Information and Knowledge Management using ArcGIS ModelBuilder

4. Existing technologies
Cuneyt Gurcan Akcora, Barbara Carminati and Elena Ferrari
In this section, we will first discuss the foundations of virtual organizations, and then proceed to review
real life existing solutions.
4.1 Literature review
Much of the early research on virtual enterprises and organizations were influenced by Transaction
Cost Economics (Williamson 1975) which proposes that manufacturing firms should use externally
purchased goods to focus only on their core competencies. This idea necessitated outsourcing
(obtaining goods or services from an outside supplier) parts of the manufacturing process to other
business companies and required business-to business communications. For this purpose,
frameworks (Inmon et al. 1997), (Schekkerman 2006), (Zwegers et al. 2003) and models (Stewart
1997) have been proposed in the following years.
Current research in this field works on bringing together individual entities by information technology
to share resources and skill sets in order to improve market competency (Cardoso and Oliveira 2005),
(Pang 2001), (Tan 2010). Similar to value homophily, this aspect of current research shares our goal
of combining skills and abilities for greater market opportunities. However, such enterprises form a
nebulous group of individual entities in which any entity can be changed. Moreover, cooperation
between entities does not serve a higher purpose; instead each entity is present to increase its own
profit and market share. In our proposal, members of the organization are connected by a central
permanent node in the social network. This node provides an anchor for similar people to find and
interact with each other.
Much of what we have discussed until now involves a form of commerce related symbiotic
cooperation. With the advent of information theory, virtual enterprises have also been used in non
commercial applications. Among them, humanitarian organizations use virtual enterprises to
coordinate responses in an emergency (Charles, Lauras and Tomasini 2010), (de Leeuw, Kopczak
and Blansjaar 2010). Similar to our proposal, humanitarian organizations have to find members and
control the cooperation among them. This cooperation serves the higher purpose of responding to an
emergency in a timely manner. However, many of such organizations are created at the beginning of
an emergency and memberships end when the emergency is over. Some researchers propose
models to ensure that global capacity is built up and maintained before an emergency breaks out
(Truptil et al. 2010). These capacities building humanitarian organizations are very similar to our
proposal with the exception that their members are mainly not individuals but companies.
Virtual organizations have also been used in collaborative networks where members can include
individuals as well as companies (Baldo and Rabelo 2010), (Camarinha-Matos and Afsarmanesh
2005). More than getting a single task done, collaborative networks can be used for long term
projects. Collaborative networks make use of ontologies for member roles and capabilities (Plisson et
al. 2007). Furthermore, data standards 2 are used to facilitate information exchange among members
(Berners-Lee et al. 2001), and some proposals integrate social network data with collaborative
network data (Fiumara et al. 2010).
Our proposal is similar to collaborative networks in information exchange and member collaboration,
yet it differs from them in using a publicly available, popular social network to recruit members.
Furthermore, the main idea in collaborative networks is to use team effort. In this aspect, it diverges
from our proposal to increase user interaction through membership in a virtual organization.
Having explained the research foundations, in the next section we will discuss how these ideas have
been implemented in real life solutions.
4.2 Real life solutions
Commercial solutions mainly involve outsourcing parts of a manufacturing process to subcontractors.
Aventis (French Pharmaceuticals Company), Dell computers (US computer manufacturer) and British
Telecom were the leading figures in transitioning to virtual enterprises for better profits.
2 www.w3.org/TR/rdf-primer/ , www.unece.org/trade/untdid/welcome.htm
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