Virtual organizations: An overview

Abstract

The need to remain competitive in the open market forces companies to concentrate on their core competencies while searching for alliances when additional skills or resources are needed to fulfill business opportunities. The changing business situation of companies and customer needs have motivated researchers to introduce Virtual Organization (VO) idea. A Virtual Organization is always a form of partnership and managing partners and handling partnerships are crucial. Virtual organizations are defined as a temporary collection of enterprises that cooperate and share resources, knowledge, and competencies to better respond to business opportunities. This paper presents base concepts of virtual organizations including properties, management concepts, operational concepts, and main issues in collaboration such as security and authentication. © 2008 International Federation for Information Processing.