Organizing as Programming: A Reference Model for Cross-Organizational Collaboration

Today, 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. New concepts are now required which facilitate a comprehensive industrialization of related concepts and methodologies. In this work, we revisit the evolution of computer programming and derive essential principles which drove its industrialization during the past decades. In combination with the St. Gallen Media Reference Model (MRM), we leverage these key principles to transfer them to the field of cross-company collaboration. We apply the extended MRM to the specific case of governmental administration in Switzerland, which represents a cross-organizational service industry with significant potential for performance enhancement. The analysis shows that organizations in the public sector may improve productivity, quality and flexibility of their collaboration by adhering to the MRM which transfers programming principles to the context of human organizations.