Virtual organization and the examination of its structural characteristics: The Ameritech sample

ABSTRACTOrganizational structures and management approaches have been changingaccording to social changes, since the beginning of humankind?s written history. Beingformed, at first, due to the agriculture society?s properties, organizations have madepossible many people work together in order to produce more outputs in a shorterperiod, through the industrialization. With the development of Post-Industrial societyand new technologies, traditional structure of organizations has fallen short to satisfycustomer needs by lacking of elasticity and lost its functionality. In 1990s, where newapproaches are put forward to fill this gap, the virtual organization concept appearedlike many others.Virtual organization, often confused with other terms related to the IT usage incorporations, is defined as temporary organizations outsourcing each productionfunction to legally and geographically independent partner corporations, work groupsand workers, which are inter-connected with highly improved communication tools andcomputer technologies, in order to decrease costs and increase elasticity. There aredifferent models for virtual organizations exposed by various researchers. These modelsstrive to bring forward different practical aspects of the concept.Only few organizations have succeeded to execute a virtual organizationconsistent with the theoretical base. Some organizations intending to make partnershipsare forced by environmental conditions to be a part of a virtual organization, while someothers claiming to be virtual organizations are nothing more than traditionalorganizations highly invested on IT. The Ameritech Sample, mostly expressing thetheoretical base, is the practice part of this study. Ameritech have initiated a projectcalled Ameritech Cellular Services to improve its services. Greg Oslan is the Broker andthe project manager of the project including multiple corporations with activities inmany different areas. According to Oslan, also responsible for the production functionof the project, the most important issue while taking part in a virtual organization ismanaging the inter-relations among partners correctly and efficiently. Only in that case,it is possible to keep partners from unfulfilling the obligations during the project and/orto prevent the reveal of a copyright issue at the end of the project.By this means, the purpose of the study is to examine from various points of viewthe concept of ?virtual organization?, which has not been commonly evaluated in theliterature. The study attracts importance by dwelling upon contradictory issues relatedto virtual organizations, one of the organizational structures of post-industrial society.