Davinci Virtual | Blog

As we witness daily headlines discussing economic, organizational and systemic changes globally we can see how “virtual” our worlds are becoming.

Information is now available 24/7. The overload of information is being vetted by a few with the aim of finding new knowledge that can be applied to innovation.  From innovation organizations can learn to create new currency.  The virtual organization of the future will capitalize on these very opportunities.

Is Your Business Prepared for the Change?

Irving Wladawsky-Berger writes in his artilcle titled: The 2009 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium
I moderated a panel on The Virtual Organization.  We all agreed that the classic hierarchic organizations of the industrial age do not scale well for the fast changing, integrated global environment in which business is now conducted.  You need the kind of distributed, collaborative approach that virtual organizations are all about.

Good virtual organizations are designed to help bring together different groups from within and outside the organization, so they can better work and share ideas with each other.  The rise of virtual organizations in the last decade has been enabled by advanced Internet technologies, multi-channel communications capabilities and social networking, Web 2.0 oriented platforms.

Our panel had a number of very interesting discussions.  It is quite likely that the net generation, that is, those that are growing up digital might not be able to understand why we are having a panel on virtual organizations at all.  Aren’t all organizations part physical and part digital?  We wondered if young people would view our panel as a way to bring to the attention of an older generation of business executives and academics what the younger generation is already doing.

Teams operate most effectively with the right balance of personal and virtual contact, but we don’t know yet what that right balance might be.  We are beginning to learn what works best for different kinds of projects and organizations.  The more structured and concrete a problem, the easier it is to partition the work among physically distributed groups, who will interact mostly through virtual channels.  However, when addressing ill defined, unstructured problems, groups whose members know each other personally, will likely be able to better collaborate and come up with innovative, new ideas.

Advanced technologies and innovations, such as those emerging around virtual worlds, can significantly improve the effectiveness of distributed organizations.  When distant team members share a common virtual space, such as a virtual office or lab, they can not only better communicate but also become more aware of each other’s presence even when not communicating.  Such distance awareness and presence might help create more cohesive and focused virtual work environments.  There is clearly a lot to learn about virtual organizations

We would agree with the last statement and only add the time to learn and capitalize on the advantages of a virtual organization is now rather than later.