| Summary: | The innovative advancements of information communication technology (ICT) combinedwith a globalized economy have given rise to organizational forms that manipulate timeand distance. Today, competitive advantages are more elusive than tangible as a result ofdynamically complex environments motivating organizations to adjust in structure andfunctional capacity. New emergent forms of organizational structures have resulted inthe virtual organization (VO), which employs a network structure and allowsorganizations the flexibility to perform core processes amongst distributed teams, units,departments, and/or organizations. In essence the virtual organization may be viewed asa strategic response to dynamic environmental forces that have encouragedorganizations to rethink the concept of competitiveness. Virtual organizations havegained popularity throughout the last decade as a more effective way of managing andcommunicating information within and across organizations. Information communicationtechnology (ICT) has aided in the globalizing effect of informationalism. Theinformational flows within a virtual organization have direct bearing on individual andgroup efforts to obtain and employ information essential to organizational objectives.This thesis investigates the information interchange within virtual organizations througha theoretical study, which converges identified relevant subject areas and introduces theMedia Rich Social Information Interchange (MERiSii) model. The empirical study isdesigned to further investigate the validity of theoretical concepts employed in theMERiSii model and to expand its development to facilitate the function of informationinterchange. VGR-IT is an IT infrastructure provider, for hospitals and healthcarefacilities in the Västra Götaland region of Sweden. Interviews conducted with an accountmanager for VGR-IT and an IT strategist for Borås Hospital give insight into thecommunicative tasks of information interchange that must be effective to support the coreprocesses within VGR-IT and the service VGR-IT provides to Borås hospital. The resultsof a comparative analysis between the theoretical and empirical studies support a revisedMERiSii model that may be implicated in future research to further verify itseffectiveness. === Program: Magisterutbildning i informatik
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