Customer service has moved from personal craftsmanship, through mass production, into a new organization of customized mass production. Virtual organizations are being used for rock and roll tours, prison construction, and home shopping. All of these activities involve shifting networks that collaborate to achieve a consumer-dictated goal. The following papers highlight some aspects of this developing form. The first paper introduces the computing aspects of virtual organizations.
Mowshowitz
Mowshowitz introduces the “virtual organization” as the common principle applicable to virtual memory, virtual reality, virtual classrooms, virtual teams, and virtual offices. Using the shipping function in a company’s catalog sales division as an example, the author, in a very readable and exciting manner, introduces the central features and potential advantages, limitations, and prerequisites of the virtual organization.
The virtual organization exploits the advantages of switching and the use of computers to minimize the cost of switching. Management must make goals explicit, and “must embrace the idea of logically separating task requirements from potential task satisfiers--or of distinguishing between goals and the procedures for implementing them.” This is difficult to do because of the human needs for loyalty and permanence. “Objective loyalty” has a place in metamanagement, but “subjective loyalty” does not. Computer networks may figure in creating “illusions of permanence.” References are listed at the end of this interesting paper, which focuses on the strengths and limitations of virtual organizations.
Turoff
In February 1998, Egghead Software became the first major retail chain (250 stores in 1992) to exist solely in cyberspace. It hopes to achieve substantial cost savings and is delivering software electronically. It can track and target-market customers who order online, and it hopes to capitalize on its already-strong brand name by Web advertising. This paper emphasizes the necessity of being sensitive to human social and psychological needs, regardless of the organizational reality.
“My definition of virtuality can be summed up as the potential for a virtual system to become part of the real world,” writes Turoff. “In a philosophical sense, virtuality is a process of ‘negotiated reality,’ in which the users of computer systems as groups or organizations negotiate an agreed-upon reality.” Thus, “the introduction of new information technology requires reexamination of the human part of the organization together with its associated tasks and objectives.”
There have been three stages in the evolution of virtuality: technological progress, social system design, and control system design. This third stage “is based on the concept that the computer can be a control system regulating the real world of which it is a part.” Turoff concludes that “there needs to be a general recognition that the modern computer-communication system includes the process of designing a social system today and will include the process of designing an organizational control system in the future.” For this reason, system designers and trainers need to be broadly trained in social and individual behavioral sciences as well as computer sciences. References for additional reading are listed at the end of this thoughtful paper.
The previous two papers are the most important in this series, because they outline the theoretical overview of the technological and social sciences for virtual organizations. The remaining papers provide specific examples of these concepts. Western Governors University, a cooperative venture of 17 states and Guam, may ultimately set the standard for virtual education. Of course, as the next paper discusses, considerable work will be required to achieve the integration of technical and social aspects in a virtual organization.
Hiltz and Wellman
Research concerning computer-mediated communication and the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s “Virtual Classroom” is reported. Research indicates that virtual communities “involve sociability, emotional support, and a sense of belonging as important ends in themselves.” Asynchronous learning networks best enrich education when they create the feeling of “a group of people learning together” and when they “structure and support carefully planned collaborative learning activities that constitute the assignments for a course.”
Virtual classrooms provide mastery of course material and better access to professors; to the extent that students perceive the experience of group learning, they judge virtual classrooms superior to the traditional classroom. Disadvantages include difficulty in establishing close personal relationships, procrastination, information overload, and difficulty in identifying and controlling rule breakers. This paper includes references and is must reading for educators.
Faucheux
Peter Drucker, in The practice of management [1], wrote that to manage workers and work implies “consideration of the human resource as human beings having, unlike any other resource, personality, citizenship, control over whether they work, how much and how well, and thus requiring motivation, participation, satisfaction, incentives and rewards, leadership, status and function.” At present, it is estimated that in excess of two million people in the US are both engaged in home business and use email to maintain professional contacts.
Faucheux discusses the unique aspects of managing human resources in virtual organizations. He emphasizes the “process nature of social reality,” with virtual organizing providing “the means for critical reflection, awareness, searching, and learning from our experience.” Since the world is dynamic, managers must act with insufficient knowledge, so judgment and strategic information are important. “Virtual organizing emphasizes five essential dimensions of human activity”: reflective, collaborative, unifying, creative, and developmental. Social reality is transformed, since actions become more public and transparent, thinking becomes more dialogue-based and dialectic, and we achieve a better appreciation of broader contexts. References are included.
Chellappa, Barua, and Whinston
Higher education is undergoing revolutionary changes. A common saying is that in the future, the wealthy will be taught by tutors and the masses will be taught by computers. The appeal of the virtual university is time-shifting for adult learners, broader access, and reduced operational costs. This paper details one of many attempts to develop an infrastructure for a virtual university.
According to the authors, it is about “the Electronic Education Environment, or E3, an infrastructure developed at the University of Texas at Austin to support processes in a virtual university (VU). The E3 infrastructure consists of many components, including a collaboratory, a payment system, and a document filtering system,” and is being field tested. “The E3 infrastructure uses Internet surveys to determine demand for various types of content, then uses software agents to search for content providers.” An elaborate system of interaction and automation provides “the flexibility needed to match market demand with customized content and a mode of administration designed to minimize total transaction costs.” The paper contains references. It should be of value to the education community.
Hardwick and Bolton
In Future perfect [2], Stan Davis stated that “there is a competitive advantage in providing the same product or service, at the same price, in 20% less time.…Speaking practically, whatever your business, think about how you can create products and services in real time that you can deliver instantly. Even in the slowest-moving company this conceptual shift will speed things up.” This is precisely what the industrial virtual enterprise, as described by Hardwick and Bolton, attempts to do.
The authors define an industrial virtual enterprise as “a temporary consortium of independent member companies coming together to quickly exploit fast-changing world-wide product manufacturing opportunities.” This paper briefly reports on the work of the National Industrial Information Infrastructure Protocols Consortium, “a team of organizations cooperating with the U.S. government to develop open industry software protocols allowing manufacturers and their suppliers to interoperate as if they were part of the same enterprise.” The protocols will give systems used by an industrial virtual enterprise the following characteristics: noninterference, availability, open access, load balancing, controlled publication, seamless integration, and no replication. References are included at the end of the paper. It should be read by business and production managers.
The final two papers discuss two current applications of virtual reality: a virtual museum and medical applications. These real-time examples illustrate the incremental development of virtuality.
Mannoni
Mannoni, head of the computing department of the Ministry of Culture in Paris, France, describes the ministry’s information system, its design, and related technical details. People who need to display thousands of images in a Web-based format will find this paper of interest.
Zajtchuk and Satava
According to the authors, “virtual reality is being used to enhance medicine in four main areas: education and training; medical disaster planning and casualty care; virtual prototyping; and rehabilitation and psychiatric therapy.” Each of these areas is briefly discussed, and references are supplied.
Conclusion
The papers in this section, overall, are an exposition of the future as a work in progress--an open-ended experiment that will see new organizational forms providing greater contact with and information about the consumer’s needs and desires in a very immediate, rapid way, as opposed to providing just isolated fragments of information; thus, a much more comprehensive body of knowledge will be available to the organization. Wisdom, however, remains an elusive human characteristic that any organization, real or virtual, finds in short supply.
