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

Figure 2.1
Formation of business
alliances
Characteristics of the virtual organization
2.3.1 Essential partnership practice
The formation of business partnerships and alliances is thus
pivotal to the concept of the virtual organization (Grenier and
Metes 1995, Henning 1998). Acquiring and/or developing all the
required resources and competencies in order to avail itself of
windows of opportunity can be both too time consuming and
too costly to be an appropriate response for organizations acting
on their own. In other words, in the brief period of time
available to exploit business opportunities, a single organization
may not have the time or the financial resources available to
obtain and/or develop the needed skills, infrastructure, resources,
or to develop efficient business processes. However, access
to the required knowledge, skills, resources and infrastructure
may be available through entering into alliances or partnerships
with all, or a part only, of other organizations. This notion is
captured pictorially in Figure 2.1.
Thus organization 1 on its own may not have the capability to
take advantage of a particular perceived business opportunity.
But by working cooperatively and synergistically with others, a
virtual organization (depicted by the shaded area) may be
formed to exploit that opportunity. By each contributing
different knowledge, skills, and resources, the virtual organization
formed by the cooperative leveraging of assets and
resources in organizations 1, 2, 3 and 4 may be highly successful
in availing itself for a time of the original business
opportunity.
Implicit in this description of the formation of business alliances
is the notion that various components of the virtual organization
may well be geographically dispersed, giving rise to the
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