Vulnerabilities of Virtual and Networked Organizations

Virtual organizations (VO) represent a future paradigm of business. Having in mind different types of perturbations in business today, from the economic crisis to the earthquakes in Japan and terrorists' actions, new business solutions have emerged in order to sustain development all over the world. As a new field in scientific research, organizational resilience needs to be investigated in the context of VO's. This paper has the intention to suggest a qualitative way to assess one dimension of organizational resilience in VO's related to keystone vulnerabilities and to establish directions for future work, emphasizing the importance of quantifying overall organizational resilience. Copyright © 2012, IGI Global

A Strategic Benchmarking Process for Identifying the Best Practice Collaborative Electronic Government Architecture

The rapid growth of the Internet has given rise to electronic government (e-government) which enhances communication, coordination, and collaboration between government, business partners, and citizens. An increasing number of national, state, and local government agencies are realizing the benefits of e-government. The transformation of policies, procedures, and people, which is the essence of e-government, cannot happen by accident. An e-government architecture is needed to structure the system, its functions, its processes, and the environment within which it will live. When confronted by the range of e-government architectures, government agencies struggle to identify the one most appropriate to their needs. This paper proposes a novel strategic benchmarking process utilizing the simple additive weighting method (SAW), real options analysis (ROA), and fuzzy sets to benchmark the best practice collaborative e-government architectures based on three perspectives: Government-to-Citizen (G2C), Government-to-Business (G2B), and Government-to-Government (G2G). The contribution of the proposed method is fourfold: (1) it addresses the gaps in the e-government literature on the effective and efficient assessment of the e-government architectures; (2) it provides a comprehensive and systematic framework that combines ROA with SAW; (3) it considers fuzzy logic and fuzzy sets to represent ambiguous, uncertain or imprecise information; and (4) it is applicable to international, national, Regional, state/provincial, and local e-government levels