Agility of enterprise operations across distributed organizations: A model of cross enterprise collaboration

Abstract

We discuss the need for agility of business operations in a collaborative services ecosystem of partners and providers, and present a new system architecture for cross collaboration among multiple service enterprises. We demonstrate the importance and inevitability of such collaboration along with challenges in its proper realization through several real-life examples taken from different business domains. We then show that these challenges are rooted in two key factors: unpredictability and responsiveness; agility enables optimal response to unpredictable events. The key contribution of this manuscript is the presentation of a new model, centered on the modeling of work-as-a-service (WaaS) and an intelligent hub for coordinating cross enterprise collaboration. This hub is constructed in a manner intended to directly identify and solve the two key fundamental challenges of cross enterprise collaboration. As such, we expect it to outperform other means of collaboration across service providers. We demonstrate the potential for such performance using field examples. © 2011 IEEE.