From internet to cross-organisational networking

Abstract

The Internet has become a powerful means of communication and interaction and various research projects have shown its potential to revolutionize business models and means of cooperation. Only recently, development has made significant progress in catching up with research and a series of products have been exposed to the market which may well represent the next step to realize this revolution. This development will allow flexible resource and capability sharing across the net, as if the according capabilities would be locally available - even though this is already possible in principle, new models will allow maintenance of resources & capabilities on an operating system level, making it completely transparent to the average user. This paper will show how the market is currently changing to host a new range of operating systems and collaboration support that will give rise to complete new capabilities, business models and communities, but at the same time will have us rethink classical approaches to problem solving. The paper will therefore examine recent research approaches to so-called Virtual Organisations and how they contribute to realizing new collaboration modes. It will show how major IT vendors are approaching this vision and where the current development may lead to, and how this will influence future business models. © 2008 Springer-Verlag London Limited.