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The purpose of this paper is to discover a three-step process for building contextual ambidexterity into inter-organizational IT-enabled service processes through developmental interventions.

A longitudinal action research project was conducted. The empirical study consisted of three consecutive developmental interventions to support the collaborative development effort of an IT company and its customer network to efficiently serve their present and future customers. The data consists of process modeling and simulation workshop discussions, interviews, observation, and archival data. The development effort was studied for over a year.

The study shows that the three developmental interventions acted as a process for balancing the exploration-exploitation tension in inter-organizational service processes. The sequential interventions facilitated the studied organizations in crossing the inter-organizational knowledge boundaries and creating shared domain knowledge, creating common understanding of the collaborative IT-enabled service processes, and co-developing the coordination mechanisms that are essential for the continuous exploration and exploitation of the new ideas in the future collaborative service processes. These three steps built capacity for the inter-organizational management system to achieve synergies between goals, resources, and activities in the inter-organizational collaboration.

The study contributes to the understanding on the process of building inter-organizational ambidexterity. The study presents a three-step process for building inter-organizational contextual ambidexterity into the IT-enabled service processes through developmental interventions. Research on inter-organizational contextual ambidexterity is combined with research on coordination and knowledge management.

Modern enterprises face a strong economical pressure to increase competitiveness, to operate on a global market, and to engage in alliances of several kinds. In order to meet the requirements and challenges of participating in such alliances, companies must be able to cooperate effectively and efficiently. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of some major directions in inter‐organizational cooperation.

In order to cope with the challenges of inter‐organizational cooperation, to share innovative research issues and to facilitate profound discussions about them, the authors organized a series of workshops on Modeling Inter‐Organizational Systems (MIOS‐CIAO!) starting at the annual OTM Federated Conference and Continuing at the Annual CAiSE Conference. This paper summarizes the results of the workshops.

This paper provides an overview of what has been established and what is going on regarding the cooperation of enterprises in networks. The focus has been on the modeling of cooperation, from the business level down to the implementation level.

This overview is a useful source of knowledge for those who want to have a quick insight in the relevant aspects of cooperation, and in many well‐known modeling approaches and techniques. It is also an inspiring source for those who want to investigate yet unsolved or unsatisfactorily solved problems. Although developments, both in theory and in practice, will go on, no landslides are expected. Particularly for practice, the value of this report will therefore last for a considerable time.

Several core notions in the area of inter‐organizational cooperation are clarified, such as collaboration, cooperation, enterprise network, choreography, and orchestration. The whole process of developing or investigating an enterprise network is covered.

The paper aims to propose a web‐based “intermediation hybrid architecture” for a workflow management system that integrates services by exploiting and combining the advantages of strict centralized topologies that use workflow engines, with totally distributed systems which use agent technologies.

The proposed operational and technical architectures define the combination of a workflow engine and a software agent platform for the appropriate management of inter‐organizational workflow processes. The proposed system is called “hybrid intermediation portal.”

The hybrid system was used in e‐government cases for the management of cross‐border workflows that span across multiple European chambers of commerce and industry. That demonstrated the usefulness of the specific approach in the inter‐organizational workflow management domain.

The approach presented in this paper was implemented and validated in real e‐government cases that proved the advantages of the potential commercial use of the system. Several limitations were located due to the lack of a wide use of web services within governmental organizations.

Concerning security issues, it would be necessary to integrate appropriate security mechanisms without constraining the technical and functional characteristics of the software agents involved.

The contribution of the paper concerns the evolvement of the agent‐enhanced workflow management systems in order to tackle the intelligence issues and the credibility problems concerning the overall control of dispersed inter‐organizational processes.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the effects of inter‐organisational compatibility on inter‐organisational information systems (IOIS) integration and supply chain performance of large enterprises (LE) and small‐medium enterprises (SMEs) in Australian retailing chains.

Convergent interviewing technique was used to collect data from managers of 12 fast‐moving consumer goods and hardware manufacturing and retailing organisations. Within‐ and cross‐case analyses were used to analyse the data.

