Tales of Mindspace & Radio

It is difficult to define a Virtual Team; instead the focus in recent times is to define the extent of virtualness (Bell & Kozlowski 2002 and Griffith & Neale in 2001.)

The success in creating a virtual world depends on how clearly the objectives have been defined and to what extent the process necessary for the accomplishment of the objective has been designed (Norton and Smith, 1997).

Consequently, recent definitions have stressed the omnipresent nature of virtual interactions, pointing out that a pure face-to-face team that does not use any communication technology is rare.

Virtualness diminishes the adverseness geographical distribution has on psychological intimacy.


Barriers to Virtual Teams

Trust and identity are two significant issues for efficient creation and operation of virtual teams.

Identity plays a critical role in communication and yet, when spatial borders separate team members, identity is ambiguous. Basic indicators of personality traits and social roles are harder to identify. Unlike the physical world that consists of matter, the virtual world is composed of information that is diffused over time and space. There is alas no law of the conservation of information.

Along with identity, trust is also a crucial component of cooperative endeavors. Without trust, the management of a virtual organization cannot be conceived (Kimble, Li & Barlow, 2000).

In addition to trust and identity, there are a number of technological hazards that present barriers to success. Virtual teams require multimedia communications incorporating voice, data, text and video. This infrastructure is not always readily available in certain areas or is often cost-prohibitive to the organization.

Even after the difficult selection of appropriate technologies and services has been made, the additional cost in maintaining the system need also be considered. Also, most equipment and software available today has been designed for use in a conventional office, and may not always be adaptable to a virtual environment.

RFID: The Flip Side

In an age of greater supply chain awareness the buzz around RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is natural but unfortunately, businesses and governments are not the only ones interested in RFID. Civil liberties groups, hackers and criminals are also keenly interested in this new development, albeit for very different reasons. Groups are concerned about RFID technology being used to invade people's privacy; RFID tags enable unethical individuals to snoop on people and clandestinely collect data on them without their knowledge, leave alone approval. For example, RFID-enabled public transit tickets could allow public transit managers to compile a dossier listing all of a person's travels in the past year -- information which may be of interest to the police, divorce lawyers, and others.

A completely different category of threats arises when hackers or criminals cause valid RFID tags to behave in unexpected (and generally malicious) ways. Typically, computer-bound or mobile RFID readers query RFID tags for their unique identifier or on-tag data, which often serves as a database key or launches some real-world activity. For example, when an RFID reader at a supermarket checkout counter reads the tag on a product, the software driving it could add the item scanned to the list of the customer's purchases, tallying up the total after all products have been scanned.

Here is where the trouble starts. Up until now, everyone working on RFID technology tacitly assumed that the mere act of scanning an RFID tag cannot modify back-end software, and certainly not in a malicious way. Unfortunately, they are wrong. Studies have revealed that if certain vulnerabilities exist in the RFID software, an RFID tag can be intentionally infected with a virus and this virus can go on to infect the backend database used by the RFID software. From there it can be easily spread to other RFID tags. No one thought this was possible until now. Designers of RFID systems therefore should take care that they do not end up deploying vulnerable systems.

(Credits: Melanie Rieback, Patrick Simpson, Bruno Crispo, and Andrew Tanenbaum of the Department of Computer Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)

Rajib Kumar, Offline (The Material World Online Management Journal) Volume-4, No- 4, March 2006