Organizational enterprise 2.0: Finding equilibrium in turbulent environments.

摘要

The speed and frequency of changes in the information and communications technology environment have exceeded the abilities of many companies in this industry to quickly develop new core competencies that accommodate their post-turbulent environments. This study examines four information technology companies in two distinct time periods to determine whether their virtual enterprise maturity, as measured by the number of acquisitions and virtual alliances, has positively affected their ability to survive turbulent changes that occurred during those periods. IBM, Control Data Corporation (CDC), Cisco, and 3Com are the four companies studied.;IBM and CDC were competitors during the period 1980 to 2000. Both were successful mainframe manufacturing companies whose equilibrium with the computer industry's business environment was destabilized when the market shifted from large expensive computers based on proprietary technology to small inexpensive personal computers based on standard open technologies. Cisco and 3Com were early competitors in the network business during the period 1990 to 2010 when the industry shifted from stand-alone to connected computers in public and private networks. Documents from the companies' Web sites, archived data, researcher's direct observations, and an interview of CDC's former president comprised sources of evidence to test the study's theses.;Although the theme of virtual organization has received some coverage in the literature, most of the research has concentrated on the intraorganizational productivity benefits derived from employees working in some form of virtual arrangement, such as telecommuting. This study's focus is interorganizational, and explores how permanent and temporary partnerships between companies create an adaptive organization that can more quickly recover from environmental jolts.;Examining the causal relationships between a virtual enterprise and its turbulent environment, this study draws from concepts and findings established by previous studies that dealt with the concepts of open systems, core competencies, decision making, information and communications technologies, virtualization, and loosely coupled relationships.;This study contributes to a growing body of research that seeks to identify organizational forms that can more quickly adapt in turbulent environments. Previous studies suggested that such environments demand organizational forms that are fundamentally different from the more familiar hierarchically and vertically integrated structures. This study concludes that a 2.0 enterprise is formed by dissimilar organizations whose fates are positively related, for whom cooperation is maximized, and where there is mutual agreement that no one organization can displace the role of the other.