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Itais 2013
1. 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: barbara.livieri@unisalento.it
2. Objective
Propose a prototype of a new web-based system, called DsNA (Database
for strategic Network Analysis) for:
Online database
KPIs monitoring for networks and firms;
Benchmarking of similar firms or networks;
Statistical analysis.
Information and
Communication
Technologies
DsNA
Benchmarking
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
Performance
management
3. Context
Why?
Cooperation
Competitive
advantages
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?
50% of alliances fails
How should firms and networks
compare KPIs?
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
4. Context
Performance measurement is relevant in all phases of the SA‟s lifecycle
Pre-alliance
phase
Lesson learnt for
firms
Accountability
Conclusion
phase
Strategy
definition
Partner selection
Operational
phase
SAs monitoring
Changes
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
5. Related works
Performance management and PM have a key
role in the assessment of SAs and of how the SA is
affecting firms.
PM in SAs can be focused on three aspects
Firms
•Consolidate literature
Effects of •Few works with no
attention on quantitative
the SA
aspects
on firms
SA
•Guidelines, performance
measurement tools and
enforcements methods
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
6. 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
7. 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
9. DsNA system
1.
Database for strategic
Network Analysis
3.
2.
4.
GOAL-STAKEHOLDER
DIAGRAM;
MAIN SOFTWARE
ELEMENTS OF THE SYSTEM
MAIN IMPLEMENTATION
ASPECTS
EARLY TEST PHASE
10. Goal-stakeholders diagram
Internal stakeholders
networks‟ managers
firms‟ managers
external stakeholders
network associations
Policy
makers
Researchers
Complete set
of goals and
constraints;
Networks‟
manager
policy makers
For each of
them:
Functional and
non-functional
requirements
researchers
Firms‟
managers
Network
associations
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
11. Goals and stakeholders: firms
Goals
Requirements
Firms (managers and directors)
G.1 Evaluating network suitability for specific business goals (competitiveness,
improvement and increase of advertisement, growth of R&D)
G.1 Evaluating
network suitability
for specific
business goals
Operational-phase
R1 (DL). Information objects: firms, network agreements, financial statements,
items. (Stored data)
Pre-alliance
phase
R2 (BRL). KPIs calculation rules, privacy anonimization, (derived data)
R3 (BRL). Visibility - managers and directors can see (DD):
G.2 Firm assessment
G.3 Share
information (costs,
suppliers,
performance, …)
their own analytic data;
Information on other firms of the network, depending on each firm choice;
synthetic data of other firms and networks;
G.2.2
Benchmarking
R4 (PL). Reports and dashboards on R3 objects
G.2.1 Financial
analysis
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
12. Internal stakeholders: networks
Goals
Requirements
G.5 View statistics (synthetic data)
Network‟s managers
G.2.1 Financial
analysis
G.2.2
Benchmarking
G.3 Share
information
G.4 Network evaluation
G.4.1 Projects
assessment
G.4.2
homogeneity
G.4.3
distribution of
benefits
G.5 View
statistics
(synthetic
data)
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;
G.2 Firm assessment
R2 (DL) Information objects: Firms, network agreements,
financial statements, items, sector.
Operational-phase
R1 (DL). Required info: network size, firm size, industrial sectors,
firms and networks age, performance trend, …
R6 (PL). Filtering, search, ordering and comparison on R1
information and R2 objects;
R7 (PL). Overall navigation
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
13. External stakeholders (sneak-peek)
Goals
Requirements
G.6 Definition of new ratios
External stakeholders
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).
Operational-phase
G.2 Firm assessment
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:
G.3 Share
information
G.4 Network evaluation
G.5 View
statistics
(synthetic
data)
G.6 Define
new ratios
new ratios;
metadata on new ratios;
G.2.2
Benchmarking
G.4.1 Projects
assessment
G.4.2
homogeneity
G.4.3 distribution
of benefits
R3 (PL). Organization of new ratios – New ratios have to be
„groupables and searchables‟ according to multiple criteria.
G.2.1 Financial
analysis
R4 (PL). Reports and dashboards on R2 objects‟ usage.
R5 (PL). Overall navigation
14. System architecture and
implementation
DsNA is a Web System composed by
two main application:
a)
a data integration subsystem
Collet financial
statements
We decided to use the classic threelayer architecture.
Load in the db
LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)
architecture integrated with the jQuery
v.2.0 library to support asynchronous
page update.
Why?
b)
Problem size: less than 5000 firms and
related financial statements for 5 years
Estimated workload: less than 10
concurrent users
a front-end
Computing
KPIs
Present KPIs to
stakeholders
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
15. System architecture and
implementation
STRATEGIC
ALLIANCE
FIRM
SECTOR
ITEM
REPORT
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.
ITEM TYPE
Main elements of the data model
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
16. 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
17. Validation
The validation of the prototype concerns four aspects:
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
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
18. Validation
Performance (tested on 192 firms and 75 networks)
Performance test
Load test
Assumption:
Input
Data integration
Speed: 8 s/file
Estimation for around 3681 firms: 9 hours
20 concurrent users
DsNA
1000 unique visitor per
day
standard server (quadcore Pentium with 32 GB
of RAM)
Result: response time < 3 s
Every four months
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
19. Validation
Usability (tested on 192 firms and 75 networks)
Test
Results
10 graduate students of the course of Data
Management (MSc in Management
Engineering – University of Salento) to:
The 10 students pointed out a number of
mistakes and errors in navigation, which
allowed us to correct and improve the design
of the Web Application
and the structure of the
service before the
actual go-live
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
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
20. Validation
Features (through an expert review)
Test
Results
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
It resulted that requirements meets firms
and networks‟ needs, although some
improvements can still be done.
