The Need for Second Order Interoperation

Modern day enterprises need to be continuously “on the move” to deal with the many challenges and opportunities that confront them. The resulting changes can take shape as top-down and premeditated efforts, but are more likely to also take the form of numerous small changes that emerge bottom-up in a seemingly spontaneous fashion. Additionally, fixed organizational structures are being replaced by more dynamic networked enterprises, also blurring borderlines between existing enterprises within the same value web/chain.

We argue that the change processes of modern day enterprises are a key business process, next to the regular business processes involved in the operational activities. We therefore suggest to refer to the change processes as

second order

business processes, as they essentially change the regular (

first order

) business processes and their supportive structures. Second order business processes need the supported of information systems that capture, manipulate and disseminate information concerning different structural aspects (e.g. from value propositions, via business processes and supporting applications, to the underlying IT infrastructures) of a networked enterprise and its environment. We refer to such information systems as

second order information systems

.

In this position paper, we specifically zoom in on the need for interoperation of such second order information systems within networked enterprises that are “on the move”. This is what we will refer to as

second-order interoperation

.