The past years have seen a decentralization of R&D to local markets and centresâofâexcellence. Supported by modern information and communication technologies, âvirtual project teamsâ were formed to facilitate transnational innovation processes. With their boundaries expanding and shrinking flexibly with changing project necessities, virtual teams are believed to be an important element in future R&D organization. Based on 204 interviews with R&D directors and project managers in 37 technologyâintensive multinational companies we identify four distinct forms of virtual team organizations used to execute R&D projects across multiple locations. Ordered by increasing degree of central project coordination, these four team concepts are based on: (1) decentralized selfâorganization, (2) a system integrator as a coordinator, (3) a core team as a system architect, and (4) a centralized venture team. Our contingency approach for organizing a transnational R&D project is based on four principal determinants: (1) the type of innovation (radical/incremental), (2) the systemic nature of the project (systemic/autonomous), (3) the mode of knowledge involved (tacit/explicit), and (4) the degree of resource bundling (complementary/redundant). According to our analysis, the success of virtual teams depends on the appropriate consideration of these determinants.
Recently, the autonomous decentralized heterogeneous environment has been realized by integrating CORBA and Internet technology. On the other hand, workflow management systems have been introduced into organizations. However, it is difficult to apply workflow management system to coordinate workflow across the multiple organization. The next step of introducing workflow in organizations requires technology to link the workflow across multiple organizations. We call this interworkflow. We propose interworkflow for the autonomous decentralized heterogeneous environment and discuss its functional model.
Manju Ahuja, Kathleen M. Carley, Dennis F. Galletta
Todayâs organizations face a dynamic and turbulent environment which imposes a requirement for flexible and fast responses to changing business needs. Many organizations have responded by becoming decentralized, team-based and distributed (DeSanctis and Jackson, 1994; Drucker, 1988). These distributed organizations have also been described in recent literature as virtual, network, or cluster organizations, employing selfmanaging teams and autonomous business units (Goldman, 1995; Beyerlein and Johnson, 1994; Camillus, 1993; Mills, 1991; Drucker, 1988). Advances in communication technologies have enabled organizations to acquire and retain such distributed structure by supporting interaction among people coordinating their efforts from different locations.
Distributed problem solving networks provide an interesting application area for high-level network coordination through the use of organizational structuring. We describe a decentralized approach to the coordination of these networks that relies on each node making sophisticated local activity decisions. Each node is guided by a high-level strategic plan for cooperation among nodes in the network and must balance its own perceptions of appropriate problems solving activity with activities deemed important by other nodes. The high-level strategic plan, which is a form of meta-level control, is represented as a network organizational structure specifying in a general way the information and control relationships among the nodes. In addition to its application to Distributed Artificial Intelligence, this research has implications for organizing and controlling complex knowledge-based systems that involve semi-autonomous problem solving agents.