Abstract
Due to the increasing heterogeneity and dynamics of the economy, more and more enterprises are challenged to adapt continuously to rapid changes, to concentrate on their core competencies as well as to search for competitive advantages and innovations (e.g., Prahalad & Hamel, 1990). Rapid technological advances and altered customer demands create a new dynamic and complex business environment, which requires flexibility and mobility of enterprises (Camarinha-Matos, 2002). For these reasons, different enterprises have to cooperate in order to meet customer needs effectively, to encounter the contemporary prevalent high competition and innovation pressure as well as to be permanently successful in largely saturated markets. In this respect, the opening of an organization’s borders is no longer regarded as a necessary evil but rather as an opportunity of strategic importance. Current approaches mainly focus on the cross-enterprise integration of data, functions, and processes for operational purposes within such collaborative business structures (e.g., Adam, Chikova, Hofer, & Vanderhaeghen, 2005; Grefen, Aberer, Hoffner, & Ludwig, 2001; Schulz, 2002). The driving force behind such activities is to generate a win-win-situation for all partners, whether by creating new structures or by adapting the existing ones, realizing an optimization objective. However, how do you measure if this postulated win-win situation by concentration on core competences is really achieved? The question is: Has the cooperation yielded the objectives that had been determined in the run-up? Is the cooperation really as successful as it was intended to be or can it be improved?
Key Terms in this Chapter
Collaborative Networked Organization: A set of peering and autonomous enterprises that interworks by division of labor and that conjointly provide differentiable outputs in a stable and durable business relationship.
Corporate Network: Multiple dependant enterprises that act adjusted in order to jointly follow shared business objectives and to increase their competitiveness. The dependency results from ownership respective shareholder relations between the enterprises.
Collaborative Performance Measurement: The collection of controlling data in terms of key performance indicators across organization’s borders in order to measure the efficiency of cross-organizational business processes and to prearrange and support decisions for the life cycle of a cooperation.
Network Performance: The way or manner of the operating functions of an enterprise network. In this case, the object to be valorized or evaluated is not the single output-generating unit but the overall performing process. Therefore, network performance is not only inducted by the efficiency of the functional transformations but also by the efficiency of communications and coordinations.
Business Process Performance Management: The controlling of the execution of business processes by comparing process models (for example, to-be models of business processes) with data collected during process execution (for example, as-is models of business processes).
Competitive Intelligence: The methodic and continuous collection and analysis of information about rival businesses, competitive products, trends of the market, new technologies, and customer expectations.