Using Network Analysis to Improve Decision Making for Partner Selection in Inter-Organizational Networks

Professionals in decision making roles are often faced with the problem of choosing partners for closer cooperation, for instance, to start new joint IT development projects or for harvesting best practices. The large amounts of information involved in these decision processes obscure possibilities, and therefore choices are made ad hoc. In this article, the authors present an approach that uses concrete data and network analysis to support decision makers in processing and understanding this information. Central in the authors' approach are questionnaires capturing aspired and current development levels of the processes of the cooperating organizations and graphs generated using network analysis techniques. The advantage of the authors' approach, which they validated via expert interviews, is that results are semi-automatically translated to visualizations; which in turn offer an overall view of the current and aspired situation in the network without losing the ability to pinpoint particular, individual processes of interest. This, in turn, enables IT professionals to make better decisions.