Verna Allee
Verna Allee
extract from :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verna_Allee
Verna Allee, born 1949 in Kansas,[1] United States, is an American business consultant and writer on topics including knowledge management, organizational intelligence, intellectual capital and the value conversion of intangibles.
Allee is a co-developer of the ValueNet Works Fieldbook[2] (see FileNet) and the GenIsis application (see CDS ISIS). She co-hosts an open resource website[3] with content under a Creative Commons Attribution License for value network analysis practitioners.
Open Value Networks
http://www.value-networks.com/
Every business relationship includes contractual or mandated activities between participants — and
also informal exchanges of knowledge, favors, and benefits.
A ValueNet WorksTM analysis begins with a HoloMapping® diagram that first shows the essential contractual, tangible revenue- or funding-related business transactions and exchanges.
Along with the more traditional business transaction the critical intangible, although informal, knowledge exchanges and benefits that build relationships and keep things running smoothly. These informal exchanges are actually the key to creating trust and opening pathways for innovation and new ideas.
Traditional business practices ignore these important intangible exchanges, but they are made visible with a ValueNet WorksTM Analysis.
A Value Network Approach
http://www.value-networks.com/howToGuides/A_ValueNetwork_Approach.pdf
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The methodology is grounded in principles of living systems, and represents a decided shift away from mechanistic models. It expands current thinking about intangibles in three important ways.
1. It goes beyond the asset view of intangibles to also consider intangibles as negotiables and as deliverables.
2. It proposes a way to model organizations and business relationships as living networks of tangible and intangible value exchanges.
3. It provides a way to link scorecards and indexes to specific business activities, allowing people to more fully understand the impact of their decisions and actions in both tangible and intangible terms.
Enterprise as a Living System :
The key business question is, “How is value created?”
The traditional answer to that question is – “through the value chain.”
The value chain model, however, is a linear, mechanistic view of business that is based on the industrial age production line. This type of limited process perspective is woefully inadequate to understand the complexities of value in the knowledge economy. Further, most approaches to analyzing business relationships have not taken into account the role of knowledge and intangible value exchange as the real foundation for value creation.
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What makes something a truly living system?
There are two additional criteria that must be met:
1. The pattern of organization in a living system is consistent with that of an autopoietic network. An autopoietic network is one that continually produces itself, so that the being and doing are inseparable. That continual process of producing is cognitive in nature. So living systems exhibit intelligence.
2. Living systems are also dissipative structures that are open to the flow of energy and matter. They exist on the edge of chaos. With too much openness, they disintegrate; with too little they become rigid and closed and can no longer exchange energy and matter.
So, modeling business and enterprise from a living systems perspective requires being able to
a) Identify its pattern of organization as an organization
b) Describe its structure
c) Discover its most critical processes or exchanges from both a cognitive perspective and the flow of energy and matter.
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Intangibles are at the heart of all human activity, especially socio-economic activity.
A number of intangible accounting approaches have been proposed to explain, measure, and manage intangible assets. Intangibles, like other assets, are increased and leveraged through deliberate actions.
Among these efforts, one finds the intellectual capital methods of Karl-Erik Sveiby , Leif Edvinsson , Johan and Goran Roos , Annie Brooking , Pat Sullivan.
Related work from the U.S. is the Balanced Scorecard approach of Norton and Kaplan.
There are also a number of other experiments such as Kanavsky and Housel’s