Knowledge Management Based Approach For Virtual Organization Inheritance

This paper presents a framework for supporting virtual organization (VO) inheritance relying on knowledge management approach. It emphasizes that part of the problems to manage VOs is derived from the lack of information and lessons learned about the past businesses as well as that keeping the VOs ́ histories can be useful for augmenting and for given more agility in the decision-making process. The suggested framework presents VO inheritance as a horizontal activity that covers the entire VO life cycle, providing information for the several involved collaborative actors. An initial experiment using decision analysis is presented to show its use in VO inheritance. In the conclusions it is argued that VOs could be much more effective and the problems solved with more agility if a better use could be made out of the information inherited from VOs.