[8] 2002 e-business-strategies-for-virtual-organizations

e-Business Strategies for Virtual Organizations
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� Virtual means resembling or giving the appearance of a wellknown
physical item or object, which in fact it is not. It
normally implies that the virtual object so described is
supported by information and communication technology
(ICT). This sub-concept of virtual means that something is
only created by data. In this sense we talk readily of virtual
shopping malls – in this case we are using the model of the
physical shopping mall to describe a grouping of enterprises
which appear to be in proximity and to form a cluster while in
fact they need have no physical locations in common. In this
sense we commonly talk of these virtual objects as having an
existence in cyberspace.
� Virtual means ‘potentially present’. This sub-concept of
virtual is often used to describe resource pools. The resource
pool is basically a repository of resources; as soon as the need
for a certain resource configuration is allocated, an operating
unit will be formed. This simply means that the resource pool
has the potential to be real when it is needed. The ‘virtual
Web’ is a good example of this sub-concept.
� Virtual means ‘existing, but changing’. This sub-concept
describes the fluid and dynamic network approach. This kind
of organization reconfigures itself permanently; it is dynamic,
progressive and only temporary. ‘Virtual corporations’ and
‘virtual teams’ are good examples of this sub-concept. While it
is accepted that business conglomerates may buy and sell
subsidiaries, thus changing their components over time, we
do not think of them as virtual because of this. However, the
very speed with which an organization may reconfigure itself
and its components using modern information and communication
technologies (ICTs) does tempt us to see this as a new
organizational form, not simply a faster-moving old form.
1.7.1 A taxonomy of the virtual
Figure 1.4 is introduced as a handy way of seeing how various
ideas of virtual can be related.
Figure 1.4 shows how we may think of virtual organization from
both an intraorganizational and interorganizational perspective.
The interorganizational perspective is divided into virtual
markets and virtual corporations. Virtual markets means
e-commerce, market transactions between companies using
sophisticated ICT, i.e. the Internet. In contrast, virtual corporations
are basically partnership networks of dispersed organizational
units or independent companies.