Smart Business Networks

A number of scientists - from management and strategy, information systems, engineering and telecommunications - gathered at the Vanenburg castle in the Netherlands to discuss a novel concept: Smart Business Networks. They see the future as a developing web of people, organisations and IT/networking infrastructures, bound together in dynamic, unpredictable ways, creating smart outcomes from quickly (re-)configuring links between actors. They posed the question: What should be done to make the outcomes of such a network 'smart' that is just a little better than that of your competitor? More agile, with less pain, with more return to all the members of the network, now and over time? The answer was that we observe the emergence of "business operating systems" that run business processes on different organisational platforms while sharing elements of their infrastructures. Business processes become portable: The end-to-end management of different processes running across different organisations in many different forms becomes possible, while leaving to each actor the ultimate power of choosing its partners in different constellations. This book presents the outcomes of an energizing discussion of this emerging new direction in management science.