Infrastructures for collaboration in virtual organisations

Many organisations are currently forced to collaborate with others in renewing their products and processes to stay competitive, to enter new or to retain their current markets, or to get easy access to new knowledge. Management of collaboration between two or more organisations is, however, still not well understood, given that about half of the collaborative endeavours fail. A methodology to support management of collaboration is still lacking. To build such a methodology, knowledge is needed on the process of collaboration. Much research has been devoted, however, to understanding the relationships between initial conditions and outcomes of a collaboration initiative. The results of this research are sometimes contradicting or not very well comparable because of differences in conceptualisation or ignorance of moderating factors. Moreover, a good design of initial conditions is necessary, but not sufficient. Conditions change during the process of collaboration. We need knowledge on the dynamics of the collaboration process to understand why and how conditions change and how they can be influenced. In this paper an approach will be presented that can support the gradual building of knowledge on the process of collaboration. The approach, which resulted from the Esprit IV project 23286 FREE (Fast Reactive Extended Enterprise), can be viewed as a first step towards building a methodology to support management of collaboration. The concept of infrastructures for collaboration will be introduced stressing the integral nature of management of collaboration.