Virtual Leadership: Required Competencies for Effective Leaders

There are countless books, articles, and resources available which attempt to identify the competencies and qualities of effective leaders. Traditionally, leaders have been at the center of a community, be it work, church, or social groups. In these communities, face-to-face meetings and close personal interaction have dominated the way leaders interact with their members. However, with the advent of the internet and the host of communication tools that followed, teams today are becoming increasingly dispersed and diverse. Studies are now being done to understand how leadership has or should evolve in order to meet the changing needs and demands of these new and different communities. Some argue that leadership in the virtual environment is simpler as fewer tools are available to virtual leaders. Others may argue that access to fewer tools makes virtual leadership more complex and challenging than traditional leadership. This paper will explore leadership in virtual settings and how it’s changing as more teams move away from traditional team environments. I’ll review the responsibilities and roles of virtual leaders in an effort to better highlight the core competencies needed in today’s virtual settings. I’ll also look at competencies required of global virtual leaders and I’ll address how these competencies can be cultivated to ensure leaders are more effective in leading teams in these new environments

Virtual Teams: Work/Life Challenges - Keeping Remote Employees Engaged

Remotely located employees are quickly becoming a norm in the modern workplace in response to evidence that telecommuters save on costs and produce more efficiently. There are many intangible benefits also felt with the increasing prevalence of remote employees. Telecommuters are more satisfied with their work/life balance and report lower rates of job burnout. Though there are also many well-identified setbacks remotely located managers and employees may face. Employers see the most success with telecommuting by first recruiting the people best fit to fill these remote roles. However, the process of developing remote employees is a process that requires constant monitoring. The purpose of this paper is to identify the best practices being used by companies to keep remote employees engaged while simultaneously avoiding burnout

TCG based approach for secure management of virtualized platforms: state-of-the-art

There is a strong trend shift in the favor of adopting virtualization to get business benefits. The provisioning of virtualized enterprise resources is one kind of many possible scenarios. Where virtualization promises clear advantages it also poses new security challenges which need to be addressed to gain stakeholders confidence in the dynamics of new environment. One important facet of these challenges is establishing 'Trust' which is a basic primitive for any viable business model. The Trusted computing group (TCG) offers technologies and mechanisms required to establish this trust in the target platforms. Moreover, TCG technologies enable protecting of sensitive data in rest and transit. This report explores the applicability of relevant TCG concepts to virtualize enterprise resources securely for provisioning, establish trust in the target platforms and securely manage these virtualized Trusted Platforms

Distributed Trust Management in Grid Computing Environments

Grid computing environments are open distributed systems in which autonomous participants collaborate with each other using specific mechanisms and protocols. In general, the participants have different aims and objectives, can join and leave the Grid environment any time, have different capabilities for offering services, and often do not have sufficient knowledge about their collaboration partners. As a result, it is quite difficult to rely on the outcome of the collaboration process. Furthermore, the overall decision whether to rely at all on a collaboration partner or not may be affected by other non-functional aspects that cannot be generally determined for every possible situation, but should rather be under the control of the user when requesting such a decision. In this thesis, the idea that trust is the major requirement for enabling collaboration among partners in Grid environments is investigated. The probability for a successful future interaction among partners is considered as closely related to the mutual trust values the partners assign to each other. Thus, the level of trust represents the level of intention of Grid participants to collaborate. Trust is classified into two categories: identity trust and behavior trust. Identity trust is concerned with verifying the authenticity of an interaction partner, whereas behavior trust deals with the trustworthiness of an interaction partner. In order to calculate the identity trust, a "small-worlds"-like scheme is proposed. The overall behavior trust of an interaction partner is built up by considering several factors, such as accuracy or reliability. These factors of behavior trust are continuously tested and verified. In this way, a history of past collaborations that is used for future decisions on further collaborations between collaboration partners is collected. This kind of experience is also shared as recommendations to other participants. An interesting problem analysed is the difficulty of discovering the "real" behavior of an interaction partner from the "observed" behavior. If there are behavioral deviations, then it is not clear under what circumstances the deviating behavior of a partner is going to be tolerated. Issues involved in managing behavior trust of Grid participants are investigated and an approach based on the idea of using statistical methods of quality assurance for identifying the "real" behavior of a participant during an interaction and for "keeping" the behavior of the participants "in-control" is proposed. Another problem addressed is the security in Grid environments. Grids are designed to provide access and control over enormous remote computational resources, storage devices and scientific instruments. The information exchanged, saved or processed can be quite valuable and thus, a Grid is an attractive target for attacks to extract this information. Here, the confidentiality of the communication between Grid participants, together with issues related to authorization, integrity, management and non-repudiation are considered. A hybrid message level encryption scheme for securing the communication between Grid participants is proposed. It is based on a combination of two asymmetric cryptographic techniques, a variant of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) and Certificateless Public Key Cryptography (CL-PKC). The different methods to trust management are implemented on a simulation infrastructure. The proposed system architecture can be configured to the domain specific trust requirements by the use of several separate trust profiles covering the entire lifecycle of trust establishment and management. Different experiments illustrate further how Grid participants can build, manage and evolve trust between them in order to have a successful collaboration. Although the approach is basically conceived for Grid environments, it is generic enough to be used for establishing and managing trust in many Grid-like distributed environments

A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Face-to-Face and Virtual Communication: Overcoming the Challenges

Virtual communication has become the norm for many organizations (Baltes, Dickson, Sherman, Bauer, & LaGanke, 2002; Bergiel, Bergiel, & Balsmeier, 2008; Hertel, Geister, & Konradt, 2005). As technology has evolved, time and distance barriers have dissolved, allowing for access to experts worldwide. The reality of business today demands the use of virtual communication for at least some work, and many professionals will sit on a virtual team at some point (Dewar, 2006). Although virtual communication offers many advantages, it is not without challenges. This article examines the costs and benefits associated with virtual and face-to-face communication, and identifies strategies to overcome virtual communication\u27s challenges

Abstractions, accounts and grid usability

The vision of the Grid is one of seamless, virtual and constantly changing resources where users need not concern themselves about details, such as exactly where an application is running or where their data is being stored. However, seamless and virtual often imply a lack of control that users may be wary of, or even opposed to. Drawing upon our studies of HCI and of collaborative work, this paper examines whether the Grid development community should be taking this vision literally and argues for the need for accountability of systems ‘in interaction’. We give examples of an alternative approach that seeks to provide ways in which administrators, technical support and user communities can make sense of the behaviour of the complex socio-technical ensembles that are the reality of Grids

Achieving success in collaborative research: the role of virtual research environments

Due to various challenges and opportunities such as globalisation of research agenda and advancements in information and communication technologies, research collaborations (both international and national) have become popular during the last decade more than ever before. Within this context, the concept of Virtual Research Environments is an emerging concept looking at addressing the complex challenges associated with conducting collaborative research. The research reported within this paper investigated how the success factors of collaborative research can be achieved by deploying a Virtual Research Environment