Written by David Tebbutt in April 2004

Someone you've never heard of calls and says, "I hear you're an expert on divorce settlements." How the heck did they know you'd recently divorced? And how did they get your email address? Answer: a software tool which quietly sniffs your email, extracts what it considers to be useful knowledge and cites you as the source.

A seeker after information simply taps in their question and, along with the answers, comes a list of experts who may be willing to answer deeper questions. Whether this happens or not depends on a number of practical considerations and your organisational culture.

It's all part of the move towards effective management of Intellectual Capital (IC) within large organisations. In 1996, Touraj Nasseri explained the value of IC like this: "just imagine that your company is suddenly struck by a knowledge blight that erases all your corporate knowledge from the storage media including the employees' minds. The difference between the market values of the company before and after the blight struck is the value of the company's intellectual capital."

International accounting standards bodies have been wrestling for years to find precise ways of measuring IC. All anyone knows is that it represents about 78 percent of the value of the Fortune 500 companies. IC of all kinds - business processes, patents, IP, computer software, brainpower, competence, skills, databases, trademarks, brands, and so on - is at the heart of the economies of the developed world.

Whether or not they can attach a numerical value, organisations know they need to build their IC asset base so that it can be re-used, thereby exploiting its value. This means grabbing it from between peoples' ears as well as from more formal systems such as databases and document management systems.

For this to happen successfully, an organisational culture has to be created in which information is exchanged and shared rather than hoarded in employee's heads or departmental silos. As we saw with knowledge management, and expert systems before that, it's a tough call for people to give up their expertise and knowledge willingly.

A way round this is to use software which gathers tacit knowledge surreptitiously. It might sniff emails or watch what information people search for, and which links they follow. This kind of invisible monitoring helps enormously in placing a positive or negative value on information according to whether it is accepted or rejected. To a certain extent, it's what Google does.

Companies like Verity, which describes its products as intellectual capital management software, can provide all manner of underpinning tools for categorising, searching and delivering unstructured information. Without such software, companies wouldn't stand a chance of being able to sift through the ever-billowing volumes of information being produced.

Never forget, though, that these products are just the supporting act. A set of tools cannot make a company rich in IC. The direction and will still has to come from the organisation itself. It has to decide how important IC is and where it can deliver the best value to the company. In a pharmaceutical company it will be in the area of accelerating submissions. In a telco, it might be on improving customer loyalty.

But for an IC management programme to work, the stored information needs to be trusted. And that suggests that humans have to be involved in developing the rules by which it is selected, deciding on what information needs to be captured, classified and tagged and then monitoring the system to ensure that it's delivering the goods.

It seems to me that a certain profession - yours - is in an enviable position here. You are the skilled information professionals that can help organisations create and fine-tune their IC management systems. You could even persuade them that sniffing personal emails would be counterproductive and have zero strategic impact.