Abstract:

Today, cross-company collaboration is about to gain momentum, but still shows considerable weaknesses with respect to productivity, flexibility and quality: A lack of standardized supporting e-Business solutions, unclear terminology and unstructured business processes prevent from seamless interoperability and the fast development of a globally networked service economy. New concepts are now required which facilitate a comprehensive industrialization by improving the formalization, standardization and automation of related concepts and methodologies. In this work, we present a novel framework which aims at supporting the efficient organization of cross company collaboration: The MCM Organization Engineering Framework (MCM-OEF) follows a Service-Oriented paradigm which leverages major concepts that played a major role in the industrialization of computer programming. We apply this framework to the specific case of governmental administration in Switzerland, which represents a cross-organizational service industry with significant potential for performance enhancement. The analysis shows that organizations in the public sector may improve productivity, quality and flexibility of their collaboration by adhering to the MCM-OEF which transfers programming principles to the context of human organizations.