Virtual Communities as a Mechanism for Sustainable Coordination within the South African Public Sector

Due to limited resources, organizations are constantly facing challenges. To take advantage of new opportunities and mitigate possible risks they look for new ways to collaborate with each other, sharing knowledge and competencies. Hence, coordination among partners is critical to achieve success. The segmented South African public sector is no different. Driven by the desire to ensure proper service delivery in the sector, various government bodies and service providers play different roles towards common goals. As such, continuous coordination is required between the role players. This paper investigates Virtual Communities as a possible coordination artifact for supporting sustainable coordination within the South African public sector. The paper commences with a brief introduction. Thereafter, the paper carefully defines the notion of sustainable coordination. It continues then to show that Virtual Communities indeed support the requirements for sustainable coordination. Having argued this at a theoretical level, the paper moves to show how this may be applicable to the South African situation. The paper concludes by emphasizing on the value of virtual communities as separate entities to attain sustainable coordination service provision in the South African public sector.