Aurelio Ravarini

Interorganizational Information Systems (IOS) will play a relevant role in shaping competition in the next years. Even though companies have become extremely efficient in managing information and logistics inside their boundaries, communication and coordination among partners is still far from effective. Both obsolete technologies and a very scarce ICT support to interorganizational processes are found in practice. In a global market where the entire supply chain is involved in the success of companies, the proper design and implementation of an IOS are becoming mandatory. SMEs, and in particular those inside industrial aggregations, could greatly benefit from IOS implementation; on the other hand, a widely accepted model on IOS adoption is still missing. This paper proposes a framework to analyze the relationships among the main players of industrial aggregations and presents its application to an industrial district. The analysis of the results has proved that this methodology offers useful insight for the understanding of the aggregation's information requirements at the interorganizational level.

Information Systems evaluation in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) often represents a difficult task. Because of cultural, economic, or organizational reasons, SMEs rarely make use of formal business strategies: as a consequence, the management of the Information System (IS) is often approached in a non formalized way. Moreover, such enterprises are often characterized by a limited number of specialized staff, hence either the management or the ownership itself should be provided with a well defined, low cost, and easy to use procedure for the evaluation of the Information Technology (IT) investments and for the assessment of the existing IS. This paper presents an Information System Check Up Model (ISCUM) which fulfills these requirements: according to the strategic importance and the current state of the IS for each functional area, the model highlights the inefficiencies of each area and identifies the strategic choices required to improve the IS performance.