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.