A comprehensive modeling framework for collaborative networked organizations

Collaborative networked organizations (CNOs) are complex entities whose proper understanding, design, implementation, and management require the integration of different modeling perspectives. A large number of modeling tools and theories that have been developed in other disciplines have a potential applicability in this domain. Therefore, an identification of the most promising approaches is made and mapped into four dimensions of an endogenous perspective of collaborative networked organizations: structural, componential, functional, and behavioral. But a comprehensive modeling of such complex dynamic systems requires also an exogenous perspective, the life cycle dimension, and a stratification of models according to the modeling purpose. Thus a comprehensive modeling framework is therefore proposed as a first step towards the elaboration of a reference model for collaborative networks.