Virtual organization delivering public services

In the last decades of twentieth century, the subject of the administrative reform started to be in the agenda of great part of the governments of the industrialized countries. It is in a change context and of new challenges of the Administration that the New Public Management appears as a model of the Administrative Reformation. Thus, the introduction of market mechanisms and the adoption of tools of private administration are presented as a model on the basis to solve the problems of efficiency of the public administration. The New Public Management appears as a microeconomic perspective of privatization and puts stress on private management style in Public Administration. It argues an alteration on the organisational structures and relations, the introduction of management processes and tools, and the delimitation of performance indicators. The main objectives are the specialization, the decentralization, the fragmentations and autonomy of public structures and the increase of the efficiency. Thus, the followed way is the differentiation, which is a natural trend of the different areas of Public Administration to seek a higher identification of values and procedures within working environment. If this identification is a way for the efficiency, according to Lawrence and Lorsh (1967), it has to be complemented with an inverse movement of integration. Then, after a first phase of specialization, the creation of new economic agents, imposes a phase of higher need of coordination to really achieve sustained efficiency (Rhodes, 1996). In this line of reasoning, the agenda to public administration reforms has a new issue, the management by networks. This means that, in a macroeconomic perspective, the delivery of public services is made through partnerships between multiple agents (private, public and non-profit) - The Virtual Organizations -. The solution to the production and coordination mechanisms of any services had been, during much time, underlying in the Hierarchic Market dichotomy (Coase, 1937; Williamson, 1996). The enterprise strategies were centered in the horizontal integration, the market competition and the knowledge specialization. Nowadays, hybrid solutions are preferred, where the strategy is the creation of partnerships and sharing information. The knowledge and the information are dispersed through the market and each agent uses them in their most profitable way. Thus to get higher levels of efficiency and satisfaction of the customer, the competition must give place to complementary structures between organizations. That is, the performance and the levels of innovation of each one of these organizations are dependent of its capacity of cooperation and share of information, what for itself leads to the creation of a virtual organization. Since Government is under a great pressure to accomplish higher levels of efficiency in Public Administration, it is its tasks and responsibility to encourage the creation of Virtual Organizations, that can be defined as an association of some specialized agents in a way to produce a final output that maximizes the utility of the citizen. It matters therefore to analyze this new model of public management. Our work is to understand the valences and the feasibility of the creation and implementation of the Virtual Organizations as well as its impact in the installment of the Public Service. It is our intention to consider it a new conceptual model of public administration and to clarify some inherent dimensions, such as the factors that are in the basis of its origin and creation; the role played for the State and public agents; the financial mechanisms; the evaluation and control methods; the analysis of the inter- organizational relations; the role of the citizen in these new forms of organization