Without renewed and sustained goals, a human network will disintegrate. Only people who think for themselves can internalize goals and act to benefit a larger shared purpose without coercion or detailed policies. In both people and technology networks, the nodes have an independence and autonomy of action separate from their cooperation as part of a successful network. Nodes are people and devices. Links are relationships and wires.
Purposes are goals and applications.
For a technology company, network language provides a way to leverage technical knowledge to bridge the gap to organizational understanding. For their customers, and for themselves as companies of people, network language provides a new way to look at the organization, one that supplements traditional hierarchical and bureaucratic views. Seeing an organization as distributed work processes and networks of people provides a natural configuration template for technology networks, and a challenge to the need for fundamental technology flexibility in adapting to changing people patterns. The network is a powerful conceptual model, a tool for thinking about technology and people issues. This provides a mental model for grasping the distributed complexities of organizations of all sizes, just as a tree diagram serves as a mental model for authority structures of all sizes.