Vulnerabilities of Virtual and Networked Organizations

Introduction

Disruption in business has widened, it includes a traditional natural disaster and any event that disturbs this fast-paced operational flow — from an acquisition or organization’s growth to a new government regulation or to a scheduled system upgrade. Many organizations today are made up of multiple, distributed members, temporarily linked together for competitive advantage, that share common value chains and business processes supported by distributed information technology. These organizations are virtual organizations (VO).

Efforts to improve the capacity for improvements and sustainability mechanisms of systems have often been an interesting theme of researchers and practitioners (Andre et al, 2009). The practical concern for this topic is usually driven by events that have happened and can cause serious damage, either in one organization or in the industry as a whole. The motivation for organizations and VOs to prevent such events from happening again, in concrete cases is because they may result in severe losses (including equipment, funding, internal resources, even employees) (Robb, 2000). New demands are invariably seen as translating into increased costs for organizations and VOs so they lead to challenges that should be overcome. Theoretically, the business paradigm called organizational resilience (McManus, 2008) should give answers on how to successfully overcome all kinds of disruptions and business threats. Very important issue during resilience assessment is process approach which can be observed in the papers which treat resilience of social - ecological systems (Manyena, 2006). In the terms of process approach, resilience can be seen as the ability of a system to recover and adapt to disturbances in the environment, while continuing to operate as if the characteristics of change have never occurred. Having on mind this, it can be concluded that resilience is a process and not an outcome. The characteristics of a system which can be defined as a resilient are related to the focusing on the recovery from disturbances, i.e. adaptation to the disorder, natural disasters, etc.