Abstract
Advances in information and communication technologies and, more specifically, in artificial intelligence resulted in more intelligent systems, which, in the business world, particularly in collaborative business ecosystems, can lead to a more streamlined, effective, and sustainable processes. Following the design science research method, this article presents a simulation model, which includes a performance assessment and influence mechanism to evaluate and influence the collaboration of the organisations in a business ecosystem. The establishment of adequate performance indicators to assess the organisations can act as an influencing factor of their behaviour, contributing to enhancing their performance and improving the ecosystem collaboration sustainability. As such, several scenarios are presented shaping the simulation model with actual data gathered from three IT industry organisations running in the same business ecosystem, assessed by a set of proposed performance indicators. The resulting outcomes show that the collaboration can be measured, and the organisations’ behaviour can be influenced by varying the weights of the performance indicators adopted by the CBE manager.
Highlights
Advances in information and communication technologies and, in artificial intelligence (AI) have enabled more intelligent systems, which, in the business world, in collaborative business ecosystems (CBEs), can streamline collaborative processes among organisations, promoting sustainability and resilience [1]
The remaining part of the article, which is an extended version of a conference paper [35], presenting the research design, new experiments, and simulation results, is organised as follows: Section 2 describes the research design that guided this work, encompassing it into the three cycles of design science research [36]; Section 3 explains the designed artefacts, the simulation model including the performance assessment and influence mechanism; Section 4 details the internal collaborative behaviour of an agent; Section 5 presents and discusses the results of different scenarios of simulation using the Computers 2021, 10, 167 actual data collected from companies in the information technology (IT) industry; the last section contains a summary of the research contributions, refers main limitations and identifies future work
Considering the benefits of collaboration, we are interested in identifying metrics that make it possible to assess them for business ecosystems
Summary
Advances in information and communication technologies and, in artificial intelligence (AI) have enabled more intelligent systems, which, in the business world, in collaborative business ecosystems (CBEs), can streamline collaborative processes among organisations, promoting sustainability and resilience [1]. Investigations on the applicability of social networks analysis (SNA) in inter-organisational networks of firms, namely the use of measures of network density, centrality and tie strength [28,29], Poisson regression [30], and partial least squares and fuzzy sets [31]; this further led to some contributions to the design of performance indicators based on the structural analysis of the relationships between actors in social network analysis [32]. The remaining part of the article, which is an extended version of a conference paper [35], presenting the research design, new experiments, and simulation results, is organised as follows: Section 2 describes the research design that guided this work, encompassing it into the three cycles of design science research [36]; Section 3 explains the designed artefacts, the simulation model including the performance assessment and influence mechanism; Section 4 details the internal collaborative behaviour of an agent; Section 5 presents and discusses the results of different scenarios of simulation using the Computers 2021, 10, 167 actual data collected from companies in the IT industry; the last section contains a summary of the research contributions, refers main limitations and identifies future work
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