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

e-Business Strategies for Virtual Organizations
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number of levels. With pressures across government generally
to maintain or enhance services to the public while decreasing
costs, any prospect of efficiency gains through collaboration is
attractive. Important also is the recognition of potential
improvements to service performance in all three agencies if all
three worked collaboratively. The actions and responsibilities of
all three departments are somewhat mandated by law, and prior
to the decision to work more closely on aspects of their
responsibilities, contacts between the departments had been
minimal in terms of the issues of interest.
A, B, and C each bring to the relationship not only a set of
complementary skills, assets and competencies, but also three
discrete internal business environments, including notions such
as visions, goals and objectives, decision-making styles and
processes, patterns of communication and interaction, business
processes and approaches to ‘doing business’, corporate cultures,
learning styles, attitudes to risk and planning, and so on.
As A, B, and C strive to work together at some level for some
purpose, as they strive to reconcile different objectives and
approaches, they individually bring internal business environments
to their collaboration from which over time evolves a
network business environment.
Participating in the collaboration, however, and hence becoming
part of the network business environment, is likely to cause
changes to the individual internal business environments. Each
individual organization’s interaction with the external business
environment is thus now mediated through the network
business environment, at least as far as the extent of their
collaboration is concerned.
Take, for example, the issue of domestic violence. A, B, and C
individually have a set of strategies, competencies, structures,
processes, procedures and infrastructure by which they individually
address their responsibilities in terms of domestic violence.
As they collaborate and start to share and explore one
another’s perspectives on the issue, realizations of new possibilities
occur, and the recognition of joint initiatives, shared
resources, new cooperative procedures, etc. emerge. So too does
the recognition that changes to individual internal business
environments to ‘give’ to the network business environment
will take place.
Each individual member of the alliance experiences the creation
of network business environment, and changes to the internal
business environment. This process repeats and evolves over