Self-organization of interorganizational process design
- PDF / 231,210 Bytes
- 11 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 56 Downloads / 167 Views
FOCUS THEME
Self-organization of interorganizational process design Peter Rittgen
Received: 13 March 2009 / Accepted: 15 September 2009 / Published online: 1 October 2009 # Institute of Information Management, University of St. Gallen 2009
Abstract Interorganizational process design is challenged by a number of factors: There is no central governance, processes change over time and the stakeholders from the different organizations can hardly meet physically to agree on a mutually acceptable process. A process modeling session in the traditional way can therefore not be executed. In this paper we try to overcome the problems by offering an approach that allows for distributed process modeling and negotiation. Complemented by video or telephone conferencing the whole design can be done without any physical meeting. Much of the design work can even be done offline at the stakeholders’ discretion. Keywords Systems design and implementation . Computer-mediated communication and collaboration . Case studies . Field experiments JEL M15 . IT Management Introduction When organizations in a network want to organize work amongst and between them they face a number of serious challenges. For one there is no central governance that could take decisions on how to design the interaction process. This means that the process design has to be negotiated and agreed upon.
Responsible editor: Kai Riemer P. Rittgen (*) University of Borås, Allégatan 1, 50190 Borås, Sweden e-mail: [email protected]
Secondly, the economic environment and with it the demands on the interorganizational process change frequently, which makes it necessary to use a procedure for process update that works with a minimum of effort. And this already brings us to the third point: Process design usually requires workshops with all the stakeholders, which in our case might be distributed over the whole world. Frequent re-design workshops therefore become unfeasible. The aim of this paper is therefore to find a process modeling procedure that allows for distributed collaboration in an asynchronous manner (i.e. not requiring people to work on the design at the same time) keeping the required synchronous parts to a minimum so that they can be performed via a video or teleconference if supported by a suitable modeling tool. But an agreement can only be reached when the stakeholders collaborate closely and in a creative way. By collaborative we mean that all participants of a modeling session take a direct and active role in creating the model as opposed to the indirect influence they usually have via the facilitator of the session. This means that we depart from the assumption that participants cannot do models themselves or at least make changes to them. If the stakeholders develop their designs independently there will be an endless discussion about the pros and cons of each design and we will never reach consensus. Our approach therefore puts consensus-building, together with negotiation, in the focus of a procedure for collaborative design of interorganizationa
Data Loading...
