Assignment 1
Virtual office is a business location that exists only in cyberspace. A virtual office setup allows business owners and employees to work from any location by using technology such as laptop computers, cell phones and internet access. A virtual office can provide significant savings and flexibility compared to renting a traditional office space. Meetings can be conducted via teleconferencing and video conferencing, and documents can be transmitted electronically. Some companies even provide virtual office services to give virtual offices the prestige associated with physical offices, such as an important-sounding address, a professional phone-answering service and even occasional rental of office space and conference rooms. If the business has employees, each employee can work from the location that is most convenient for him or her, and the business is not restricted to hiring employees that live locally. The virtual office arrangement thus expands job options for employees and hiring options for businesses.
To illustrate, if you work from your home utilizing a computer, modem, fax machine, email or other electronic means to perform your job and communicate with your place of employment, you work in a virtual office. In other words, you're telecommuting. Even though a virtual employee may use a company email address, mailing address and phone extension, he still works from an outside location. The virtual office worker doesn't necessarily need to be an employee. He can also be someone who owns his own business and works from his home or on the road via laptop and wireless connection. The owner of a virtual office can also be an independent contractor or freelance worker, with no ties to one specific place of business. The benefits of a virtual office are many. For instance, many overhead costs, such as electricity, are cut out or kept to a minimum for the company with virtual employees. Telecommuting also eliminates crowded offices. As an added benefit, the virtual employee may agree to lower pay in exchange for the ability to work out of his home. A virtual organization or company is one whose members are geographically apart, usually working by computer e-mail and groupware while appearing to others to be a single, unified organization with a real physical location. A flexible network of independent entities linked by information technology to share skills, knowledge and access to others' expertise in nontraditional ways A form of cooperation involving companies, institutions and/or individuals delivering a product or service on the basis of a common business understanding. The units participate in the collaboration and present themselves as a unified organization. Virtual organizations do not need to have all of the people, or sometimes any of the people, in one place to deliver their service. The organization exists but you cannot see it. It is a network, not an office. To summarize these definitions, attributes of VOs include: A dispersed network of skills and capabilities. The structure of a VO is distributed among multiple locations resulting in the capacity of bringing in a wider pool of skills and capabilities. The use of telecommunications and computing technologies--These technologies serve as the enabler that makes a VO exist. One could argue that VOs have always existed: traveling sales staff, outsourced staff and staff working at home. However, what is new is that technology has made it much easier to support distributed work teams. Barriers of distance and time have been overcome by technology. Furthermore, the Basic technologies supporting VOs include the Internet and the World Wide Web, telecommunications, electronic mail, groupware such as Lotus Notes, and video conferencing. Terms such as, “hotelling”, “motelling” describe the transformation of spatial arrangements of work. The reduced office space is shared on an advanced booking basis. For instance, when the manager wants to set a meeting to meet his client if he reserved a room in advance it will be “hotelling”, but if he reserved a room now it will be “motelling”. There are different software that allow reservation in advance, while others not. Recent research indicates that in some businesses between fifty and eighty percent of office desk space may be empty on any given day. Thus, the introduction of a virtual office is a sound business decision. I think that virtual organization is an essential approach as it is the key drive is to reduce office overheads and facilities costs and disperse workers to get closer to the customer. So from my opinion in both those to concepts we can see how life has became easier and technology has helped people to work in any place at any time without restrictions. So, nowadays people can work from their homes rather than going to crowded offices.

References: http://www.isaca.org/Journal/Past-Issues/2001/Volume-6/Pages/Understanding-Virtual-Organizations.aspx http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/virtual-organization http://www.investopedia.com/terms/v/virtual-office.asp http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-virtual-office.htm