How can we use IT to optimize our Intellectual Capital?

I received a call the other day from the administrator of a good-sized Sharepoint implementation. He had actually fielded a number of requests from managers in his organization about how to use IT to optimize IC.

Wow. I love questions like that, especially since I have had a category on this blog since last year called IT=IC. They were thinking in terms of knowledge management. I think that’s a great place to start but doesn’t get to the most exciting part. That’s because knowledge in itself is not that big a deal.

Sure, I know that we live in the knowledge era and knowledge is key to competitive advantage. But knowledge on its own is more than just a commodity–a lot of it is free. So, collecting knowledge for its own sake is not that valuable.

The real value comes when it is captured and operationalized in re-usable form. Think training content or work processes. Even better is when these processes are automated. Then knowledge becomes re-usable and almost infinitely scalable.

That’s where IT comes in. Information technology is the “steam engine” of the knowledge era. It’s the technology that changes everything. To a huge extent, however, it is still viewed as isolated tools that we use because we have to.

But IT has the potential to create infinite value by helping you capture and operationalize knowledge. This is what is meant in intellectual capital vocabulary as stuctural capital. Structural capital is the most valuable kind of intangible and it is the part of intangibles management that businesspeople find the most challenging. For more thoughts on this read The Weakest Link in Corporate IAM.