Interpreting Inter-organizational Information Technology Networks: a Chaos Theory Approach

Inter-organizational information technology networks act as an enabler for complex, inter-company business processes and large, distributed business models. These technology networks cover not only technical aspects, but moreover organizational aspects and show a highly dynamic change. For the study of organizational behavior, concepts from chaos theory have been used to understand the development and change of organizational systems. This paper makes use of these concepts to study inter-organizational networks as organizational element. For this, elements from chaos theory are discussed in the context of inter-organizational networks. The findings are applied to a case study to demonstrate the value of the identified concepts. The results of the current research give more insight in the dynamics of inter-organizational networks for a better understanding of developing large, distributed network systems.