Frictionless Business Ecosystems

Welcome

November 23, 2009 by Paul M.. Filed under Site.

The purpose of this site is twofold:

1. To communicate a vision of research and industry engagement for our team and,
2. To provide a forum for exploring and addressing real-world industry challenges in our field.

Our team is at work on the Business Adaptation and Interoperation project at NICTA, Australia’s ICT Research Centre of Excellence.  Our vision can be summed in the three words that identify this site.

Business Ecosystems are units within an organisation, and/or they may span across organisational boundaries, even on whole-of-sector scales.  It may be the entire mortgage lending industry in Australia. Or a business ecosystem may be all of the functional units within a multinational corporation, or a large government agency.  On a smaller scale still, a business ecosystem may be an SME and its network of customers and supply chain partners.

Friction is a short-hand way of describing those factors that slow or otherwise impede transactions, business practices, and business agility.  It includes:

• The unnecessary delays and overheads that exist in business process activities, especially those that span the boundaries of individual organisations
• The time and cost overheads, rework, and other forms of wastage that continue to be a large part of the implementation of major business systems and processes
• The encumbrance and inflexibility that many existing systems weigh down today’s businesses and industries, to prevent them from responding rapidly to changes in the world around them and from finding newer and richer ways of working.

Our research is aimed at reducing or eliminating these forms of friction in business ecosystems, through new tools and methods to improve organisational interoperability and adaptability.  Our goal is to create a positive impact not just for individual customers, citizens and businesses, but also at the level of entire industry sectors.

Essential to our success is engagement – with other researchers in the field as well as industry partners in business and government, to help validate our technologies and bring them to a point where their full impact can be realised.

Welcome.

We invite you to share our vision and join the conversation.

Tags: NICTA

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