Characteristics and specific features of virtual organizations

Abstract

Trends of today’s market development, such as globalization, understanding the product quality, its price and the degree of customer satisfaction, as well as the growing importance of using information and communications technologies have led to emergence of new organizational forms of enterprise management. A fast developing trend in market interaction between business entities is a virtual form, which exists together with other organizational forms but represents another mechanism of structural coordination that differs from in-company and purely market mechanism. The author studies a new organizational form, characterizes its nature and provides a comparative analysis of virtual organization and virtual business-organization. The article characterizes virtual organization space, shows its key elements. Apart from that the author researches world and home experience in this field and gives examples of the most successful organizations. The article analyzes necessary conditions for virtual business functioning and shows its key advantages and disadvantages. It also studies the issue of labour organization at virtual enterprise and discusses basic tools of assigning functions to other companies or individuals. In the conclusion the author describes prospects of virtual business-organization development.