Abstract
One of the main critical success factors for the companies is their ability to build and maintain an effective collaborative network. This is more critical in the IT industry where the development of sustainable competitive advantage requires an integration of various resources, platforms, and capabilities provided by various actors. Employing such a collaborative network will dramatically change the operations management and promote flexibility and agility. Despite its importance, there is a lack of an analytical tool on collaborative network building process. In this paper, we propose an optimization model employing AHP and multiobjective programming for collaborative network building process based on two interorganizational relationships’ theories, namely, (i) transaction cost theory and (ii) resource-based view, which are representative of short-term and long-term considerations. The five different methods were employed to solve the formulation and their performances were compared. The model is implemented in an IT company who was in process of developing a large-scale enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The results show that the collaborative network formed through this selection process was more efficient in terms of cost, time, and development speed. The framework offers novel theoretical underpinning and analytical solutions and can be used as an effective tool in selecting network alternatives.
Highlights
Business networks have become an essential part of conducting business
This paper provides an analytic method that consists of a hybrid AHP and multiobjective programing and a managerial framework for collaborative network building process by structuring the various aspects of the problem in a step by step procedure
This research has made the contributions into two areas, namely, (1) conceptual contribution and (2) methodological contribution
Summary
Business networks have become an essential part of conducting business. This is because the nature of business environment has changed and in many industries strategic business networks are replacing market structure theories [1, 2]. The significance of the concept leads to many efforts from the authors in various disciplines and provides a huge body of knowledge in different branches of science like management, economy, computer science, industrial engineering, sociology, law, and so forth, with various keywords like “collaborative network” [4], “collaborative networked organization” [5], “strategic networks” [1], “relational view” [6], “business networks” [7], “network approach to strategic management” [2], and “industry network approach” [8, 9] This diversity of literature convinced the authors [10] to provide a metareview in different types of interorganizational relationships. There are some debates on the economic reason of this paradigm shift; [11] named the innovation economy and growth of information technology as the reason behind decentralization of firms and emergence of business ecosystems
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