Virtue : Virtual Enterprises For Information Markets

An essential part of a modern economy is an information market. In this market, information products are being traded in countless ways. Information is bought, modified, integrated, incorporated into other products and then sold again. Usually, the manufacturing of an information product requires the collaboration of several participants. A virtual enterprise is a community of business entities that collaborate on the manufacturing of new products. This collaboration is often ad hoc, for a specific product only, after which the virtual enterprise may dismantle. The virtual enterprise paradigm is particularly appealing for modeling collaborations for manufacturing information products, and in this paper we present a new model, called VirtuE, for modeling such activities. 1. INFORMATION MARKETS AND VIRTUAL ENTERPRISES An essential part of a modern economy is an information market. In this market, information products are being traded in countless ways. Information is bought, modified, integrated, incorporated into other products and then sold again. Some information products are elementary. An elementary information product is created out of nothing; for example, a reading off an instrument, a photograph taken by a camera, or a new customer record added to a database. Often, however, information products are derived from other products. A weather report is assembled from multiple instrument readings, a news report requires the analysis of several sources, and even a photograph may be an enhancement of another photograph. It is possible that an information product is manufactured in its entirely by the same individual or business entity. More often, however, the production of an information product requires collaboration among several different participants. A particular form of business cooperation that has attracted attention recently is that of a virtual enterprise. A virtual enterprise is a community of business entities that collaborate on the manufacturing of new products. The collaboration is often ad hoc, for a specific product only, after which the virtual enterprise may dismantle (indeed, former collaborators may become competitors). The members of a virtual enterprise often possess complementary skills and technologies whose combination is deemed necessary for the target product at hand. The virtual enterprise paradigm appears to be suitable for collaborative productions of information products. In this paper we describe the VirtuE model for virtual enterprises whose core business is information products. Such a virtual enterprise may be set up to produce an electronic publication, with individual members providing services such as photo archives, news, layout, and proofing. A market research enterprise may be a collaboration among a credit bureau, a mailing list consolidator, an arThis work was partially supported by the European Commission (FAIRWIS project IST-1999-12641) and by the Italian MIUR project on “Organization & Management of Information Systems in Virtual Enterprises within Digital Marketplaces”.