Since the mid-1990s academics and business leaders have been striving to focus their businesses on what is profitable and either partnering or outsourcing the rest. I have assembled a long list of quotes that define what a virtual organization is and why it's different than conventional organizations. The point of looking at these quotes is to demonstrate that none of these models or definitions can adequately be achieved without some heavy analytics and integration of both IT (the wire, the boxes and now the cloud's virtual machines) and IS - Information Systems (Applications) with other stakeholder systems and processes. Up till recently it could be argued that these things can and could be done because we had the technology. But the reality is, unless you were an Amazon, e-Bay or Dell, most firms did not necessarily have the money or the know-how to invest in these types of inovations.
With the proliferation of cloud services, we are finding new and cheaper ways to do things that put these strategies in the reach of more managers and smaller organizations. Everything is game... even the phone system can be handled by the cloud. Ok, I digress, Check out the following quotes and imagine being able to pull these off without analytics.
The next posts will treat some of the tools and technologies that are available to make these business strategies viable.
Famous Quotes on the Virtual Organization
We believe there is no conflict between collaboration and competition and that in fact, to compete in today’s networked knowledge-configured environment one must actually collaborate to be competitive, even to merely survive. There are two senses in which we believe an organization can compete by collaborating. One is through the internal collaboration between the organization’s managers and employees. The other is external, through collaboration with other organizations beginning with customers, suppliers and business partners, but even including competitors if the circumstances are right. This second form of collaboration is known as collaborative commerce or c-commerce. Logan & Stokes (2004)
Virtual organizations coordinate much of their business through the marketplace, where free agents come together to buy and sell one another's goods and services; thus virtual companies can harness the power of market forces to develop, manufacture, market, distribute, and support their offerings in ways that fully integrated firms cannot duplicate. Chesbrough & Teece (1996)
One of the chief strategic challenges of the new economy is to integrate knowledge and relationships – devise a good fit between competencies (Competencies are the technologies, specialized expertise, business processes and techniques that a company has accumulated over time and packages in its offering.)and customers and keep that fit current. Norman and Ramirez (1993)
X-engineering is the practice of using technology enabled processes to connect businesses with other businesses and companies with their clients/customers to achieve dramatic improvements in efficiency and create value for everyone involved. When an organization’s processes are integrated with those of other companies, all the partners can pool their efforts and effectively become a new multi-company enterprise, far stronger than it’s individual members could ever be on their own. (Champy, 2002)
As more and more established organizations realize that they need to form alliances with their customers, partners and suppliers over the Internet, e-business integration with ERP systems becomes a critical issue. This combination of technologies offers established companies the opportunity to build interactive relationships with partners and suppliers, improve efficiency and extend reach, all at a very low cost. Ash & Burn (2001)
Business Network Redesign - Articulating the strategic logic to leverage related participants in the business network to provide products and services in the marketplace; exploiting IT functionality for learning from the extended network as well as for coordination and control. Venkatraman (1994)
We view virtual organizing as a strategic approach that is singularly focused on creating, nurturing, and deploying key intellectual and knowledge assets while sourcing tangible, physical assets in a complex network of relationships. […] We develop our logic of virtual organizing by placing IT at the center […] the emerging architecture of virtual organizing is not possible, or constructed effectively, without the significant power of IT. Venkatraman & Henderson (1998)
Collaboration in business is no longer confined to conventional two-company alliances such as joint ventures or marketing accords. Today we see groups of companies linking themselves together for a common purpose. Consequently, a new for form of competition has emerged: group vs. group. Gomes-Casseres (1994)
Today's organizational boundaries are blurring, partnerships with suppliers, clients and even competitors are commonplace, and quality and efficiency issues extend well beyond the traditional enterprise boundary. Crossing-boundary business activities are also enabled by state-of-the-art information and telecommunication technologies. Information flow between business partners can be seamlessly and effectively facilitated. Individual companies work together to form inter-enterprise networks across the product value chain, in order to survive and achieve business successes. Browne & Zhang (1999)
Other references are available in http://www.crystalballservices.com/Resources/CBConceptsWiki/topic/Collaboration-Research-Article-References.aspx