The results indicate that technical, strategic and cultural compatibility between supply chain partners are antecedents to IOIS integration and supply chain performance of both LE and SMEs. A conceptual model explaining the relationship between inter‐organisational compatibility, IOIS integration and supply chain performance is advanced. The study extends congruency theory to information systems and supply chain contexts.

The study provides some guidelines to supply chain and information systems managers on how inter‐organisational compatibility can be used to facilitate IOIS integration and enhance supply chain performance in both large and small firms. Technical, strategic and cultural compatibility emerged as antecedents to IOIS integration, suggesting the need for supply chain managers especially within SMEs to pay close attention to inter‐organisational compatibility factors when integrating IOIS with supply chain partners.

Research relating IOIS integration and supply chain is limited, especially in the SMEs context. Thus, this paper contributes to the body of knowledge by examining how inter‐organisational compatibility influences organisations' decisions to integrate IOIS with supply chain partners using congruency theory.

The purpose of this paper is to survey existing inter-organisational information security research to scrutinise the kind of knowledge that is currently available and the way in which this knowledge has been brought about.

The results are based on a literature review of inter-organisational information security research published between 1990 and 2014.

The authors conclude that existing research has focused on a limited set of research topics. A majority of the research has focused management issues, while employees’/non-staffs’ actual information security work in inter-organisational settings is an understudied area. In addition, the majority of the studies have used a subjective/argumentative method, and few studies combine theoretical work and empirical data.

The findings suggest that future research should address a broader set of research topics, focusing especially on employees/non-staff and their use of processes and technology in inter-organisational settings, as well as on cultural aspects, which are lacking currently; focus more on theory generation or theory testing to increase the maturity of this sub-field; and use a broader set of research methods.

The authors conclude that existing research is to a large extent descriptive, philosophical or theoretical. Thus, it is difficult for practitioners to adopt existing research results, such as governance frameworks, which have not been empirically validated.

Few systematic reviews have assessed the maturity of existing inter-organisational information security research. Findings of authors on research topics, maturity and research methods extend beyond the existing knowledge base, which allow for a critical discussion about existing research in this sub-field of information security.

Despite the high operational and strategic potentials of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology, very few studies have been conducted about its role as enabler of supply chain integration to achieve high‐level operational efficiency. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to be an initial effort towards bridging the existing knowledge gap in the literature.

This exploratory research was conducted in one retail supply chain. A multi‐method approach combining a longitudinal real‐life case study and a methodology integrating several steps, including a “living laboratory” strategy was used and involved all members of a product line to analyze their contributing activities and their interface with other supply chain members; the aim being to explore the impact of RFID technology on inter‐and intra‐organizational processes and information systems.

The results provide support to the role of RFID as enabler of better integration of timeliness and accuracy data flows into information systems, business process optimization through automation, better system‐to‐system communication and better inter‐and‐intra‐organizational business process integration. Furthermore, they also validate the unique characteristics of RFID technology such as enabler of real‐time multiple tags items data collection and exchange within the supply chain and the read‐and‐write capability that may help, for example, to reuse some RFID tags within the supply chain and therefore reduce the cost related to the purchase of the said RFID tags. Finally, the study also reveals the importance of business process renovation and complementary investments during the adoption of RFID technology, in order to achieve high level of business value from the technology.

The paper is original in the sense that it provides some empirical support for the enabling role of RFID technology in allowing supply chain integration.

IT-based supply chain performance is co-created through inter-organizational business processes. This research is motivated to explore how business value of IT in supply chain is co-created in downstream process and probe into the possible complementary effect of relational resources from retailers and customers during the cooperative process. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

A model is proposed to conceptualize the process with three dimensions and six constructs, which emerges a causal link between organization resources application, e-supply chain capability (ESCC) and process performance. And then the research model was validated using partial least squares with data collected from 128 manufacturing firms in China.

The results provide broad support for the following: the casual relationship among inter-organizational resources interaction, ESCC and process performance; the mediating role of ESCC in the e-CRM process is more significant than that in e-ordering process; and there is the moderating effect between relational resources and internal resources in e-CRM process.

