A Meta-methodology for Collaborative Networked Organisations: Creating Directly Applicable Methods for Enterprise Engineering Projects

In the current global market, organizations worldwide often need to come together in order to bid for and execute projects whose requirements go beyond their individual competencies. Collaborative Networked Organisations (CNO) are known to offer an advantage in a competitive situation by capitalising on the overall pool of knowledge owned by the network participants. Business ecosystems, breeding environments and company networks can enable a prompt formation of CNOs e.g. by using reference models for design and operation. Unfortunately, such reference models are often rather generic and thus must be first specialised for the particular enterprise engineering task, which requires extensive user expertise in those reference models. The applied research described in this book has attempted to address this problem by studying the feasibility and the architectural design of a step-by-step meta-methodology. i.e., a method on how to create methods directly applicable to the design and operation of CNOs and their Breeding Environments based rather on the business context knowledge of the user. The research is spread over several case studies covering manufacturing and tertiary education.