Done…I finally made it! Today I submitted my full chapter for the book on Managing Risk in Virtual Enterprise Networks: Implementing Supply Chain Principles
A new experience
Writing a chapter for a book has been a whole new experience to me. Daunting at first…how do your come up at least 9000 words on a topic you don’t really know much about? Following the references in Ken Thompson’s The Networked Enterprise as a starting point, it wasn’t too hard in the end, reaching some 12.700 words. Besides investigating a new field of study hitherto utterly unknown to me, writing a book chapter is considerably different from writing a journal article or a research report (which I do a lot of in my day job), let alone reviewing books or literature or websites and thinking up some posts for this blog. My posts on Virtual Enterprise Networks are actually partly taken from my chapter proposal. For the sake of copyright and other issues, the full chapter will not be published on this blog until it is finalized and sent to the printers. The preliminary chapter proposal can be seen in my post on Understanding Risks in Virtual Enterprise Networks.
Virtual Enterprise Networks
I must admit that I knew very little, if anything, about Virtual Enterprise Networks when I started this adventure some months back, but I can now say that I am fascinated by the concept, and I believe that much of the future of supply chains lies in virtual enterprise networks. Supply chains have evolved in so far four stages, from the mere optimization of flows to economies of scale and further to economies of scope. The current stage is economies of integration, integrating and involving customer requirements in a value-driven rather than value-pushed supply chain, which leads to the next stage: economies of relationships. The basis for any virtual enterprise network is are the relationships among its partners, and my hope is that my chapter can contribute to managing the risks in the relationships that make up a virtual enterprise network.
What if
What if my chapter submission is not accepted? Well, as we say in Norwegian, “nothing is so bad it’s not good for something else”. I’ve covered some solid research ground and discovered many new articles on topics related to supply chain risk (and re-discovered som old ones I deemed not useful at that time). This means that large parts of my chapter could be re-worked into a journal article, or, if nothing else, at least I will be able to produce a whole string of posts about Virtual Enterprise Networks here on this blog.
Related
- husdal.com: Understanding Risk in Virtual Enterprise Networks (chapter proposal)
- husdal.com: Is managing risks in Virtual Enterprise Networks different from managing risks in Supply Chains? (conference presentation)
- husdal.com: Finally, my book chapter is published
