Panel Description: The future of business meetings — possibilities and problems of computer support in virtual organisations [chapter]

J. M. Haake, M. Bever, J. Bumiller, D. Martin
1995 Information Systems Development for Decentralized Organizations  
Due to globalisation of markets, business processes of today are characterized by a change from individual work to team work as well as by a shift from single, independently acting corporations to virtual organisations operating as dynamic networks. On the other hand, trends emerging in this context are joint ventures and outsourcing -trends which result in an increased complexity and frequency of communication, co-ordination and co-operation within companies as well as across organisational
more » ... ndaries. As a consequence, meetings at all levels have become more frequently over the past decade. This development calls for improved and enhanced communication facilities at an internal level, e.g., between various teams of a company, and at an external level, e.g., between a corporation and its suppliers or customers. So far, efforts to electronically support synchronous communication (e.g., meetings by video-conferencing systems) have mostly been limited in terms of integration. The main reasons for insufficient progress-or even failure-of most current meeting support systems are their lack of flexibility and their insufficient integration with asynchronous modes of co-operation and related applications (e.g., workflow management systems, multimedia collaboration teteservices). Problems arising from this deficit are manyfold: Documents of a meeting participant are unusable since their format is incompatible to the electronic meeting support system; data are unaccessable due to missing interconnectivity; particular expertise required during a session is not available since there is no support for immediate electronic consultation of absent group members or external experts -or even more important, the only person who is authorised to make a crucial decision at some point of a negotiation can not be consulted. Such deficits lead to incompensatory delays, decrease "speed to market" or reduce the quality of strategic managerial decisions. Moreover, they inevitably cause considerable costs for the intense communication and cooperation activities typically required in virtual organisations. A. Sölvberg et al. (eds.), Information Systems Development for Decentralized Organizations
doi:10.1007/978-0-387-34871-1_14 fatcat:a4s3ifesczhtdlhc6a7whspcru