What is Virtual Organization

Formed by business partners and teams who work across geographical or organizational boundaries with the help of information and communication technologies (Rachman & Bhattachryya, 2002).

A temporary network of companies, suppliers, customers, or employees linked by information and communications technologies with the purpose of solving a specific problem.

Dynamic set of companies defined around a set of resource-sharing rules and conditions. Boundaries between organizations are fuzzy.

A virtual organization is a geographically distributed organization whose members does a long-term common interest or goal bind, and who communicate and coordinate their work through information technology. VO refers to a temporary or permanent collection of geographically dispersed individuals, groups, organizational units—which do or do not belong to the same organization—or entire organizations that depend on electronic linking in order to complete the production process. They are usually working by computer e-mail and groupware while appearing to others to be a single, unified organization with a real physical location.

An organization that operates through a public or private electronic network.

A virtual organization is an organization or a productive entity that does not have a central geographical location and exists solely through information technology tools.

While it may have a physical plant or a physical central headquarters for some corporate employees, a virtual organization is one where the vast majority of its employees and/or consultants work entirely online often from dispersed geographic locations.

A temporary network of independent companies, suppliers, customers, and erstwhile rivals—linked together by information technology to share skills, cost, and access to one another’s markets

A network of independent firms most often connected by information and communication technology tools joined together for delivering specific service or product, which creates external impression and effect as a major monolithically organized corporation.

Introduces a temporary coalition of organisations, which utilizes pre-prepared and pre-negotiated general parts of the contract.

Virtual organization has not been given one definition that would suit everybody. One can say that it was born in the wake of virtual reality. Virtuality is described by the nature of ownership and not by existing physical features. That is why we talk about virtual organization, virtual services, virtual travel, and virtual actions. From that perspective, virtual organization is an organization, which is formed voluntarily, and its members enter into diverse relations to achieve a common goal. The duration of the relation is set by each member of the organization. A decision to liquidate the organization may be taken by the member who as the first decides that it is no longer beneficial and quits. Virtual organization operates in the so-called cyberspace and its existence rests on computer network (Kisielnicki 2002, 2003).

A consortium that uses informatics tools to enable, maintain and sustain the sharing of resources in distributed work environments.

A virtual organization is a network of institutions that, using cutting-edge technology, unite to provide a value-added competitive advantage.

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 (Wikipedia, 2007).

A cluster composed by independent companies cooperating on the extra-enterprise level.

A network form of organization that operates across space, time and organizational boundaries through an intricate Web of information technology.

Temporary alliance of organizations/enterprises (legally) independents that share competencies or experiences and resources to better answer to some business opportunity, supported by technology.

Represents a temporary alliance of diverse organizations that form a collaboration network, sharing knowledge, skills, and resources towards provision of value-added products and services and that resort to a computer network and associated tools to support their cooperation.

An ICT-enabled collaboration between legally independent subjects aimed at the joint provision of goods or services, where each partner contributes to specific activities. It does not aim at achieving an autonomous legal status but appears as one organization toward third parties.

A group of people with similar interest that primarily interact via communication media such as newsletters, telephone, email, online social networks etc. rather than face to face, for social, professional, educational or other purposes. In Grid Computing, a VO is a group who shares the same computing resources.

An organization existing as a corporate, not-for-profit, educational, or otherwise productive entity that does not have a central geographical location and exists solely through telecommunication tools.

A temporary alliance of (legally) independent organizations that share resources and skills to achieve its mission/goal and whose cooperation is supported by computer networks.

Flexible and dynamic coalition of geographically dispersed organizations, or organizational units, that pool resources and capabilities quickly to achieve common objectives. A fundamental characteristic of virtual organizations is the flexibility of the interdependent relationships across space, time, and formal boundaries.

A productive organizational entity comprising independent organizations or individuals as members that share resources and skills to achieve a common goal and where the interaction among members is conducted mainly through computer networks.

A virtual organization refers to a group of individuals whose members and resources may be dispersed geographically, but function as a coherent unit through the use of cyber-infrastructure. This group of individuals is typically team-based and goal-oriented, where leaders and subordinates work together to achieve pre-determined goals. A virtual organization is an equivalent term to cyber organization.

A switchable interorganizational electronic network that delivers special products. Also, a member of this network that exhibits ISSAAC dimensions (is virtualized).

It can consist of multiple independent organizations linked through a computer network. These independent organizations share skills and resources to achieve their goals.

(a) Virtual organization ( Kisielnicki, 2002 , p. 102) is created voluntarily; its members create this organization to accomplish a certain goal. Virtual organization is created anytime a manger realizes that he or she needs the cooperation of other organizations to accomplish its goal. The duration of a virtual organization is defined by each of its members; virtual organization operates in the cyberspace, which means that its duration can be very short, so short in fact, that it would be impossible to cooperate with other organizations using the traditional methods. The decision to restructure or fold the organization can be made anytime by any of its members. Virtual organization does not have one president or general manager. The virtualization process is a process of transformation from traditional organization into virtual using informational technology. This process can result in two forms of virtual organization: traditional organization with virtual divisions, or an association of many organizations, as depicted in Figure 3. (b) Artificial organizational structure where individual organizations provide base competencies. The integration and coordination of these base competencies allows for effective execution of chain process to deliver a product and satisfy a customer. This integration and coordination does not incur additional costs and maintains the customer focus ( Scholzch, 1996 ). (c) Temporary network of independent enterprises—suppliers, customers, even former competitors—linked through the IT and working together to share their knowledge and costs to enter a new market ( Byrne & Brandt, 1993 ).

Primarily a network of independent, geographically dispersed organizations with a partial mission overlap, within which all partners provide their own core competencies to deliver innovative and strongly customer-based products and services.

A collection of geographically/temporally dispersed, functionally and/or culturally diverse entities that work together using information technology.

A temporary network of actors, linked by information and communications technologies, with the purpose of delivering a service or product

An organization that uses networks to link people, assets and ideas to create and distribute products and services without being limited to traditional organizational boundaries or physical locations.

A consortium of organizations (enterprises) that align their businesses to perform integrated and more complex activities.

A collection of individuals, companies or organizations who have agreed to work together and use the ICTs as the main tools to enable, maintain and sustain member relationships in distributed work environments.

It is an organization that has the ability to respond to customers' needs and expectations in the shortest time, regardless of time and space through the possibilities provided by ICTs.

Network organization where individuals communicate each other without physical presence at the same place by using modern ICT.

A Virtual Organization is a group of individuals or institutions who share the computing resources of a “Grid” for a common goal.

Virtual organizations are a type of organization made up of several distinct organizations, connected through ICT, which perform a specific task or process, with each organization filling a niche within the process. Virtual organizations occur through networking of allocated organization units which are involved in a co-ordinated value added process based on the division of labour. Thereby processes can be redesigned not just within an organization, but also between organizations and if necessary between sectors.

A network of autonomous organizations and individuals, typically with the main aim of sharing resources in a coordinated fashion.