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Fall 2009

The Virtual Enterprise

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A Hierarchy of “Virtualness”

• Virtual Teams within an organization

• Virtual Worlds

• Modelling an environment

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About The Class

• We are in a discovery mode

• There hasn’t been all that much written

• We will be doing some research of our own

• Articles

• Games

• Project (?)

• Guest Lecturers

• We will be discussing enterprise adaptation, evolution and change

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About The Class

QUESTIONS – WITH VIRTUAL ORGANIZATIONS

What sets of management skills are now required?

Are they different from traditional management skills?

What new tools are required to manage these organizations?

Is the manager even relevant?

How do we react to the rate of change in the technology industry?

Who takes responsibility for evaluating the most effective tools to use?

Rapid change always implies steep learning curves.

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Administrative Stuff

We will use my Web Site as our primary resource.

We will use Skype as a secondary resource

We will use the 420 Wiki

My Web site…

•Links pages

•Download pages…

•Assignments…

Blackboard

Email…

•For this class I’ll be much more critical of e-mail and it will impact your grade.

•Precede each topic with 420

•Check for spelling errors and use proper business grammar. This means you may have to write them in Word them cut and paste to the email.

•Make email succinct, clear, and put most important information up front. Think before you write, think before you send.

•Skype…

•It really needs high speed access (T1, DSL, Cable Modem)

Field Trips

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Grades and Projects

I like the idea of every starting with a B, so Today – if this were the final day of class, everyone would get a B.

We will typically work in teamsYour grade will be displayed in Blackboard

We will have at least one test on readings

There will be one paper due at the end of the term

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Resources

Texts –

Implementing Virtual Teams, Edwards and Wilson, Gower Press

The Distance Manager, Fisher and Fisher, McGraw Hill

Managing Virtual Projects, Goncalves, McGraw Hill

Various Research articles and articles from the popular media.

Your first assignment:

Do some JSU Library Research. Find Texts which are relevant to this class.

We will research each Text – strong points, weak points and make a recommendation.

You will make a presentation on Thursday.

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Definitions-Descriptions

• Co-located.

• Employees in the same physical location

• Mobile Employees.

• Those who do not work in any one particular location.

• Frequently they are in transit.

• Remote

• The employee is not at the same location as the manager.

• Remote Manager

• The managed employees not at the managers location.

• Virtual Workplaces

• Where work tasks occur by electronic means and not at any centralized location.

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Dimensions of Working Remotely

• Place these on the Quadrant above :

• A team leader on a conference call with team members located in different cities

• An employee in London works with a co-worker in Singapore. One works while the other sleeps, and they communicate via groupware and eMail

• Team members in the same manufacturing plant work different shifts, so the leave messages via post-it notes and voice mail (what's voice mail)

• Members of a process improvement team meet together in a conference room.

Same place, same time

Different timeSame Place

Same timeDifferent place

Different timeDifferent place

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Dimensions of Working Remotely

• One still manages people and business processes. The key is not to do different things, but to do differently those things that managers and professional staff have always done.

• Research Shows there are FIVE areas in which remote managers need to apply special focus.

—Relationships—Trust—Performance Management—Enablement—Communications

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Special Focus Areas

• Relationships• Some say its difficult to create a good relationship with someone you see

infrequently

• BEHAVIORS TO BUILD REMOTE RELATIONSHIPS—Emphasize commonality (similar background, interests, etc)—Stay in touch; phone contact is the next best thing to being there—Focus on being clear in your communication—Have empathy, show concern

Trust – In the workplace it has 3 dimensions• Professional regard – respect fro one’s skills, knowledge, experience and ability to

get the job done

• Personal regard. Values and integrity. The belief in what someone says and does.

• Relationship – History, friendship, shared respect

• Performance Management • Performance mgt from a distance is difficult. It’s hard to assess what you can’t see.

—Places more performance responsibility on the employee—Share knowledge by coaching—Keep interaction logs and review them

• Enablement• Distance employees often have more difficulty with boundaries

• They are uncertain about what they can and can’t do.—Encourage a buddy or mentor system if possible—Talk specifics – detail important boundaries—Watch – may mean more travel, more calls—Allow some exploration – hep explain when they screw up

• Communications• You don’t have water coolers, restaurants and cafeterias. Use the technology you

have. Team Rooms, IM, etc.

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Research View

Organizations increasingly rely on teams to do much of the work traditionally accomplished by individuals. This is largely in response to growing demands for efficiency and flexibility rapidly changing organizational environments. In part, this reliance is based on the assumption that decisions made by groups of employees with diversified expertise will be of higher quality than those made by any one employee (e.g., a manager).

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Increasing Organizational Complexity

Organizations are facing strong forces of change: globalization, demographic shifts, advances in technology, and the demassificiation of society.

Opportunities are presented by global markets and customers, reduced distribution costs via the Internet, and better integration of internal and external information.

The challenges faced by large, multi-national organizations all exist in some form at the team level. For example, organizations face an environment that is increasingly characterized by diverse employees and customers, multiple and competing goals, and greater physical distance between their customers and their employees as well as among locations.

As organizations experience these challenges, so do the teams that are created to respond to these challenges. How well a team responds will determine its benefit to the organization.

Technology is often credited with enabling this increasing organizational complexity that gives rise to virtual teams Broadly, virtual teams are teams that can function outside of physical or temporal boundaries.

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Definition

.A virtual team is a sociotechnical system.

A virtual team is enabled by technology, exists in an organizational structure, and is comprised

of a social system (i.e., the team).

Virtual enterprises are organizations that can reconfigure themselves quickly and temporarily in response to challenge, and then dissolve or transmute into something else.

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Matrix Organizations

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Virtual enterprises are organizations that can reconfigure themselves quickly and temporarily in response to challenge, and then dissolve or transmute into something else.

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Matrix Organizations

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Matrixed organizations and Matrix management processes are particularly well suited to virtual enterprise management and virtual teams

Atlanta e-biz Group

Center Manager

PDM

RDM

PM