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It's 9:00 AM. Do you know where your company's assets are?
If the assets in question are cash, investments, receivables, inventories, or equipment, chances are that you do. But if your company has amassed a pool of intellectual assets--knowledge, resources, media, copyrights, or the like--chances are good that each and every day some of them are expiring unused.
No CEO would enjoy being grilled at the annual shareholder's meeting for allowing valuable assets to expire. But every CEO (and each of a company's officers) is generally entrusted with responsible stewardship of the company resources--tangible or otherwise--at his or her command. And many are missing the mark when it comes to commercially exploiting that company's intellectual assets.
As knowledge management strategists and developers of e-learning solutions, TechEmpower, Inc. has encountered some pretty amazing pools of hidden, inaccessible or otherwise underutilized resources. Perhaps the most pervasive example across a wide array of industries is the easily overlooked asset known as "knowledge capital." Consider the costly, ongoing reinvention of basic business and industry knowledge by battalions of engagement managers in the world's largest management consultancies. Or the 1-to-1, customer-specific knowledge of relationship managers, account executives and consultative salespeople. In each case, a company's valuable but uncapped knowledge capital recedes each evening and generally returns each morning, until departing one last time to accept new employment.
But it is in its role as information technology strategists and developers of custom business and Web applications that TechEmpower, Inc. has found some of the richest veins of inaccessible or untapped value--intellectual assets in forms such as patents, license rights, copyrights, digital and analog media creative treatments, customer data, professional briefs, product specifications, inventions, research findings and data stores.
In a recent project, TechEmpower created a digital media infrastructure to house and manage three-quarters of a million copyrighted works found languishing deep in the archives of a major entertainment company. The new system stores all of the these assets in a digital library. It acts as a mini-customer relationship management (CRM) system to capture and process inquiries, and ultimately to ship product out the door on a variety of media. As a result, the company has been able to activate large portions of its libraries that were completely unknown, streamline business processes, and reach new audiences through the Web--creating nothing short of "found money" for the company and its shareholders.
In another effort, the company created an online resource to digitally store, search, and serve high-resolution images of fine art from several major universities and museums, together with information regarding each work. It's exciting to be able taccessss beautiful works of art (in such fine resolution) from an aesthetically appealing site. But to the client, the heightened accessibility of these works--enabled by custom software and database engines that comprise the backbone of this Web application--is the principle benefit that was sought and was successfully achieved.
Unlocking hidden assets or capturing previously unrecorded knowledge capital is a value proposition with staying power. But value is not created just by recordinformationtion in a repository. Value is derived from an asset when it can be activated, managed, and monetized--at a cost that is less than the benefits it provides. Beyond pure asset management, this calls for process integration and workflow with the goal of reducing friction in the delivery of those assets. Now there's a software or Web application that makes good economic sense.
As long as a company's intellectual assets are somewhere within its reach (or in its employ), is there really any urgency to automate them?
The urgency is great. That's because intellectual assets have a distinct tendency to decline over time. With the odd exception, the value of most unused intellectual capital simply expires or evaporates into thin air, never to be seen again. With each coming month and year, memories fade, technology shifts, trends reverse, creative tastes change, employees move on. The result? Lost value.
And that brings us back to the question of stewardship. What are you doing to sustain the utility and maximize the value of your company's hidden assets?
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