While value is often expressed in monetary terms, there are many other sources of value for individuals as well as for organizations. This implies that there are many other forms of power too, which is one of the reasons to look at this.
Individuals do not just have economic needs, they also have emotional needs. They don’t just want to support themselves and their families financially, they also want to belong to a group, act ethically, and be recognized as independent individuals.
You can see this, for example, in the tremendous amount of time many people spend on social media (which, these days, are facilitated by digital infrastructures). Time spent on social media often does not bring monetary value, but is felt to be essential for staying connected to other people.
Non-monetary value is not only important to users but also to creators of digital infrastructures.
IT practitioners are among many professionals that can have more loyalty to their profession than to their employer. The value that this brings to them is a sense of belonging, meaningfulness and self development, and is sometimes achieved at great personal monetary cost.
An internet company I once worked for was later going bankrupt (I don’t think it was because of me). Even in its final days, when they were no longer being paid, the network engineers kept the service operational, probably out of deeply felt loyalty to their profession.
The prisoner’s dilemma, discussed in another unit, is a game model where autonomy (freedom) is explicitly identified as a positive outcome.
Company values
Companies also value more than just money, whether they are for-profit or not. Companies, societies, communities, have an identity that is often strongly guarded.
Research suggests that, given a choice, companies would rather keep autonomy over most of their activities than save money by outsourcing them to shared service centers.
This may explain why mergers often become traumatic experiences for organizations and their staff. It feels like giving up a core part of identity.
I have worked in many organizations that show clear signs of mergers that happened a long time ago. Scars would sometimes be an appropriate metaphor. People there would still be identified through the ’tribe’ that they originated from. In one case people who joined the organization after the merger were called ‘volunteers’, as opposed to the older ones that were ‘drafted’.
Another example I encountered in my career as a cloud security instructor is cloud resistance originating from the feeling of loss of control. In retrospect, I suspect that a lot of the initial appeal of my cloud security training programs was that people wanted to learn about good reasons to not go to cloud.
Value leads to power structures
Now, what does this have to do with power?
I consider anything that influences people (or organizations for that matter) as a potential source of power, independent of who is exercising that power. As people (and organizations) let themselves be guided by what they value, it follows that these sources of value are also a source of power. You should therefore be looking, not just at hierarchical control and money for influencing behavior, but also at these other sources of value. Aligning these intrinsic values may well be more effective.
Let’s pick an example that is relevant for our discussion of digital technology and infrastructures: professionalism.
Creating and managing digital infrastructures requires a great deal of technical, professional skill. Many professionals have their identities and sense of belonging strongly tied to these skills. They also understand that they need to develop and maintain these skills to remain employable.
Rather than treating professionals as dispensable resources, organizations would do better to acknowledge and encourage professional behavior. Too often to my taste, IT professionals are viewed as ’nerds’ stuck in their own world, which echoes sentiments about scientists stuck in their ivory towers. This view reflects in seeing these people’s presence as a necessary evil.
Instead, true professional behavior involves engineering the best solution to achieve an organization’s goals, not tinkering with technology to show off to fellow nerds.
But it is not up to the IT professionals alone to understand what those organizational goals are. It requires that the users of the technology see the IT professionals as partners instead of as commodity resources.
This book aims to be a guide to help bridge that gap, and that is why I frame all discussions on value, power, and risk in such a way that they are meaningful for both business and technical professionals.