Collaborative Research: Virtualization of Work Capabilities in Project-Based Design Organizations

该奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案（公法111-5）资助的。基于项目的设计组织是当代不懈追求创新的基础。设计组织不可避免地具有虚拟组件，其设计过程深受作为设计基础的信息技术（it）的影响。过去对虚拟组织的研究强调虚拟如何通过取代传统的物理组织来提高绩效。组织形式。然而，随着IT变得无处不在，这样的观点既不实际，也在理论上不可持续。所有的组织都是由比特和原子同时构建的，虚拟组织总是位于物理物质中。我们的目标是研究：(a)基于项目的设计组织如何通过纠缠虚拟和物理物质来虚拟化他们的工作能力；(b)设计控制和环境波动如何影响虚拟化进程。拟议的研究解决了这三个目标。首先，我们将开发并验证一种半形式化符号，以描述设计过程中虚拟和物理物质纠缠的内容和范围。我们早期的实地工作表明，基于项目的组织根据其具体的、收到的？流程逻辑。其次，使用经过经验验证的虚拟化工作能力的时间顺序表示，我们将检查两个关键偶然性变量的影响——控制和环境波动——设计组织如何可能虚拟化他们的工作。为了解决这些问题，我们在四个基于项目的设计组织中进行了纵向案例研究——建筑设计和管理、软件团队、网络（硬件/软件）产品设计团队，以及复杂的机械和过程工程（航空航天中的流体控制），涉及不同程度的设计控制和环境波动。这些研究将分为四个独立的多层次（涉及组织单位、战略业务单位和设计项目）研究，利用面向实地的数据收集技术，包括半结构化访谈、观察、档案研究、调查、使用录像和图像（处理材料工作的物理方面）和过程建模。主要的数据分析技术是面向过程的事件结构研究和模式匹配。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). Project-based design organizing is fundamental to the contemporary relentless pursuit of innovation. Design organizations inevitably have virtual components and their design processes are deeply affected by information technologies (ITs) serving as design infrastructures. Past research on virtual organizations emphasizes how virtuality can improve performance through substituting traditional ?physical? forms of organizing. As IT becomes ubiquitous, such a view, however, is neither practical, nor theoretically sustainable. All organizations are built simultaneously with both bits and atoms and virtual organizing is always situated in physical materiality. Our goal is to study: (a) how project-based design organizations virtualize their work capabilities by entangling both virtual and physical materiality; (b) how design control and environmental volatility affect the virtualization process.The proposed study addresses these three goals. First, we will develop and validate a semi-formal notation to describe the content and scope of the entanglement of virtual and physical materiality in design processes. Our earlier fieldwork indicates that project-based organizations virtualize their work capabilities according to their specific, ?received? process logic. Second, using empirically validated chronological representations of virtualized work capabilities, we will examine the impact of two critical contingency variables- control and environmental volatility- how design organizations are likely to virtualize their work. To address these questions, we conduct longitudinal case studies in four project-based design organizations- construction design and management, software teams, network (hardware/software) product design teams, and complex mechanical and process engineering (fluid controls in aerospace) involving different levels of design control and environmental volatility. The studies will be organized as four separate multi-level (involving both organizational units, strategic business units and design projects) studies that draw upon field-oriented data collection techniques involving semi-structured interviews, observations, archival research, surveys, the use of video and images (to address the physical aspects of material work) and process modeling. Main data analysis techniques are process oriented event structure studies and pattern matching.