On Quality Issues in Networked Value Constellations

* Supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), project 638.003.407 (Value-based Business-IT Alignment) One of the main purposes of collaborative networks is to satisfy specific consumer needs, which one company cannot satisfy alone. With the opening of the internet in the 1990s the number of companies that collaborate by means of computer networks increased rapidly. As far as one of our main foci is the consideration of value object exchanges between the involved business actors, we refer to such collaborative networks as networked value constellations or value webs. The business requirements of networked value constellations need to be enabled and operationalized by means of functional and quality requirements at the IT level. Our paper aims to build a sound understanding of how to plan quality related issues by considering distinct perspectives, namely the business perspective and the information systems perspective. Each perspective requires multiple quality-related considerations. From a business perspective, we have (a) to consider the quality perceptions by the end consumers, (b) to plan the quality of the value objects to be produced, and (c) to plan the quality of the value objects to be transferred. Quality issue (d), structural properties of the network have to be applied to both perspectives. From an information systems perspective we need (e) to plan the quality of the software-intensive systems. In this paper we provide a framework for discussing and addressing the described quality issues and suggest several techniques in doing so. We point out where these techniques can be used as such and where additional research is required.