Measuring and evaluating communication intensities in collaborative networks

Abstract

Companies that are actively participating in a collaborative network (CN) need to show a high level of cooperation ability and willingness. The concept of cooperation contains various aspects that need to be considered, like e.g. communication, resource exchange, or cross-organisational processes. These aspects should become permanent subjects of analysis during the operational phase of the CN. The article at hand considers one of these aspects, namely the communication aspect. Our approach is based on a combination of fundamental concepts stemming from the Media-Richness-Theory (MRT) and Graph-Theory. It enables the analyser to firstly measure and then evaluate communication intensities in CNs. We present our approach by means of an example and discuss possible application areas and extensions. © 2010 IFIP.