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-基本上依靠互联网而不是实际邻近来开展业务的工作组织-有望更好地利用全世界的各种资源，并改进涉及相互遥远的伙伴的协作知识工作的进程和成果。它们作为一种日益标准化的工作范式的出现是迅速的，但却吸引了相对较少的实证研究。许多关于虚拟组织的最好的实证研究都记录了适度（或更糟）的成功，主要集中在描述风险和失败模式上。本研究课题是对虚拟组织的有效性、虚拟组织如何实现有效性、虚拟组织如何以新的、独特的方式支持知识工作等进行研究的补充。课题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，旨在对虚拟组织的有效性进行初步的概念分析和实证分析。所有这些组织已经持续运作和发展了五年多，并被其利益相关者和成员公认为成功的组织。这些组织产生了各种成功的知识产品和服务，并形成了三种不同类型的虚拟组织。我们将使用参与行动研究来参与和观察我们的合作伙伴在真实的活动环境中的领域专长，并确保我们的合作伙伴在塑造研究活动中有适当的投入。我们的项目将使用定性的实地研究方法，以经验为基础，描述合作伙伴组织的有效方式。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成设计模式：典型问题的标准解决方案。我们将以三种方式应用这些基于模式的知识：（1）我们将使用成员检查和参与式设计，与三个合作组织的主要信息提供者一起调查设计模式对我们的合作伙伴的有用性。(2)我们将在Web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，这些反应与它们对于理解和设计虚拟组织的初步有效性和实用性有关。(3)我们将在一个原型虚拟组织基础设施中整合和评估这些模式的特征和社会技术启示，鉴于虚拟组织作为知识工作的标准范式越来越重要，更好地理解如何设计它们是至关重要的。这样做的一种方法是调查长期和成功的虚拟组织是如何运作的，并试图将这种理解细化为未来虚拟组织的可操作设计指南。

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.