DsNA A DATABASE FOR STRATEGIC NETWORK ANALYSIS IN ITALY Authors: M. A. Bochicchio, B. Livieri, A. Longo, P. Di Cagno Presenting author: Barbara Livieri email: [email protected]
DsNAA DATABASE FOR STRATEGIC NETWORK ANALYSIS IN ITALY
Authors: M. A. Bochicchio, B. Livieri, A. Longo, P. Di Cagno
Presenting author: Barbara Livieri email: [email protected]
Objective
Propose a prototype of a new web-based system, called DsNA (Database for strategic Network Analysis) for:
KPIs monitoring for networks and firms;
Benchmarking of similar firms or networks;
Statistical analysis.
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
DsNA
Online database
Performance management
Benchmarking
Information and Communication
Technologies
Context
Cooperation Competitive advantages
Why?
Lack of tools and methods to quantitatively track the effects of alliances on firms and to link goals and KPIs outside of traditional organizational boundaries
What should firms and networks monitor?
How should firms and networks compare KPIs?
50% of alliances fails
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
Lesson learnt for firms
Accountability
SAs monitoring Changes
Strategy definition
Partner selection
Context
Performance measurement is relevant in all phases of the SA’s lifecycle
Pre-alliance phase
Operational phase
Conclusion phase
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
Related works
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
Performance management and PM have a key role in the assessment of SAs and of how the SA is affecting firms.
• Consolidate literatureFirms
• Few works with no attention on quantitative aspects
Effects of the SA on firms
• Guidelines, performance measurement tools and enforcements methods
SA
PM in SAs can be focused on three aspects
Motivation and theoretical foundation
PM has an high degree of complexity in inter-organizational settings
it is not yet possible to analyze in detail which costs and which revenues of a firm are ascribable to the SA (lack of multi-level studies)
However, “if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it”
Firms’ and SAs’ managers could benefit from quali-quantitative information allowing them
a) to better understand if SAs are a good choice for them
b) to comprehend what to expect from a SA
c) to monitor how their firm/SA is going
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
Motivation and theoretical foundation
An acceptable solution is benchmarking: comparison of firms or SAs with similar ones.
But…why is an online service for benchmarking useful?
a benchmarking system requires for many information, which are not accessible at a reasonable cost to firms (especially, SMEs).
So…less expensive information
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
Scenario
Chance to develop such a benchmarking system
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
Worldwide
GlobalizationCooperation
and networks
Importance of SMEs
SBA (2008)
Network agreements
Europe Italy
DsNA system
Database for strategic Network Analysis
1. GOAL-STAKEHOLDER DIAGRAM;
2. MAIN SOFTWARE ELEMENTS OF THE SYSTEM
3. MAIN IMPLEMENTATION ASPECTS
4. EARLY TEST PHASE
Goal-stakeholders diagram
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
Networks’ manager
Firms’ managers
Policy makers
Network associations
Researchers
For each of them:
Complete set of goals and constraints;
Functional and non-functional requirements
Internal stakeholders
networks’ managers
firms’ managers
external stakeholders
policy makers
network associations
researchers
Goals and stakeholders: firms
Goals
Firms (managers and directors)
Pre-alliance phase
G.1 Evaluating network
suitability for specific business
goals
Operational-phase
G.2 Firm assessment
G.2.1 Financial analysis
G.2.2 Benchmarking
G.3 Share information
(costs, suppliers, performance, …)
RequirementsG.1 Evaluating network suitability for specific business goals (competitiveness, improvement and increase of advertisement, growth of R&D)
R1 (DL). Information objects: firms, network agreements, financial statements, items. (Stored data)
R2 (BRL). KPIs calculation rules, privacy anonimization, (derived data)
R3 (BRL). Visibility - managers and directors can see (DD): their own analytic data;
Information on other firms of the network, depending on each firm choice;
synthetic data of other firms and networks;
R4 (PL). Reports and dashboards on R3 objects
R5 (PL). Filtering, search, ordering and comparison on R1 objects
R6 (PL). Overall navigation
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
Internal stakeholders: networks
Goals RequirementsG.5 View statistics (synthetic data)
R1 (DL). Required info: network size, firm size, industrial sectors, firms and networks age, performance trend, …
R2 (DL) Information objects: Firms, network agreements, financial statements, items, sector.
R3 (BRL). KPIs calculation rules, trend analysis and comparison, descriptive and inference statistics indicators, privacy anonimization
R4 (BRL). Visibility: synthetic data of other firms and networks;
R5 (PL). Statistical reports on R3 objects;
R6 (PL). Filtering, search, ordering and comparison on R1 information and R2 objects;
R7 (PL). Overall navigation
Network’s managers
Operational-phase
G.2 Firm assessment
G.2.1 Financial analysis
G.2.2 Benchmarking
G.3 Share informatio
nG.4 Network evaluation
G.4.1 Projects assessment
G.4.2 homogeneity
G.4.3 distribution of
benefits
G.5 View statistics (synthetic
data)
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
External stakeholders (sneak-peek)
Goals RequirementsG.6 Definition of new ratios
R1 (DL). Information objects: all the information objects defined in the model, data coming from external sources and stored as couples “attribute-value”, metadata on new ratios (Stored data).
