Lars Trieloff's Collaboration Weblog

The first unconference session I moderated tried to answer the question: Do virtual organizations really exist?.

We first tried to define what an virtual organization is and came to the concusion that in virtual organizations knowledge workers work distributed over

• time
• place
• and organizational borders

on one common task. A knowledge worker in a virtual organization is almost always member of more than one (virtual) organization at the same time.

The existence of virtual organizations seems to be bound to the size of the organizations that host them. In small companies they are ubiquitous, so that the question "Do physical organizations really exist" can be posed in the future for small knowledge-centric companies such as design- or consulting agencies. Already today virtualization of organizations seems more the rule than the exception for small companies.

Why is it that large companies have a lower share in virtual organizations, when it can be argued that not being able to open up and to create virtual organizations is a competitive disadvantage, as it prevents the best allocation of resources in the company. At the same time, lots of Fortune 2000 CIOs are observed to try to open up their infrastructure, to lighten their infrastructure in order to allow collaboration.

The main issue seem to be firewalls. Not only hardware and software firewalls, but also the policy firewalls that surround them, so that tools like Skype and Groove that are designed to circumvent the physical firewalls are still blocked.

The examples of Skype and Groove have been used to pose the thesis: "In the future, all enterprise tools have to emerge in the consumer market." Afterwards you add enterprise-features like accountability and supervision, as Groove did (Btw. when will Skype release the enterprise-ready Skype-appliance?).

The effect, reduced coolness can be described using following chart: With increased enterprise adoption and commercial success, new tools and techniques become less and less cool.

Mentioning supervision, what about privacy? Privacy can be seen as quality of service and with increased use of tools like instant messaging in enterprises, vendors will try to raise the quality of service and thus open up to privacy concerns. An interesting question asked was: "When will instant messaging be 'part of the job' just as having a telephone on your desk is now?"

As a last question I asked "What tools do you need in order to create a virtual organization right now?"

• Internet
• Skype
• Wikis
• GoToMeeting

One problem still open is how to collaborate across time zones, because "people want to sleep when it is dark outside". Answer: we need to enable our organizations for asynchronous collaboration.

Robert Cringely writes about The Final Days of Google. He makes up following equation:

"Gather a bunch of smart people, they will create new ideas, some good, some very good, some better than your original idea and you cannot recognize or pursue all of them, so they will be pusued by other people, who will kill you", then the threat to Google is not gathering smart people, because they can still leverage a fraction of the ideas their employees are generating."

The problem is, with modern distributed collaboration technology it is much easier to gather a buch of people, even smart people, without being a real company. There are more ideas generated outside Google than inside. When people outside Google can collaborate as productive as people inside by forming a virtual organization, they, together with the right idea have the potential to kill the cash cow.