Managing cooperation in e-business systems

E-Business management involves monitoring and controlling all forms of business transactions conducted over the Internet, extranets, and related communications technologies and services. As such, it includes the management of networks, systems, and software applications. E-Business management is beginning to depend increasingly on knowledge of the cooperative aspects of partners in a business chain and the cooperative aspects of stake-holders in e-business operations. The study of cooperation offers many opportunities to apply social network analyses to derive software solutions for the management of e-business. This article provides a methodology and case study that recognises the dimension of cooperation among a multiplicity of organisations, coined “Awareness-based Cooperative Management.” It is aimed towards the design or re-engineering of effective e-business management systems, where the key concept involves the degree of awareness held by e-business stake-holders. Awareness is defined in terms of stake-holder interactions and artefacts used in those interactions such as buyer specifications, requests for proposals, offers, service level agreements, and the like. Since awareness is an indispensable, albeit an inherently vague concept, we cast it and reason about it with the apparatus of fuzzy logic.