Virtual organization

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• A Virtual Organization is a corporate, not-for-profit, educational, or otherwise productive organizational entity that uses telecommunication tools to enable, maintain and sustain member relationships in distributed work environments. Critical management dimensions are those that apply to the (1) spatial (e.g. distance between members), (2) temporal (e.g. overlapping work hours), and (3) configurational (e.g. where members are located and how activities are coordinated across member sites) aspects of member relationships in these work environments.
• A Virtual Organization comprises a set of (legally) independent organizations that share resources and skills to achieve its mission / goal, but that is not limited to an alliance of for profit enterprises. The interaction among members of the virtual organization is mainly done through computer networks. A Virtual Organization is a manifestation of Collaborative Networks. See also Virtual Enterprise.

• Virtual Organization Management, a modern discipline pioneered by Pierre Coupet since 1997, takes a macroview of an entire organization from top to bottom and seeks to institute and incorporate best practices, policies and procedures for working in any type of virtual environment and for managing any specific virtual organization. Virtual Organization Management differs substantially from Virtual Team Consulting in that virtual team consulting is engagement specific and deals with a microview of an existing virtual situation.

• In business a Virtual Organization is a firm that outsources the majority of its functions; see virtual corporation.

• In grid computing, a Virtual Organization is a group of individuals or institutions who share the computing resources of a "grid" for a common goal;^{[citation needed]} see utility computing

[edit] See also

• Organization
• Virtual workplaces