Managing cooperation in e-business systems Pradeep Ray & Lundy Lewis Published online: 20 May 2008 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2008 Abstract E-Business management involves monitoring and controlling all forms of business transactions conducted over the Internet, extranets, and related communications technologies and services. As such, it includes the management of networks, systems, and software applica- tions. E-Business management is beginning to depend increasingly on knowledge of the cooperative aspects of partners in a business chain and the cooperative aspects of stake-holders in e-business operations. The study of cooperation offers many opportunities to apply social network analyses to derive software solutions for the management of e-business. This article provides a method- ology and case study that recognises the dimension of cooperation among a multiplicity of organisations, coined “Awareness-based Cooperative Management.” It is aimed towards the design or re-engineering of effective e-business management systems, where the key concept involves the degree of awareness held by e-business stake-holders. Awareness is defined in terms of stake-holder interactions and artefacts used in those interactions such as buyer specifications, requests for proposals, offers, service level agreements, and the like. Since awareness is an indispensable, albeit an inherently vague concept, we cast it and reason about it with the apparatus of fuzzy logic. Keywords E-business . E-business management . Design patterns . Social networks . Awareness . Fuzzy reasoning 1 Introduction From a technical point of view, e-business operations involve the management of the systems upon which it depends, including networks, computer nodes, and distributed software applications. It would seem that e-business manage- ment would be an extension of existing techniques for managing these latter elements; however, it turns out that e-business management poses additional challenges such as the alignment of business perspectives with technical per- spectives. Further, e-business management involves a social dimension that isn’t present in network, systems, and application management (Lewis and Ray 2003). One approach to the design of e-business management solutions is to characterize the range of patterns that occurs over classic cases of e-business operations. This approach is compelling since design patterns are well-understood and have been put to good use in the field of software engineering (Buschmann et al. 1996). Sample patterns in the software engineering community include layered pat- terns, pipes and filters, and blackboard systems among others. However, current design patterns for software engineering are not adequate for representing cooperative management solutions for e-business chains that involve social and organisational interactions. Thus, our aim in this article is to extend the notion of software design patterns whereby we offer a methodology for establishing high-level patterns based on social/organisational interactions in e-business. The methodology explicitly recognises a dimension of cooperation within and across organisations called “Awareness- Inf Syst Front (2009) 11:181–188 DOI 10.1007/s10796-008-9095-2 P. Ray (*) School of Information Systems, Technology and Management, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia e-mail: p.ray@unsw.edu.au L. Lewis School of Business, Department of Information Technology, Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH, USA e-mail: l.lewis@snhu.edu