Reliability seeking virtual organizations: Challenges for high reliability organizations and resilience engineering

Abstract

High reliability organizing is an important approach to crisis prevention and mitigation. Resilience is a term that has been used to describe an organization’s ability to respond or ‘bounce back’ from untoward, surprising or disruptive events. A growing number of organizations have increased mandates for maintaining safety, reliability and resilience; some of these are also virtual or semi virtual organizations—geographically distributed organizations whose members are bound by a long-term common interest or goal, and who largely communicate and coordinate their work through information technology. The objective of this paper is to explicate the challenges that reliability-seeking virtual organizations (RSVOs) pose for high reliability and resilient organizations, based on what is known about high reliability organizations (HROs) and resilient organizations, and what can be surmised about RSVOs. We begin by exploring a test case for RSVOs, distributed offshore oil and gas systems, using the example of the challenges presented during the Deepwater Horizon event. Since a common characteristic of resilient and reliable organizations is fluidity in organizational structures, we examine requirements for fluidity in and across RSVO organizational structures and the forms that fluidity can assume, leaning on our understanding of the role of fluidity in HROs and resilient organizations, and suggesting challenges posed by these different forms of interconnectedness. We then follow with a discussion of when a virtual organization is not highly reliable or resilient. We describe future RSVO challenges in remote settings with little infrastructure, such as Arctic energy exploration and development and IT-enabled healthcare systems in third world countries, and conclude with an agenda for future research.