It offers guidelines for managers to plan the roles played by resource, capabilities and performance for e-supply chain success in multi-firm environments.

This study provides a novel perspective and offers important implications for e-supply chain research and practice, by exploring intermediate factors and shedding light on the process of co-creating business value of IT in supply chain.

The purpose of this paper is to identify information governance (IG) requirements in the context of dynamic business networking (BN).

For the identification of IG requirements a systematic literature review is conducted. The practical significance of identified IG requirements is evaluated through a case study.

A comprehensive list of IG requirements in dynamic BN is identified. These requirements are classified in information quality, information security, and metadata domains. The conducted case study demonstrates information exchange issues in a real world dynamic BN that reflects the practical significance of the identified IG requirements.

Exploiting emerging market opportunities through a dynamic BN necessitates the realization of a comprehensive IG program within the network. Otherwise, information exchange related risks can interrupt the operations in a BN. In this research the authors concentrate on interactions between parties within a BN. The interactions with customers for the co-creation of value are not addressed directly. Although the conducted case study reflects the practical significance of the identified IG requirements clearly, more empirical study is needed for prioritizing these IG requirements.

The governor of a BN needs to balance between the value obtained from dynamic networked interactions and the risk evolving from the dynamic inter-organizational information exchange.

The comprehensive list of IG requirements that are identified in this research can be used to develop an IG program that enables high quality and secure information exchange in a dynamic BN.

The previous generations of implemented B2B e‐commerce hub solutions (e‐Marketplaces) did not successfully fulfil the requirements of buyers and suppliers (“Participants”) in different business domains to carry out their daily business and online commercial transactions with one another because of their inappropriateness, and lack of flexibility. The limitations of these provided solutions came from a lot of architectural and technological challenges in the provided technical architectures that were used to build these solutions. This research aims to provide a proposed architecture to build integrated B2B e‐Commerce hub solutions. It also aims to make use of bottom‐up/top‐down approaches to building an integrated solution and to resolve the reasons for the failure of previous generations of B2B e‐commerce hubs.

The research uses the EDI reference model, which is provided by the ISO organization to survey and analyze the challenges of previous generations of B2B e‐Commerce hubs solutions and their architectures. The study develops a proposed solution architecture based on the recent approaches to building IOSs to build a B2B e‐commerce hub solution architecture that can be used to implement vertical B2B e‐commerce hubs (vertical e‐Marketplaces). The paper assesses the capabilities of the proposed solution architecture for building vertical B2B e‐Marketplaces by applying the proposed architecture to the building of a vertical B2B e‐Marketplace for the oil and gas sector in Egypt.

Previous B2B e‐Commerce hub initiatives failed to extend their products and services to their “Participants”, and required substantial investment and effort from each “Participant” to join such a B2B e‐Commerce hub. The failure of these IOS projects lies in their inability to integrate B2B e‐Commerce networks based on IOS and consequently, they supported very few partners and “Participants”. These IOS approaches did not resolve the existing challenges of B2B e‐Commerce hubs, especially in the realm of interoperability.

The main contribution of the proposed architecture comes from the creation of a clear automatic path between a business requirements layer and a technology layer by combining both Service Oriented Architecture and management requirements in a single framework to provide dynamic products and flexible services. It provides a complete Multi Channel Framework to resolve the interoperability challenges.

Today, most organisations are using packaged software for their key business processes. Enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, customer relationship management and electronic commerce systems enable organisations to improve their focus of using information systems to support their operational and financial goals. This article argues that the need to integrate these packaged software applications with each other as well as with existing or legacy business applications drives the need for a standardised integration architecture to more flexibly implement new business processes across different organisations and applications. To illustrate the components of such an architecture, a case study undertaken at the Robert Bosch Group provided necessary empirical evidence. The Robert Bosch Group has evaluated different enterprise application integration (EAI) systems to achieve a standardised integration architecture. The article describes a reference architecture and criteria for the classification of EAI systems which are derived from different integration approaches.