VOSS: Designing Effective Virtual 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。虚拟组织——从根本上依赖于互联网而不是物理邻近来进行操作的工作组织——承诺更好地利用世界各地的各种资源，并改善涉及相互远程合作伙伴的协作知识工作的过程和结果。它们作为一种越来越标准的工作范式迅速出现，但却吸引了相对较少的实证研究。许多关于虚拟组织的最佳实证工作都记录了适度（或更糟）的成功，并且主要关注于描述风险和失败模式。我们的项目通过调查虚拟组织的有效性意味着什么，虚拟组织如何实现有效性，以及它们如何以新的和独特的方式支持知识工作来补充这一研究主体。该项目的核心是对三个已建立的虚拟组织进行深入的解释性研究，旨在对它们如何有效进行初步的概念和实证分析。所有这些组织都已经持续运营和发展超过五年，并被其利益相关者和成员认可为成功的组织。这些组织产生了各种成功的知识产品和服务，并举例说明了三种不同类型的虚拟组织。我们将使用参与式行动研究来吸引和观察我们的合作伙伴在实际活动背景下的领域专业知识，并确保我们的合作伙伴在形成研究活动方面有适当的投入。我们的项目将使用定性的实地研究方法来经验地描述合作伙伴组织有效的方式。我们将使用访谈和内容分析方法来确定组织使用的策略。我们将把这些策略编撰为设计模式：典型问题的标准解决方案。我们将以三种方式应用这种基于模式的知识：(1)我们将与三个合作伙伴组织的关键线人一起使用成员检查和参与式设计来调查设计模式如何对我们的合作伙伴有用。(2)我们将在网上发布我们的模式，以收集来自更广泛的虚拟组织社区的关键反应，这些反应涉及到它们对理解和设计虚拟组织的初步有效性和效用。(3)我们将在原型虚拟组织基础设施中整合和评估模式的特征和社会技术支持。鉴于虚拟组织作为知识工作的标准范例的重要性日益增加，更好地理解如何设计它们以使其有效是至关重要的。要做到这一点，方法之一是调查长期成功的虚拟组织是如何运作的，并尝试将这种理解细化为未来虚拟组织的可操作设计指导。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). Virtual organizations - work organizations that rely fundamentally on the Internet rather than physical proximity for conducting their operations - promise to better leverage resources of all kinds throughout the world, and to improve the processes and the outcomes of collaborative knowledge work involving mutually remote partners. Their emergence as an increasingly standard paradigm for work has been meteoric, but has attracted relatively little empirical study. Much of the best empirical work on virtual organizations has documented modest (or worse) success, and primarily focuses on describing risks and failure patterns. Our project complements this body of research by investigating what effectiveness means for virtual organizations, how virtual organizations can achieve effectiveness, and how they can support knowledge work in new and distinctive ways.The core of this project is an in-depth interpretive study of three established virtual organizations directed at developing a preliminary conceptual and empirical analysis of how they are effective. All of these organizations have been continually operating and growing for more than five years, and are recognized as successful by their stakeholders and members. These organizations have produced a variety of successful knowledge products and services, and exemplify three distinct types of virtual organizations. We will use participation action research to engage and observe the domain expertise of our partners in real activity contexts, and to assure that our partners have appropriate input in shaping research activities. Our project will use qualitative, field-study methods to empirically characterize the ways in which the partner organizations are effective. We will use interview and content analysis methods to identify strategies the organizations use. We will codify these strategies as design patterns: standard solutions to typical problems. We will apply this patterns-based knowledge in three ways: (1) We will use member checking and participatory design with key informants of the three partner organizations to investigate how the design patterns are useful to our partners. (2) We will publish our patterns on the Web to gather critical reactions from a broader community of virtual organizations with respect to their prima facie validity and utility for understanding and designing virtual organizations. (3) We will incorporate and evaluate features and sociotechnical affordances from the patterns in a prototype virtual organization infrastructure.Given the growing importance of virtual organizations as a standard paradigm for knowledge work, it is vital better understand how they can be designed to be effective. One way to do this is to investigate how longstanding and successful virtual organizations function, and to try to refine that understanding into actionable design guidance for future virtual organizations.