Abstract:

In an era when virtual companies have become the norm rather than the exception, this paper sets out to outline how ICT-based approaches can be used to streamline a virtual company’s organizational structure to facilitate management.

Management is the set of tasks or activities that govern, design and maintain the environment in which employees work together while competing at the same time for the organization’s resources to accomplish a set of jobs or tasks effectively and efficiently. As such, structuring the organization is a fundamental management task.

With the new large sized organizations, and more so withthe modern virtual organizations that are becoming more common in the present, structuring an organization has become an extremely complicated process. However, such big organizations have started using structuring methods that are anchored on information and communication technology (ICT) to tackle this complexity. The ICT approaches take their cue from computer operating systems and from that springboard several approaches have been put forward to structure the organization. These approaches such as the monolithic, hierarchical, and object-oriented approaches have a similar end goal but different designs. In the end they all provide the structure on which the organization structure is built and operated.

This paper sets out to explore one of those ICT-based management approaches—the object-oriented approach—and to explain how it is structured.  It also presents a proposal of how this approach can be adopted to structure and manage the multitude of complex tasks of the virtual organization. It alsopresents a proposal on how the object-oriented approach can be applied to the structure and management of a virtual organization.