Envisioning the Virtual Workplace: Conceptualising Virtualisation

Virtual organising is a term which commonly describes an approach to managing and configuring organisational resources beyond the spatial and legal boundaries of the firm. To better manage the process of virtualisation, three things need to be understood: how virtual the organisation wants to be, how virtual the organisation is, and how capable the organisation currently is of operating virtually. Analysis of an organisation along these three dimensions will identify the appropriateness of the present state of virtualisation and guide planning for bridging any gap between the current and desired states. In this article, we describe how data specific to these dimensions was collected in an organisation that has just initiated a conscious strategy of virtualisation. By analysing remarks made in a workshop and interviews with members of the organisation’s management team, we identify a new dimension for understanding virtualisation: the mindset of the people in the organisation, and we extend the set of capabilities for virtualisation described in the literature to: leadership and vision, management capability, employee capability, virtual mindset, technology, and economics. We show how three dimensions can be used to plan to improve the process of virtualisation.