary and dynamic organisation forms make new demands on Quality Management (QM) approaches. Existing QM practices mostly focus on assuring and improving quality of standardised processes inside single companies or long-term relations between business partners in supply chains. This paper discusses in particular the exchange of quality-relevant information flows and processes in the different constellations of collaborative business networks that are conceivable in real life.

Design Science for Future AIS: Transferring Continuous Auditing Issues to a Gradual Methodology

The tightened legal framework and technical evolution increase the relevance of effective Accounting Information Systems AIS. In this context, researchers and practitioners predict the transition from traditional auditing to automated Continuous Auditing CA. However, the organizational implementation of CA is still an unsolved problem in AIS research. To face this challenge, the authors of this paper used a Design Science Research DSR model considering the characteristics of CA. The proposed artifact in this paper is a gradual methodology which addresses general issues of CA implementation projects. The authors evaluate this artifact in an argumentatively descriptive way before stating limitations and giving an outlook on future research. Ultimately, the authors believe that the proposed methodology as well as the DSR approach for CA research contribute to the knowledge base and set the baseline for further investigations.

Measuring and Evaluating Communication Intensities in Collaborative Networks

Companies that are actively participating in a collaborative network (CN) need to show a high level of cooperation ability and willingness. The concept of cooperation contains various aspects that need to be considered, like e.g. communication, resource exchange, or cross-organisational processes. These aspects should become permanent subjects of analysis during the operational phase of the CN. The article at hand considers one of these aspects, namely the communication aspect. Our approach is based on a combination of fundamental concepts stemming from the Media-Richness-Theory (MRT) and Graph-Theory. It enables the analyser to firstly measure and then evaluate communication intensities in CNs. We present our approach by means of an example and discuss possible application areas and extensions.

Supporting entrepreneurial venturing of SMEs in collaborative cloud computing environments: a dependency-driven construction of scenario maps

Cloud computing is a relatively new computing paradigm and opens up possibilities to build new inter-organisational business configurations. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are often neglecting the opportunities and potentials that inter-organisational collaboration in the context of cloud computing can offer them. SMEs are prevalently unaware of all possible business collaboration scenarios that can emerge in such environments. In this paper we follow a construction-oriented research approach and design scenario maps. These scenario maps are conceptual models that serve as a reference catalogue of all conceivable collaboration scenarios and participating actors in cloud computing environments and are representing extensions of works from literature. The design science research artefacts presented in this paper are useful for decision makers and allow SMEs and start-ups to extract and analyse alternative inter-organisational collaboration scenarios.

A Context and Content Reflection on Business-IT Alignment Research

In this paper, the authors present the results of a recently performed literature analysis on the topic of Business-IT Alignment. They have thereby investigated 270 articles from the period 1993-2011 in a structured way. The articles were selected on the basis of three well-known ranking lists of publications in the Information Systems research domain. In the authors’ analysis they distinguish a context and a content point of view. The former one focuses on metadata analysis of the articles under consideration whereas the latter one uses text mining techniques to dive into the articles´ body of content. Finally, they discuss their results and present conceivable future research directions that should be tackled by alignment researchers and conclude their paper.

Unterstützung von Modellierungsleistungen durch semantische Technologien

Die Erbringung von Modellierungsleistungen ist mit Qualitats-, Konformitats-, In-tegrations- und Informationsproblemen behaftet. Dieser Beitrag untersucht die Unterstutzung semantischer Technologien zur Losung und Reduktion dieser Probleme. Er beschreibt systematisch eine Vielzahl an Verfahren und Technologien, die gegenwartig in Wissenschaft und Praxis diskutiert und erprobt werden und ordnet diese einzelnen Anwendungsbereichen zu, die schlieslich in einem Gesamtzusam-menhang prasentiert werden. Uber die Systematisierung hinaus werden eine kriti-sche Auseinandersetzung und Charakterisierung der Anwendungsgebiete vorge-nommen und ein zukunftiger Forschungsbedarf abgeleitet.