Introduction

Fueled by collaborative technologies that allow new ways of organizing, the great game of business is changing from a process-centric view of work to a human-centric view of business as value creating networks. This means that work design and management practices are approaching a significant turning point in the world of work design.

Social business computing is revolutionizing the way companies operate and do business by supporting broad-based contributions from across the organization and beyond. Found in loosely structured networks, rather than the traditional linear process or hierarchical organization structures, social business computing puts users in control - allowing them the freedom to determine how they will communicate and produce. Collaboration tools and social networking technologies are gaining rapid traction even in the most traditional of businesses.

Organizational life is migrating quickly onto social network platforms which are allowing a more human-centric way of organizing work. Yet, structures, processes, and systems are not evolving as rapidly, and indeed in many cases are simply inadequate to support more flexible and networked ways of working.

An Avanade 2010 survey [1] reports that more than 80 percent of executives believe that enterprise-wide collaboration is the key to success. At the same time, senior executives and IT decision makers are expressing specific business culture and behavioral concerns as a result of collaboration. Clearly the road to collaboration is not a superhighway.

The great hope of course is that greater capacity to collaborate will allow companies to be more agile. In complex, dynamically changing, and highly competitive environments, business agility is the single largest risk and opportunity facing global organizations. But that hope for greater agility and breakthrough performance has yet to be realized.

So what is really getting in the way?

Business tools, work design approaches, and organizational structures are simply not up to the challenge. Collaboration challenges arise in the structurally incompatible and poorly managed overlaps between traditional business tools and the new world of social network tools. There are typically poor linkages between the critical human interactions and workflow management. As a result workflow, project, and case variations are disruptive and change is noticed too late for effective response. Simply calling for more collaboration does not solve the problem.

Social technologies support conversations, but are disconnected from work flows and performance goals. Traditional organizational hierarchies, rigidly designed work processes, and operational performance metrics often work against collaboration. People need new ways to organize quickly to respond to ever changing, complex work environments.

Work design tools do not support the true nature of collaboration

When it comes to running the great game of business most people - and even new collaboration technologies - are still stuck in traditional work design "game boards." Two types of design tools have dominated work design for the last three decades:

Today, social networking applications are the most basic and essential new business game platforms. This is where the boxes and ledgers have landed for the moment. Companies like Jive Software(R) and Lithium Technologies(R) are offering an increasing range of features for people to collaborate on documents, share information, and hold conversations. SocialText(R) for example, started with Wikis and now has expanded to group discussions, distributed spreadsheets, and blogs. Atlassian and others provide new ways of collaborating on projects and tasks. Shared workspaces such as Salesforce.com(R) also qualify as collaborative game boards with shared tasks and tables for contacts and opportunities.

But collaboration platforms alone are not enough. Most collaboration, project, and process tools do not provide a network structure for managing collaborative work. They are focused more on individual task management, or use traditional linear process flows or spreadsheets to manage the work.

So while the many benefits of the network approach are often present at the onset of the collaborative efforts, they are lost during the implementation stage. Collaboration and social networking platforms simply don't provide enough structure - or do not make that structure visible in an intuitive way.

While structure is needed to bring focus to work objectives and accountability, too much structure stifles agility. Enterprise systems often work against collaborative work as they are by nature highly structuredand process-driven - and address only tangible transactions. They are particularly poor at addressing complex or dynamically changing environments and addressing knowledge work.

Discovering social network patterns

There are many excellent books, articles, and examples of how classic network analysis can be used to address business management issues. [2] Social Network Analysis (SNA) is now used for a wide variety of business management challenges - from identifying informal experts, to improving communication and collaboration, to managing business alliances - as well as detecting fraudulent insurance claims and analyzing criminal and terrorist networks. The social graph and classic network analytics are becoming integral components of many collaboration and business intelligence applications and will probably be standard functionality by 2012 to show people the connections in their personal networks.

However, the rising use of SNA visuals and analytics points to an even more significant

evolution in the great game of business - modeling the work itself as human-centric value creating networks. 

Value networks meet the challenge

A value network is any set of roles and interactions that generates
a specific kind of business, economic, or social good.

It is a human-centric, role-based, network view
of any business activity.

The true shape and nature of collaboration is not the social network - it is the value network. Value networks are purposeful groups of people who come together to take action. Value network modeling and analytics reflect the true nature of collaboration with a systemic human-network approach to managing business operations. It shows how work really happens through human interactions, and provides powerful new practices and metrics for managing collaborative work. It provides a way to a) better support non-hierarchical organizations such as cross-boundary teams, and task forces, and b) quickly and effectively model emergent work and complex activities that have multiple variables and frequent exceptions. 

As an example, this diagram shows the S.A. Armstrong Company, an early adopter of value network modeling in the late 1990s. Note that instead of single links like a social network, value network modeling "unpacks" the links to show the exact nature of the formal and informal interactions. S.A. Armstrong is one of the top companies Canada and the dotted lines show the power of their informal relationships building activities that helped achieve outstanding success.

Value Network Analysis (VNA), the value network modeling and analysis method described in this book, has been used in a broad variety of industries. Companies using VNA include companies from aerospace-defense, mobile and telecom, life sciences, computer technology, healthcare, software and services, engineering, and many others. In the nonprofit area VNA has been used in strategy work and industry level analysis with the Global Reporting Initiative, the Global Finance Initiative - and with networks dealing with peace and mass atrocities, rural healthcare, and hunger. It has also been used to link regional innovation value networks to macroeconomic indicators and intellectual capital formation for regions in Europe, Sweden, and the U.S. You will find many of these examples throughout the book.

Value Network Analysis provides a way to generate business and economic models that genuinely support the fabric of society and the web of life. Through the power of networks we can address our complex issues - together - and create a more hopeful future.

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