“As managers, we need to shift our thinking from command and control to coordinate and cultivate - the best way to gain power is sometimes to give it away.”
- Thomas W. Malone - MIT Sloan School & Center for Collective Intelligence
author, The Future of Work, Harvard Business School Press 2004
Malone's prescient observation from 2004 is coming home to roost. Leadership and governance vis-à-vis value networks is fast supplanting management and control. Widespread IT initiatives like SOA, mashups and business ecosystems have fundamentally altered the enterprise landscape. IT portfolio innovations like enterprise social media, collective intelligence and knowledge markets are seeing rigid command and control being subsumed by authentic value networks.
The global de facto standard for IT Service Delivery is the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). The ITIL has specifically adopted value networks in Version 3.0. For example,
- Where V2 talked about Value Chain Management, V3 emphasizes Value Network Integration.
- Where V2 talked about Linear Service Catalogues, V3 emphasizes Dynamic Service Portfolios.
- Where V2 talked about Collection of integrated processes, V3 emphasizes Holistic Service Mgmt Lifecycle.
- Where V2 talked about Business and IT Alignment, V3 emphasizes Business and IT integration.
Furthermore, value networks are the conceptual and operational foundations of the open source movement. Increasingly, open source is being adopted by the IT establishment, hence the need for far more sensible methods for leadership and governance. Open source and value networks depends heavily on Malone’s principles of ‘coordinate and cultivate.’
It is rewarding to see social network applications, social media and network analysis grow sharply. This growth drives the adoption of the new alphabet and vocabulary of value networks. It expands value network fluency. VNA delivers the network narratives necessary to comprehend complex business ecologies.
Network analysis, once a novel and interesting laboratory tool for students, scholars and researchers, has emerged as a critical language of business. Value networks and VNA lead the visual lingua franca for complex business relationships and corresponding ecosystems. VNA is proving to have enormous utility for business, economics, the environment and civil society. | 
