Final blogpost #3

Definition of VIRTUAL OFFICE

Virtual office is a term for shared office services, which normally includes business address, mail & courier services, phone services, fax services, answering services, web-hosting services, and meeting & conference facilities.

Certain providers of virtual office services will provide other in-house or outsourced services such as corporate secretarial services, accounting services, or legal service

Distinguish VO from MIS

Virtual office is also a common term for an environment that enables a network of co-workers to run a business efficiently by using nothing other than online communication technologies.

MIS refers broadly to a computer-based system that provides managers with the tools for organizing, evaluating and efficiently running their departments. In order to provide past, present and prediction information.

Illustrate how VO can improve company's competitive advantage and organizational performance

It is clear that there are tradeoffs between fully central and fully distributed organizations. Also, it is clear that central and distributed are extremes and some hybrid in between may work best and in fact describes most organizations. Finally, it clearly depends on the kind of work one is doing. But what is not so clear is what factors dominate the equation, especially if an organization is committed to breaking down barriers to make a chosen approach work.

Some advantages

Human Communication. People in a hallway are collocated so they can easily interact one-on-one or in groups, just by walking next door, down the hall, or going out to lunch together

Facilities. Facilities are centralized and shared so costs can be lower

Been Done. The obvious one. The centralized office paradigm is what people have been assimilated into from kindergarten on

Example

Virtual filesystems can be made into writable virtual office documents. The old UNIX slogan “everything is a file” together with the xsltfs:// virtual filesystem allows for transparently editing relational databases, RDF and arbitrary XML with OpenOffice.org.

Reference;

Ben Martin has been working on filesystems for more than ten years. He is currently working toward a PhD at the University of Wollongong, Australia, combining Semantic Filesystems with Formal Concept Analysis to improve human-filesystem interaction.