Introduction to the Special Issue: Information Technology for Enterprise Coordination and Integration

Abstract

This issue of the Group Decision and Negotiation Journal is devoted to topics related to recent developments of information technology for enterprise coordination and integration. Enterprise information technology is advancing at a breath-taking pace, making a major impact on all organizations large or small. This special issue focuses on the use of information technology for coordinating the complex array of decision and business processes, which have become increasingly important for today’s enterprises. Information Technology has played an important role in the effort of making organizations more productive. With the capability of computer software, hardware, and communications growing rapidly, the technological bottleneck has gradually shifted toward enterprise integration and inter-organizational coordination. In view of the importance of this emerging trend and its likely impacts on the development of the next generation of information technology, this Special Issue of the Group Decision and Negotiation Journal is aimed at serving as a forum for researchers working in related areas to address the issues involved, share their viewpoints, and describe the state of the technology and its future trend. In putting together the special issue, we have placed an emphasis on research perspectives that focus on information technology for multi-agent group environments. The problem of system integration has been with us for a very long time (Straw et al. 1993), but there have been some recent changes in the way that we think of the problem. Until recently, we operated under the assumption that large complex problems could be effectively dealt with by working on smaller pieces. Most of our research has been based upon ‘‘reductionism,’’ or the practice of decomposing a problem into smaller, more manageable pieces, with the implicit assumption that the collection of solutions to these smaller problems would somehow combine to yield a solution to the larger problem. Increasingly, the research community is abandoning this paradigm in favor of one which recognizes a need for explicit treatment of integration. We are still in the early stages of this paradigm shift. Indeed, most of the community continues to operate under the old paradigm which, after all, still provides a rich set of opportunities for productive work. The evidence, however, that something more is needed continues to accumulate. In the past several years, a variety of efforts have been undergoing to address coordination and