Kalle Dalheimer

Virtual companies - problems, advantages, challenges

Roughly, virtual companies are companies where the employees are not sitting in a traditional centralized office, but are working at individual places (often their homes) and in many cases only meet a few times a year (if at all). In my talk, I will try to define virtual companies more exactly (and compare them to companies with many branch offices) and present some of the challenges they are facing, together with possible solutions to these challenges. This includes both political and economical questions like to which extent the European Union treaties are of help for these companies as well as technical (how can such a company handle larger-sized projects at all?) and social questions (does such a setup lead to lonesomeness among the employees?). Virtual companies are today almost exclusively software companies, very often companies with tight relations to the open source community which is why I will focus mostly on software companies. However, I will also shortly mention a few other areas where virtual companies could be possible. Examples and experiences will be drawn both from my own virtual company Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB as well as other virtual companies. Required knowledge: Interest, curiosity about this way of working. Level: b/c

About Kalle Dalheimer A native German, Kalle has emigrated into the deep forests of Värmland (Sweden) where he is President and CEO of Klarälvdalens Datakonsult AB, a company specializing in cross-platform software development (with an emphasis on porting from Windows to Linux), developer training, and technical documentation. Kalle is one of the founding members of the KDE project where he works on KOffice, various odds and ends and does a lot of evangelizing.