Interorganizational Systems within SMEs aggregations: an exploratory study on information requirements of an industrial district
Federico Pigni, Aurelio Ravarini, Giacomo Buonanno, Donatella Sciuto
Note biografiche dell'autore Federico Pigni
He has graduated cum laude in Business Administration and Management and hold a PhD in Manangement Information Systems and Supply Chain Management. Since 1999, he has been working as a lecturer and research assistant at Carlo Cattaneo Unversity and in 2001 started lecturing at the Catholic University in Milan.
He collaborated to multiple EU and Italian funded projects dealing with ICT adoption within SMEs (?Osservatorio ePMI? and ?TICePMI?), and actively coordinated the research activities of the INTERREG IIIC - REGINSrfid project, premise for the institution of LIUC?s Lab#ID RFId laboratory of which he is Senior Researcher. From 2000 to 2006 he has been partner of Lab4Consulting, a Web and software consulting company.
In 2006 he joined for a post-doctorate France Télécom R&D - Pole Service Sciences in Sophia Antipolis (France), developing methodologies addressing the inter-organizational adoption of ICT.
Giacomo Buonanno
He received the Laurea degree (cum laude) in Electronic Engineering and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Sciences and Automation Engineering from Politecnico di Milan. He earned also a master degree in Business Administration from SDA Bocconi, Milano.
Currently he is Full Professor in Computer Systems at at the Istituto di Tecnologie of the Università Carlo Cattaneo - LIUC where he cohoperated in establishing the research center on Information and Communication Technology and Economy
(CETIC) and an observatory on the impact of ICT on SMEs (Osservatorio epmi).
Since November 2003 he is dean of the Faculty of Engineering.
He is member of IEEE, IEEE Computer Society, AIS (Association for Information Systems), and ItAIS, the Italian chapter of AIS. Currently he is member of the board of ItAIS.
Aurelio Ravarini
He is Assistant Professor of Information Systems at the School of Engineering at Università Carlo Cattaneo, Castellanza, Italy, where he is also Director of CETIC, Research Center on Information Systems.
His research expertise is in strategic information systems, inter-organizational information systems, knowledge management systems and information systems development, the latter focused on the context of small and medium size companies. He holds a position as instructor at Università Cattolica, Milan, Italy and is Visiting Professor at IESEG, Lille, France. He also holds a Laurea in Management Enginneering from Politecnico di Milano, and received his Master in Training Trainers from ISMO, Milan.
He is member of the AIS and of its Italian chapter (itAIS), where he serves as webmaster.
He published more than 30 papers on international journals, book chapters or conferences proceedings. He serves as Associate Editor of the European Journal of Information Systems and of the Journal of Information, Information Technology, and Organizations. He is also member of the editorial board of the the Information Resources Management Journal, of the Journal of e-Commerce in Organizations and of the Journal of Information Systems and Small Business. He is member of the program committee of several international conferences.
Donatella Sciuto
She is a full professor in Computer Engineering at the Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione of the Politecnico di Milano.
She is Deputy Director of Education at CEFRIEL where she manages the executive companies education training programs.
She received her degree in Electronic Engineering from the Politecnico di Milano, her PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Colorado, Boulder and a Master in Business and Administration from SDA Bocconi University. She works in the Electronic Design Automation field and in particular on methodologies for embedded systems design.
She has been associate editor of the IEEE Transactions on Computers, and she is Associate editor of the Journal of Design Automation of Embedded Systems, Kluwer Academic Publishers.
She is or has been member of different program committees of EDA conferences, among which: DAC, ICCAD, DATE, CODES+ISSS, CASES, DFT, FDL, PATMOS, IFIP VLSI Conference.
She has been Publications Chair for IEEE/ACM ESWEEK 2007 and she has been the European representative in the executive committee of the ICCAD conference.
She is in the executive committee of the conference IEEE/ACM Design Automation and Test in Europe, for which she has been Program Chair in 2006, Vice General Chair for 2007 and will be General Chair in 2008.
She is in the main board of the European Design Automation Association.
She has been appointed as VP of Finance of the Council of EDA CEDA (IEEE) for 2008.
She has coordinated and coordinates different european and national research projects.
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Sommario
Non v’è alcun dubbio che i sistemi informativi interorganizzativi (Interorganizational Information Systems, IOS) contribuiranno a dare forma al contesto competitivo negli anni a venire. Mentre all’interno dei loro confini organizzativi le aziende hanno acquisito una grande efficienza nella gestione dell’informazione e della logistica, i processi interorganizzativi sono supportati in misura molto limitata dalle tecnologie informatiche e pertanto vi sono notevoli margini di miglioramento dell’efficacia per la comunicazione e il coordinamento tra partner aziendali.
Questo contrasta con i requisiti di un mercato globale, in cui l’intera supply chain è chiamata a contribuire al successo delle aziende. Si rende così obbligatoria un’appropriata progettazione e implementazione di un IOS, di cui beneficerebbero senz’altro le piccole-medie imprese, in particolare se appartenenti a un’aggregazione industriale. D’altro canto, non esiste al momento un modello di riferimento per l’adozione di un IOS. Questo articolo cerca di colmare questa lacuna e propone una metodologia per l’analisi delle relazioni tra i principali attori di aggregazioni industriali. Sulla base di tale framework è stata condotta un’indagine empirica in un distretto industriale. L’analisi dei risultati della survey mostra come la metodologia proposta consenta di identificare i principali requisiti informativi a livello interorganizzativo di un’aggregazione industriale.
Abstract
Interorganizational Information Systems (IOS) will play a relevant role in shaping competition in the next years. Even though companies have become extremely efficient in managing information and logistics inside their boundaries, communication and coordination among partners is still far from effective. Both obsolete technologies and a very scarce ICT support to interorganizational processes are found in practice.
In a global market where the entire supply chain is involved in the success of companies, the proper design and implementation of an IOS are becoming mandatory. SMEs, and in particular those inside industrial aggregations, could greatly benefit from IOS implementation; on the other hand, a widely accepted model on IOS adoption is still missing. This paper proposes a framework to analyze the relationships among the main players of industrial aggregations and presents its application to an industrial district. The analysis of the results has proved that this methodology offers useful insight for the understanding of the aggregation’s information requirements at the interorganizational level.