A VOC Based Approach to Support Virtual Organizations

Employing IT as the key enable technology, virtual organization (VO) is primarily characterized as being a network of independent, geographically dispersed organizations (member organization) providing electronic services via Internet. To align these services effectively, one of the main challenges is to model cooperation in VO and provide correspondent management tools. Here we present a VOC (VO Structure-Organization Resource-Character) approach to model and run VO. VOC consists of three models. VO Structure model describes how VO functions in terms of VO Role (VR), Protocol; Organization Resource model describes potential service providers (potential member organization) capable participate VO. Character Model describes dynamic binding relationship between VO role and member organization. Following the VOC model,a platform supporting the design, administration, and running of VOC is given.