Characterizing Virtual Organizations and Their Management (original) (raw)

Approaches for the management of virtual organizations: Results from ECOLEAD

IFAC Conference on Cost Effective Automation in Networked Product Development and Manufacturing, 2007

A Virtual Organization (VO) consists of independent organizations collaborating for a common goal. Proper management is needed in order to achieve the objectives. The VO management has to enforce collaboration between independent partners with their own internal aims and own internal processes and management means. The paper presents results and solutions to support the management of virtual organizations in a dynamic environment.

The Functionality of Virtual Organizations

Procceedings of T-World, 2001

The objective of this paper is to study, how well the new organizational forms called virtual organizations are functioning. The ultimate purpose is to develop a more coherent theoretical account of virtual organizations and their various forms, e.g. teams, companies and networks. The practical aim is to develop bases to analyse and model virtual organizations. In the first chapter, reasons for the emergence of virtual organisations are discussed. The second chapter deals with the background of virtual organizations, the concept 'virtual organization' is defined, and different forms of virtual organizations as objects of the study are described. The third chapter summarizes some empirical findings concerning virtual organizations including three own case studies. Advantages, disadvantages and some managerial implications are presented. And finally, questions are dealt, what to study in virtual organizations, and how to study them empirically. This review is based on selected written material and on three own case studies.

Virtual organization as a strategic tool: Past, Present and Future

The continuous innovation in IT leads to VO concept. There are several reasons of this transformation such as: cope with new demands, and radical change in IT, gain competitive advantage, cost reduction, increasing performance, flexibility, and productivity, and involved suitable human skills from different places. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the VO concept, its evolution, characteristics, challenges associated with its implementation and proposed solution to compensate these difficulties, which led to the employment of virtual organization to become strategic tool in many organization. Real life examples will be shown, how it was used by organizations in past and present, and in the future.

Challenges in the Management of Virtual Organizations

IFIP International Federation for Information Processing, 2004

Virtual organizations (VOs) are considered to be an answer to tightening requirements of cost-effectiveness, time and quality, especially in a global environment. In addition, it is expected that collaboration within VOs contributes to flexibility, agility, customer orientation and decrease of risks. However, these objectives are not achieved automatically. The management of independent entities with individual, sometimes even contradictory, aims is a difficult task containing uncertainty. The Inter-organizational distribution of processes and activities may lead to high coordination costs, delays in deliveries, quality problems, information leaks and loss of knowledge. To prevent the problems, proactive VO management is needed. The paper discusses the challenges for the development of proactive management. The main experience behind the paper comes from the one-of-a-kind manufacturing.

Characteristics of virtual organizations

Organizational virtualness, 1998

VoNet the Newsletter @ http://www.virtual-organization.net as well as the newslist VoTalk celebrate their one year existence. In this time it has gained a lot of attention by researchers and also by managers. To concentrate on the topic of organizational virtualness we will organize a workshop for presentation and discussion of research in progress in April 1998. Virtualness -as we know from your contributions to VoNet and VoTalk -not only consists of computer mediated communication but also needs face-to-face meetings to intensify social connectivity and awareness among groups of people concerned with the same activities. Therefore we would be pleased to meet you for a two day workshop in Berne, Switzerland. The topic of the workshop will be organizational virtualness including all the research activities and practical experiences that focus on organizational structure, behavioral patterns and technological support of virtual organizations as well as virtual organizations in a global operation, the management of virtual global organizations, etc.

Virtual Organizations: Trends and Models

IFIP – The International Federation for Information Processing

The need to remain competitive in the open market forces companies to concentrate on their core competencies while searching for alliances when additional skills or resources are needed to fulfill business opportunities. The changing business situation of companies and customer needs have motivated researchers to introduce Virtual Organization (VO) idea. A Virtual Organization is always a form of partnership and managing partners and handling partnerships are crucial. Virtual organizations are defined as a temporary collection of enterprises that cooperate and share resources, knowledge, and competencies to better respond to business opportunities. This paper presents base concepts of virtual organizations including properties, management concepts, operational concepts, and main issues in collaboration such as security and authentication.

Virtual Organization: An Extensive Overview

The International Journal of Business and Management, 2017

Virtual Organization: An Extensive Overview 1. Introduction Managers and subordinates interface has always been face-to-face since the beginning of work organizations. Information Communication Technology (ICT) has changed this norm and created a new type of organization interface called VO, where management is virtual rather than face-to-face. Since virtual management has changed the whole concept of work organization, henceforth, it has become crucial to draw a line that demarcates VO from so called traditional organization. The central thesis of this paper is to draw a distinguished line between a VO from non-VO. To address this concern, the paper will proceed along the following spectrum: VO will be defined for purpose of conceptual clarity; emergences, characteristics, types, life cycle and the taxonomies of VO, will be highlighted; VO and VT will be distinguished; definitional frameworks of VO and the process of VO, the core of the paper, will be discussed followed by advantages and challenges of VO; a set of recommendation is offered to overcome the challenges faced by VO; different types of Virtual Employees are discussed and the collaboration tools of VO is enumerated. 2. Definition of Virtual Organization This section does not take into account all the definitions of VO given in the literature. Instead, the chosen definitions in this section are reviewed, commented and then classified. This may help to provide a clearer definition of VO and its implications. The terms virtual team, virtual corporation, virtual enterprise, virtual company, virtual management, and mobile workplace are used as synonyms for the term Virtual Organization in the literature (Jacobson, 2004). The VO transcends e-commerce, e-business, e-work and egovernment modes (Camarinha-Matos & Afsarmanesh, 2005). Jacobson (2004) and Reinicke (2010) claimed that the term VO was first coined by Mowshowitz in the 1980s, whereas, Camarinha-Matos and Afsarmanesh (2005) have argued that the term VO was not invented by a single researcher; the concept has matured through a long evolutionary process. In the literature, there are as many definitions of VO as there are researchers providing them (Guyverson 2006; Larsen & McInerney 2008). A point upon which many authors generally agree is that there is no common definition of VO. Some definitions of VO simply paraphrase the previous definitions, while others attempt to capture the many characteristics of VO.

The Important of Virtual Organization

Procedia Technology, 2012

Academic researches show that the capability of virtual organization has an important role in long-time existence of the business enterprises in today's variable and competitive environments. In recent years, because of the importance of the virtual organization, many studies and analysis has been done on this subject. Each one of these researches are concentrated on a special aspect of this subject, and this different looking has caused that despite the importance of the virtual organization, there are so many discussions and ambiguous theory points in this field, yet. When a business opportunity is distinguished, a need for planning and developing a virtual organization, developing an agreement or cooperation contracts among members or good participants and adjusting and arranging the desirable base in order to run the operations according to the agreement is appeared. In this paper the process of virtual organization formation is investigated

Management of Virtual Organizations

Service Oriented Infrastructures and Cloud Service Platforms for the Enterprise, 2009

In the Virtual Organization (VO) Management area the main challenge has been to develop policies and models for govemance and lif¢cycle management of a business-to-business (B2B) collaboration. This work included research and development in the areas of federated identity management and semantics in addition to VO, business registries and B2B collaboration managements. The main results produced in the VO Management area include capabilities, pattems and software solutions to simplify governance and lifecyclc management of B2B collaborations (VOs), and to manage applications distributed over several federated network hosts (e.g. CIoud Computing platforms).