V. Halonen

Case study of wind turbine sourcing: Manufacturer selection criteria

Selection of the wind turbine manufacturer is naturally an important issue for wind energy companies when they build new wind farms. This paper describes the main factors by which wind energy companies choose their turbine manufacturers in a selected case region in Finland. The study was conducted using semi-structured interviews, for which the experts and decision makers of selected wind energy companies formed the focus group. During the analysis of the results it became clear that it was not possible to form a detailed and prioritized list of selection criteria, but still some general themes emerged. The main theme was the manufacturer and product reliability, and then the production volume, cost factors, availability factors, and the organization of maintenance in this order. Interestingly the arctic conditions of the selected case region did not play any significant role.

Collaborative Implementation of Inter-organizational Interoperability in a Complex Setting

This paper explores the challenges in the collaborative implementation of interorganizational interoperability through observations of social dynamics. We focus on an inter-organizational information system that has interfaces with several information systems managed by different organizations. This complexity increases degrees of difficulty of the implementation projects. Our main finding is that as the inter-organizational nature of the problem increases considerably the technical complexity of the implementation, it also significantly increases difficulties in the social dynamics. We argue that a careful analysis of these social issues can reveal some interesting viewpoints that otherwise may stay hidden. We limit this paper to consider only the implementation of an inter-organizational information system that is implemented to support pre-defined joint functionalities.