Late one afternoon you receive a call from the receptionist, asking you to come downstairs to deal with a security problem. You were enjoying a farewell party for one of your colleagues who held a senior position at the company for as long as you have been alive and you are rather annoyed by the interruption.
You stomp down to reception to find that security has apprehended one of your staff who had been trying to leave the company with a laptop that didn`t belong to him. You call the police and set the legal system in motion. But while you are waiting for the police to arrive, the colleague who has resigned passes through reception, says goodbye, and leaves. Does the thought even cross your mind that the man who has just left is taking a more valuable asset than a laptop out of the company with him?
Tracking knowledge assets
Knowledge and experience are as important to organisations as their chairs, tables, or computers and should be treated as vital company assets.
If properly managed, knowledge is captured and stored in an organisation`s database so that when employees leave they don`t take all their knowledge with them.
Organisations do a good job tracking their physical assets because they are what we can "see". The problem is a company`s blindside, the infrastructure that can`t be seen, such as voice assets and data assets.
If the employee trying to steal that laptop had succeeded, the organisation would most likely have had an asset register that indicated exactly what make and model it was, how much it cost, and who it had been allocated to. Some companies may have even been able to say how long that laptop had been in the company for, and how much had been spent on its maintenance.
How many organisations would have a register of the data that was on that specific machine?
If your chair goes missing, you notice immediately. If 10 e-mails mysteriously vanish, how long does it take you to notice?
What is our immediate concern when a laptop is stolen? Our first thoughts turn to the data that has been lost and the hours of work that have suddenly disappeared, not the physical loss.
Organisations need to start realising the value of both their physical and invisible assets.
An asset is defined in a number of ways. The search engine Google defines an asset as anything owned by a business or individual that has commercial or exchange value.
The online dictionary, Dictionary.com, defines an asset even more appropriately: a useful or valuable quality, person, or thing; an advantage or resource.
Knowledge and data are valuable; they can be exchanged for money, and they are definitely a resource and provide an organisation with advantage over competitors.
Appointing a data champion
If organisations don`t treat data as the valuable asset it is, they could be faced with huge intellectual property losses that could extend into financial losses.
Julian Field, MD, Centerfield Software
What does an organisation do if it wants to start treating data as an asset? One of the first things would be to appoint someone as a data asset manager. This person must be the champion for data. He must assess the severity of the situation within the company and put the necessary policies and procedures in place to ensure data is being treated with the respect it needs.
He must place an emphasis on metadata to ensure it is consistently generated and appropriately stored.
Metadata is the information about information. Take a can of beans, for example. The label on that can tells you what the can contains, what the various ingredients are, the nutritional value, the weight, the price. In the same way, metadata describes the data it is associated with. The metadata could describe the data as a transaction that took place on this day, between these parties, in this location.
If organisations don`t treat data as the valuable asset it is, they could be faced with huge intellectual property losses that could extend into financial losses. If data is disappearing from your company, there could be malicious intent that must be investigated. What happens if the data is being stolen and given to your competitors, and you don`t even know it`s gone? What happens if missing data results in bad business decisions?
By better understanding your assets, both physical and invisible, you create the opportunity to add value to your company by reducing operational costs and maximising support for revenue streams.
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