EA Management Patterns for Smart Networks

Abstract: With the growing complexity of products and processes in a globalizedmarket, companies are required to strive for a new quality of partnership. In SmartNetworks, networking of partners goes beyond mere organizational networking, butinvolves also networking on the levels of knowledge and information/communicationtechnology (ICT). The setup of ICT networking in newly formed Smart Networks re-quires not only information about already existing ICT infrastructure, but also a clearunderstanding of the organizational interconnections and knowledge interdependen-cies. This paper presents how the respective knowledge can be identified, visualized,and structured through information models in order to obtain decision support for theintroduction of additional ICT support for the collaboration within a Smart Network. 1 Introduction This article gives a short introduction on the management topic of Smart Networks andshows, how enterprise architecture (EA) management methods and patterns can be appliedto this kind of networks – especially to its ICT parts. A Smart Network in this contextis an organizational structure spanning different enterprises (manufacturers and serviceproviders), which has been formed to pursue a business opportunity. A conjoint goalcould e.g. be the collaborative manufacturing of products or collaborative innovation.Smart Networks are in their understanding of collaboration strongly oriented towards threeconstituting features as characterized by Filos [Fil06]:Organizational networking refers to the strong interconnection of organizations in het-erarchical structures and business processes, which are designed and optimized together.Knowledge networking lays the base for organizational networking, by establishing ef-fective exchange of knowledge. Each partner will have access to relevant knowledge forthe different collaborative tasks to be performed at any time.