A Decision and Transparency Support Service for Moderation Management of Virtual Enterprises in Collaborative Networks

Abstract

Successful management of collaborative business in company networks calls for efficient moderator processes in assigning companies to a particular request. The moderator makes configuration decisions that generate a Virtual Enterprise (VE) as a set of companies from the network members. Alternative configurations are evaluated and the most fitting VE configuration is chosen. The moderator is furthermore required to make the configuration decisions transparent in order to achieve decision acceptance by the network members. We present corresponding information technology based services that allow moderators to meet these requirements by supporting the decision making as well as supporting the distribution of the corresponding decision information. The decision support service computes ranked configuration alternatives according to a given search profile. The transparency support service generates decision explanations which contain the rationale behind the final decision as well as both the aggregated decision information and individualized data directed towards the single company.

Website Quality and Performance Indicators Including Ratio Numbers – A Study of German and Danish SME Companies

“…Furthermore, also innovative ICT concepts for supporting Virtual Companies were investigated, prototyped, and evaluated. This included, for example, a software tool for moderation management in company networks (Thimm & Rasmussen, 2010).…”

Extra-organizational collaboration and use of IT in SME production companies

“…A business opportunity -viewed as a request to the networkleads to the construction of a virtual enterprise [3]. Our work in development of IT support for the configuration and maintenance of virtual enterprises [25] is also a motivation for our research. The virtual enterprise arises from a collaborative business network regarded as a "breeding environment" where companies form "an association (also known as cluster) or pool of organizations and their related supporting institutions" [3, p. 440].…”

“…From the qualitative interviews we concluded that the SMEs when reflecting on the future and company sustainability consistently addressed the importance of collaboration and IT [21]. The project also includes a developmental design of an application for the configuration of IT supported collaboration [25]. In this design research we focused on moderation and decision-making in the collaborative network especially concerning decision explanations in order to achieve a high acceptance by the network members.…”