Managing complexity of collaborative business processes in virtual organisations

For many companies the increasing product and service complexity raise the need of collaboration. The combination of complementary core-competencies in a framework for collaborative business provides effective conditions to cope with the related challenges. In addition to the complexity of products and services, the specific complexity of collaboration processes highlights the need of approaches to handle those complex management processes. Research provides findings about structures and challenges of collaborative business as well as about the means and approaches of complexity management. But up to now there is still no accepted concept to assess the effectiveness of various means of complexity management in different scenarios of collaborative business. This paper gives an introduction to the specific challenges in managing complexity of collaboration in the special case of virtual organisations and describes the need for measuring the effects of complexity as an important component of this management.