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Presents the most recent work carried out in the wider context of IST‐Adrenalin project, dealing with the facilitation, formation and lifecycle management of networked enterprises and organisations. In this respect, how information supply chains and routes can be organised and navigated across networked enterprise activities is specified, designed and realised in a conceptual way within the context of a branch independent model that builds on the fractal idea by supporting self‐similarity, self‐organisation, self‐optimisation and dynamic organisational behavior. The approach described places heavy emphasis on the need for interoperable, integrated, and cost‐effective business practices and capabilities within each individual organisation and across the supply as well as the value chains with respect to information technology. A reflection of the above approach will be realized by the efficient optimisation of the information supply chain and fractal company concepts which will in turn significantly affect the design and performance of the industry concerned (and particularly networked organisations).

Builds on earlier work in developing the concept of information supply chains and the ways in which it can assist industrial organisations. Presents practical results that stem from the conceptual modeling and simulation environment. Asserts that the ATLAS “A push Technology Leveraging Action for ‘Slingshot”’ initiative, which is already successfully employed in the financial services sector, would be ideal in many other sectors. Provides a case study of a pilot application of real time management of operations in an industrial enterprise using Slingshot in a company producing flexible packaging materials, Chatzopoulos S.A.

Presents work carried out in the wider context of the IST Adrenalin project whose aim is to facilitate formation and lifecycle management of networked enterprises utilising concepts from two key information research areas. The approach described places heavy emphasis on the notion of mobile agent technologies and their adaptation for achieving the IT realisation of the above theoretical background. It covers specification, design and conceptual realisation of how information supply chains and routes can be organised and navigated across networked enterprise activities within the context of a branch independent model. Builds on the distribute and integrate concept as well as on the fractal idea by supporting self‐similarity, self‐organisation, self‐optimisation and dynamic organisational behavior. The harmonised combination of the concepts formulated in the Adrenalin theoretical framework and their IT realisation are employed within the context of a real‐world case study in an industrial ERP system.

Work presented in this paper forms part of a wider research in defining a methodological framework for situation room analysis (SRA), and its employment for complex (business enterprise) systems study. More specifically, we investigate the area of multiparty collaboration and decision‐making activities by using the central metaphor of a situation room (SR). The latter term is broadly used in the context of military operations and has specific semantical connotations. These connotations are deliberately exploited in order to propose an analytical scheme based on it, which aims to assist planning initiatives and decision making in a particular application domain. Historically speaking, a SR is considered as the intelligence analysis centre used to stay abreast of the latest intelligence reports and updates. For the purposes of our aim, i.e. the multiparty collaboration and decision‐making activities from within the SRA framework, it is easy to see that the latter should be data‐driven.

The European Community ESPRIT Project Buddy addresses the needs of industrial organisations to reduce information processing time, improve added and residual value of information, and reduce processing and distribution costs and “leadtimes”. It deals with the information supply‐chain as an important entity, whose performance and optimisation very significantly affect the efficiency and performance of industrial enterprises. A conceptual modelling and simulation environment is proposed for analysing information supply‐chain management strategies, policies and decisions. A decomposable, “autonomous agents” approach is adopted to specify information supply chain models. Models in turn are defined in terms of their constituent information supply chain “agents” (e.g. suppliers, buyers, distributors, etc). This includes their structural relationships, interaction “protocols” and co‐ordination policies.