Autopoiesis in Virtual Organizations

Virtual organizations continuously gain popularity because of the benefits created by them. Generally, they are defined as temporal adhocracies, project oriented, knowledge-based network organizations. The goal of this paper is to present the hypothesis that knowledge system developed by virtual organization is an autopoietic system. The term “autopoiesis†was introduced by Maturana for self-productive systems. In this paper, Wikipedia is described as an example of an autopoietic system. The first part of the paper covers discussion on virtual organizations. Next, autopoiesis’ interpretations are delivered and the value of autopoiesis for governance of virtual organizations is presented. The last parts of the work comprise short presentation of Wikipedia, its principles and conclusions of Wikipedia as an autopoietic system.autopoiesis , autopoietic system, Wikipedia.

Contingency Factors of Virtual Organizations’ Emergence

Business organizations are permanently influenced by contingency factors which generate profound changes in their emergence, structures and forms. Globalization, technological progress, and changes in society are foundations of networked organization emergence. In the actual economic, social and technological contexts, progress assumes interdependence of many contingency factors that are in mutual interaction. The organizations integration in virtual organizations generates positive effects through which organizations become competitive and cope with the dynamics and turbulence of the business environment. Progress in areas such as networks of communications, telecommunications, information technology and social changes are preconditions for the emergence of the knowledge-based society and of the interconnected society in which new structures emerge that allow business activities and processes to unfold in a collaborative manner. The integration of organizations, especially of small and medium-sized enterprises, into networks of organizations, has become an important goal in the current economic environment, as the organizations are striving to become more competitive, to build skills and have access to know-how. To cope with changes and complexity of business sectors, the organizations seek to become more competitive by developing new business models, strategies and governance principles, processes, internal structures based on new organizational capabilities and resources. The identification and analysis of contingency factors of the emergence of virtual organizations are issues that can highlight the distinctive features of virtual organizations compared to other organizational forms, but also the differences between them and other network-type structures.virtual organizations, networked organizations, organizational structures, collaborative structures

Single sign-on and authorization for dynamic virtual organizations

The vision of the Grid is to support the dynamic establishment and subsequent management of virtual organizations (VO). To achieve this presents many challenges for the Grid community with perhaps the greatest one being security. Whilst Public Key Infrastructures (PKI) provide a form of single sign-on through recognition of trusted certification authorities, they have numerous limitations. The Internet2 Shibboleth architecture and protocols provide an enabling technology overcoming some of the issues with PKIs however Shibboleth too suffers from various limitations that make its application for dynamic VO establishment and management difficult. In this paper we explore the limitations of PKIs and Shibboleth and present an infrastructure that incorporates single sign-on with advanced authorization of federated security infrastructures and yet is seamless and targeted to the needs of end users. We explore this infrastructure through an educational case study at the National e-Science Centre (NeSC) at the University of Glasgow and Edinburgh

Collaborative Virtual Organizations in Knowledge-based Economy

The paper establishes the content of the virtual organizations concept, insisting on their collaborative nature. Types of virtual organizations architectures are developed and there are analyzed their characteristics compared to classical organizations existing in the pre-informational economy. There are presented virtual organizations for education, production and banking, focusing on their collaborative side. Metrics are built to evaluate the performance of collaborative virtual organizations

Trustworthiness in Virtual Organizations

This study examines perceptions of human trustworthiness as a key component in countering insider threats. The term insider threat refers to situations where a critical member of an organization behaves against the interests of the organization, in an illegal and/or unethical manner. Identifying how an individual’s behavior varies over time - and how anomalous behavior can be detected - are important elements in the preventive control of insider threat behaviors in securing cyber infrastructure. Using online team-based game-playing, this study seeks to re-create realistic insider threat situations in which human “sensors” can observe changes in a target’s behavior. The intellectual merit of this socio-technical study lies in its capability to tackle complex insider threat problems by adopting a social psychological theory on predicting human trustworthiness in a virtual collaborative environment. The study contributes to a theoretical framework of trustworthiness attribution, and gameplaying methodology to predict the occurrence of malfeasance

Modeling Virtual Organization Architecture with the Virtual Organization Breeding Methodology

While Enterprise Architecture Modeling (EAM) methodologies become more and more popular, an EAM methodology tailored to the needs of virtual organizations (VO) is still to be developed. Among the most popular EAM methodologies, TOGAF has been chosen as the basis for a new EAM methodology taking into account characteristics of VOs presented in this paper. In this new methodology, referred as Virtual Organization Breeding Methodology (VOBM), concepts developed within the ECOLEAD project, e.g. the concept of Virtual Breeding Environment (VBE) or the VO creation schema, serve as fundamental elements for development of VOBM. VOBM is a generic methodology that should be adapted to a given VBE. VOBM defines the structure of VBE and VO architectures in a service-oriented environment, as well as an architecture development method for virtual organizations (ADM4VO). Finally, a preliminary set of tools and methods for VOBM is given in this paper.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure

A Typology of Virtual Organizations:An Empirical Study

This paper reports on a survey of 55 organizations employing the virtual model. Based on survey responses and additional project and background information supplied by the organizations, this descriptive study develops a typology of virtual organizations including four distinct types: virtual teams, virtual projects, temporary virtual organizations and permanent virtual organizations. These four forms differed on the range of involvement of members, the membership of the group, organizational mission, and length of the project(s) undertaken. The four forms also differ in their use of information technology : fully virtual organizations using the Internet actively for connections, virtual teams and virtual projects relying more on the mature applications such as EDI, e-mail and fax and temporary virtual organizations relying more on groupware and WANs

Leading The Virtual organization: Success Strategies, Management Practices, and Skills

Virtual organizations have inherent strengths and weaknesses relative to traditional organizational forms. Their success depends heavily on the leaders of the organization leveraging these strengths, and not letting the weaknesses threaten the organization\u27s survival. We explore the character of virtual organizations and propose a value proposition as to why individuals seek employment in such organizations. We then examine several business strategies and management practices that have helped virtual organizations to succeed. Six leadership skills are discussed that the leaders of virtual organizations indicate are critical to their business success

Managing Dynamic User Communities in a Grid of Autonomous Resources

One of the fundamental concepts in Grid computing is the creation of Virtual Organizations (VO's): a set of resource consumers and providers that join forces to solve a common problem. Typical examples of Virtual Organizations include collaborations formed around the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments. To date, Grid computing has been applied on a relatively small scale, linking dozens of users to a dozen resources, and management of these VO's was a largely manual operation. With the advance of large collaboration, linking more than 10000 users with a 1000 sites in 150 counties, a comprehensive, automated management system is required. It should be simple enough not to deter users, while at the same time ensuring local site autonomy. The VO Management Service (VOMS), developed by the EU DataGrid and DataTAG projects[1, 2], is a secured system for managing authorization for users and resources in virtual organizations. It extends the existing Grid Security Infrastructure[3] architecture with embedded VO affiliation assertions that can be independently verified by all VO members and resource providers. Within the EU DataGrid project, Grid services for job submission, file- and database access are being equipped with fine- grained authorization systems that take VO membership into account. These also give resource owners the ability to ensure site security and enforce local access policies. This paper will describe the EU DataGrid security architecture, the VO membership service and the local site enforcement mechanisms Local Centre Authorization Service (LCAS), Local Credential Mapping Service(LCMAPS) and the Java Trust and Authorization Manager.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003, 7 pages, LaTeX, 5 eps figures. PSN TUBT00