Analysing Business Interaction in a Virtual Organisation: Using Business Action Theory to Study Complex Inter-Organisational Contexts

This paper focuses upon the complexity of inter-organisational systems (IOS) — on one hand enabling organisations to become successful actors conducting electronic commerce, and on the other hand being organisationally very complex and demanding to develop, implement, and use, since several organisations with differing objectives are involved. The paper proposes a model to analyse business interaction: the business action theory (BAT) phase model. The aim of the paper is to show how BAT can increase the understanding of business interaction conducted in complex inter-organisational contexts, such as business networks and virtual organisations. In order to achieve this purpose, the BAT phase model is applied on a virtual organisation. The model visualises and gives structure to the business interaction within this network of organisations. Understanding of such business interaction is important when developing and implementing IOS, since (part of) the business interaction will be conducted through the IOS.