R2 (BRL). Visibility – New ratios can be public, private or shared among specific groups (e.g. alliances or homogeneous type of enterprise or user defined groups). Each group or user can see:
new ratios; metadata on new ratios;
R3 (PL). Organization of new ratios – New ratios have to be ‘groupables and searchables’ according to multiple criteria.
R4 (PL). Reports and dashboards on R2 objects’ usage.
R5 (PL). Overall navigation
External stakeholders
Operational-phase
G.2 Firm assessment
G.2.1 Financial analysis
G.2.2 Benchmarking
G.3 Share informatio
nG.4 Network evaluation
G.4.1 Projects assessment
G.4.2 homogeneity
G.4.3 distribution of
benefits
G.5 View statistics (synthetic
data)
G.6 Define new ratios
System architecture and implementation
DsNA is a Web System composed by two main application:
a) a data integration subsystem
b) a front-end
We decided to use the classic three-layer architecture. LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)
architecture integrated with the jQuery v.2.0 library to support asynchronous page update.
Why? Problem size: less than 5000 firms and
related financial statements for 5 years
Estimated workload: less than 10 concurrent users
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
Collet financial statements Load in the db
Computing KPIs
Present KPIs to
stakeholders
System architecture and implementation
STRATEGIC ALLIANCE
FIRM SECTOR
ITEM REPORT
ITEM TYPE
KPIs (i.e., ROI, ROE, EBITDA, NFP, ROS, ROA) and the benchmark values evaluation performed through SQL views
SQL views made KPIs very fast to implement and very simple to test.
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
Main elements of the data model
Presentation aspects
The presentation aspects of DsNA have been modeled and implemented through a navigation tree and through a page template associated to each user type.
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
Validation
The validation of the prototype concerns four aspects:
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
Performance (tested on 192 firms and 75 networks)
Usability (tested on 192 firms and 75 networks)
Features (through an expert review)
Coherence with existing literature
Validation
Performance test Load test Assumption:
1000 unique visitor per day
20 concurrent users
standard server (quad-core Pentium with 32 GB of RAM)
Result: response time < 3 s
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
Performance (tested on 192 firms and 75 networks)
DsNAInputData integration
Speed: 8 s/file
Estimation for around 3681 firms: 9 hours
Every four months
Validation
Test10 graduate students of the course of Data Management (MSc in Management Engineering – University of Salento) to:
We explained DsNA features;
We asked them to execute some tasks: to work on a subset of 20 KPIs for a period of two months and to evaluate not only the usability but also the service continuity and the delivered quality;
The 10 students answered a short survey on technical and usability aspects
ResultsThe 10 students pointed out a number of mistakes and errors in navigation, which allowed us to correct and improve the design of the Web Applicationand the structure of the service before the actual go-live
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
Usability (tested on 192 firms and 75 networks)
Validation
Test We selected a recognized expert panel
composed by: 2 employee of the Commerce Chambers of
Lecce, whom operate with SAs;
4 business literacy and consultancy experts.
We explained the problem and the scenario
We asked them to test if the requirements make sense for firms and SAs, assigning to each requirement a degree of importance (on a scale on 1 to 7).
Results
It resulted that requirements meets firms and networks’ needs, although some improvements can still be done.
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
Features (through an expert review)
Validation
At the current state of research it is not possible to complete a field evaluation of the service:
prospective users cannot have a clear understanding of the possible applications of the system, until it is in a more advanced stage of prototyping.
The proposed approach (based on benchmarking) and tool (online database) are well known and documented both in scientific literature and in industrial field.
database systems are commonly used to store and analyze data of enterprises
performance benchmarking is well known to enhance competitiveness.
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
Coherence theory [27]
Discussion and conclusions
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
DsNA allows
to perform a benchmark analysis of firms and SAs with homogeneous characteristics,
to better understand the economic trends of SAs and
to better understand if, and in what measure, firms obtain benefits from a SA.
SAs can become a suitable solution also for firms that lack of the economical and managerial resources required to enforce a complex and homogeneous performance measurement system in the whole ecosystem
Discussion and conclusions
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
With the prototypical system, we achieved the following results:
acceptable evaluation and publication costs of benchmarking data;
the evaluation of firms in network agreements, with a detailed description of their characteristics (e.g., sector, place, employees); the evaluation of a broad number of KPIs and related sector benchmarks.
Future works will include the extension of the system with more advanced anonimization techniques, the creation of a collaborative version of the platform to foster data exchange and Web 2.0 interaction among stakeholders in the perspective of e-participation and the use of taxonomies and ontologies to analyze the link between business goals and KPIs.