On reference models for collaborative networked organizations

TLDR

Collaborative networked organizations are increasingly common across industry, services, and research, yet a unified reference model is lacking, hindering consistent development. The authors propose the ARCON reference modeling approach as a step toward establishing a reference model for collaborative networked organizations, clarifying concepts and terminology, and identifying future research needs. ARCON builds on enterprise modeling, introduces a taxonomy of collaborative networks, and abstracts concepts from various manifestations to create a multi‑perspective framework covering environment characteristics, life cycle, and modeling intent. Keywords include collaborative networked organization, reference model, modeling framework, and virtual organization, and the work was funded by the European Commission through the ECOLEAD project (www.ecolead.org).

Abstract

Abstract A growing number of collaborative networked organizations can be found in industry, services, and research. However, the lack of a reference model that could synthesize and formalize the base concepts, principles, and recommended practices, is an obstacle for an easier and more consistent development of the area. Therefore, after a clarification of concepts and terminology, the ARCON reference modeling approach is proposed considering multiple modeling perspectives: environment characteristics, life cycle, and modeling intent. This novel modeling framework takes into account contributions from previous works on enterprise modeling and extends them to the context of collaborative networked organizations. A taxonomy of collaborative networks is introduced. Examples of concepts to be part of a reference model are collected and abstracted from several manifestations of collaborative networks. Establishing a reference model in this area is a long-term endeavor; therefore this contribution is aimed as just a step in this process for which needed further research is also identified. Keywords: Collaborative networked organizationReference modelModeling frameworkVirtual organization Acknowledgements This work was funded in part by the European Commission through the ECOLEAD project (www.ecolead.org). The authors thank the contributions of their partners in this project.