A Reference Model for Seamless Cross-Organizational Collaboration in the Public Sector

Today, electronic cross-company collaboration is about to gain significant momentum, but still shows weaknesses with respect to productivity, flexibility and quality: a lack of standardized supporting e-business solutions, unclear terminology and unstructured business processes prevent from seamless interoperability and the fast development of a globally networked service economy. A novel approach is now required which facilitates a comprehensive industrialization of related concepts and methodologies. In this work, we present the St. Gallen Media Reference Model (MRM) and extend it to fulfill the specific needs of electronic, cross-organizational collaboration. Based on the three components "Organizational" (structural as well as process-oriented organization of interaction between agents), "Logical" (common language between agents) and "Physical" (the physical infrastructure enabling interaction), we amend the reference model by introducing key principles which improved the performance of computer programming during the past decades. To show its real-world applicability and potential for performance enhancement, we apply this extended MRM to the specific case of governmental administration in Switzerland.