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).
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
21. Validation
At the current state of research it is not possible to complete a field
evaluation of the service:
Coherence theory [27]
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
22. Discussion and conclusions
DsNA allows
to better understand the economic trends of SAs and
to perform a benchmark analysis of firms and SAs with homogeneous
characteristics,
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
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
23. Discussion and conclusions
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.
Barbara Livieri– X Conference of the Italian Chapter of AIS – Empowering society through digital innovations (itAIS 2013) – Milan, December 14th – 15st
There is the need for systems with goal oriented requirementsSeveral authors [10] studied the role of control mechanism, such as management accounting, in inter-organizational environments. Nonetheless, to our knowledge no one applied these results in order to quantitatively analyze the performance of SAs and of involved firmsPerformance management and performance measurement have a key role in the assessment of SAs and of how the strategic partnership is affecting firms. In more details, performance monitoring in SAs can be focused on three aspects: a) the firms; b) the effects of the SA on the firms; c) the SA. While there is a consolidate literature on sub-a), there are still few works on how to measure the effects of SAs on firms (sub-b), with no attention on quantitative aspects. For sub-c) researchers and practitioners propose several guidelines, performance management tools (e.g., modified Balanced Scorecard and scorecards) and enforcement methods (e.g., Open Book Accounting, henceforth OBA [11–16]). In particular, in [13] the authors highlight how OBA allows firms of a SA to share accounting information, which improve the decision process. However, many firms are reluctant to disclose these data, because OBA is sometimes seen as formal control mechanism that can damage trust [17].
Performance management and performance measurement have a key role in the assessment of CEs and of how the CE is affecting firms, according to the principle of “if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it”The motivations of our work lie on some considerations based on the analysis of literature and reports on SAs. First, performance management has an high degree of complexity in inter-organizational settings, but it is not yet possible to analyze in detail which costs and which revenues of a firm are ascribable to the SA. Thus, presently it is not possible to know in detail the impact of a SA on its firms. However, 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 and c) to monitor how their firm is going. Therefore, an acceptable solution is benchmarking, which allows the comparison of firms or SAs with similar ones. Still, a benchmarking system requires for many information, which are not accessible at a reasonable cost to firms.
Performance management and performance measurement have a key role in the assessment of CEs and of how the CE is affecting firms, according to the principle of “if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it”The motivations of our work lie on some considerations based on the analysis of literature and reports on SAs. First, performance management has an high degree of complexity in inter-organizational settings, but it is not yet possible to analyze in detail which costs and which revenues of a firm are ascribable to the SA. Thus, presently it is not possible to know in detail the impact of a SA on its firms. However, 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 and c) to monitor how their firm is going. Therefore, an acceptable solution is benchmarking, which allows the comparison of firms or SAs with similar ones. Still, a benchmarking system requires for many information, which are not accessible at a reasonable cost to firms.
The chance to develop such a benchmarking system was offered by the Small Business Act (SBA), which assigned a key role to SAs to improve the levels of innovation and internationalization of SMEs. This led the Italian parliament to introduce a specific legislation (Law n. 33/2009) for “network agreements” as a form of SA, providing a legal framework for relationships among enterprises. The legal obligation to register the contract enabled some associations to produce reports on this form of strategic partnerships, but these reports take into account only qualitative data (e.g., [25, 26]) with no regard for quantitative performance measurement aspects and for the possibility to access their primary data to assess their approaches.
In our opinion, the feasibility of the proposed approach lies on the existence of an automatic system able to process the large amount of data required for benchmarking. For this reason, in this work we describe both the benchmarking approach and the technical aspects of theDsNAprototype. The system (http://dsna.unisalento.it) is based on a database that collects information on firms involved in SAs making them available online for all stakeholders and allowing users to create customized reports.
a data integration subsystem to collect the financial statements of all firms involved in one or more SAs, loading it in a databasea frontend, in charge of computing all relevant KPIs and to present them to stakeholders according to their roles
Even if not efficient from the computational point of view, these technical choices werevery effective in terms of overall implementation costs, with less than five person-months for the first working prototype of the whole application.
An example page of the website for SAs’ managers is reported in the figure. In the central part of the page are indicated the relevant values for a given SA and the contribution of each composing firm. The parameters used to compose the page are shown in the left panel.
To test the 1st and 2nd aspects we populated the system with 192 firms and 75 networks: the dataset is not already complete because the agreement for the data provisioning is still under draft.
To test the 1st and 2nd aspects we populated the system with 192 firms and 75 networks: the dataset is not already complete because the agreement for the data provisioning is still under draft. balance sheets of firms imported on the MySQL DB through an ETL tool (Kettle tool of Pentaho BI Community Edition suite) inputs processing with a speed of around; extending the dataset (3.681 firms) we estimate that around 9 hours are required with the same machine already used for this test. the update operation, repeated every four months, is processed offline and doesn’t impact on users’ performance. Considering the order of magnitude of firms potentially involved in SAs, we estimate that the system will have no more than 1.000 unique visitors per day. Our tests show that even in the hypothesis of maximum load (i.e., simultaneous access of 20 users), the server (a standard quad-core Pentium with 32 GB of RAM) exhibits a response time lower than 3 seconds.
Inserirecosedette ad ICEIS
In this work we propose a tool, named DsNA, for the analysis of Strategic Alliances (SAs) through monitoring and benchmarking techniques. The aim of the system is to provide all stakeholders with quali-quantitative structured and complete information. . In other words, DsNA can provide a support for the decision process of managers in an inter-organizational environment.
For the production and development of DsNA we used a systematic approach that enabled us to design and automate the evaluation and publication of KPIs.
