Building Sustainable Information Systems for Project-Oriented Cross Organizational Collaboration

Shorter development cycles and higher complexity of product development require more flexible corporate structures and cross organizational collaboration in order to gain the required know-how and execution capabilities. To fulfill these requirements, many companies are transforming themselves into project based organizations and abandoning traditional business lines. A project based approach gives a company more flexibility and better utilization of its resources. However, compared to running a line-oriented company, steering project-oriented organizations is plagued by complex planning, staffing and prioritization issues. Even worse, integrated enterprise software solutions for running project based organizations simply do not yet exist. This paper explains how organizations are evolving and demonstrates how sustainable IT systems can be designed to support this evolution.