Exploring the Role of Inter-Organizational Information Systems within SMEs Aggregations

1Interorganizational Information Systems (IOIS) will play a relevant role in shaping competition in the next years. Even though companies have become extremely efficient in managing information and logistics inside their boundaries, communication and coordination among partners is still far from effective. Both obsolete technologies and very scarce ICT supported interorganizational process are found in practice. In a global market where the entire supply chain is involved in company success, the proper design and implementation of an IOS is becoming mandatory. SMEs, and in particular those inside industrial aggregations, could greatly benefit from IOIS implementation, however a widely accepted IOS adoption theory is still lacking. Focusing on the description of an industrial aggregation this paper proposes a framework, its implementation and a field test on 70 companies belonging to an industrial district, to understand the relationships among aggregation’s main players. The analysis of the results proved that this approach offers useful insight for the comprehension of the aggregation and suggest its use as a pre-design IOIS tool.

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