Loosening the Hierarchy of Cross-Company Electronic Collaboration

Abstract

Today, the organization and implementation of cross-organizational business relationships on the basis of electronic services still implies high costs for the seamless communication and coordination of those services. These costs often lead to centralized and inflexible service structures. To investigate major enablers for decentralized “service markets” which allow for increased flexibility and productivity, we draw an analogy to both the societal and the business context. The hypothesis underlying this article is that the organizational evolution of services shares strong similarities with the development of societies and businesses which have evolved from unconnected groups of people over large hierarchies to more decentralized forms. On the basis of case studies, we show that this hypothesis holds and provide recommendations for improved electronic cross-organizational collaboration. We particularly propose a reference architecture for electronic collaboration which is currently being applied in the context of Swiss public administration and show its potential for performance amendment.