Capturing Intellectual Capital in Metadata

Information Management Magazine, February 2007

Sid Adelman, Bonnie O'Neil

In the 1964 movie Doctor Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, the doomsday machine (a device that would cover the globe with a radioactive blanket, destroying all forms of life, which would be automatically activated if any nuclear device was detonated) was maligned as being ineffective if your opponent was unaware of its existence. So it is with intellectual capital and organizational knowledge. If this capital and knowledge is not made available to the rest of the organization, it's worthless.

Intellectual Capital

What is intellectual capital? Intellectual capital is:

• Organizational knowledge as well as industry knowledge,
• The ability to apply skills to complex situations,
• Cognitive knowledge through training and experience,
• The system understanding of cause and effects,
• Knowing how the business runs,
• Knowing how to avoid the minefields, and
• Knowledge of how to find information, who knows it and where to get it.

Power is not knowing all things yourself but knowing where to find the information. Thus, intellectual capital is an organizational asset along with inventory and accounts receivable. The accounting community will not let it be shown on a company's books, but it is sometimes part of the "goodwill" entry when a company is acquired.

Preserving Intellectual Capital

The problem today in many organizations is employee attrition; employees retire, resign, transfer to another department or take a job with the competition. Average employee turnover rate is 14.4 percent per year, according to the Bureau of National Affairs.¹ These employees have knowledge about their job, the business processes, the data that supports their job, how to make things happen, what works and what does not. Unfortunately, they have no means - or incentive - to share their knowledge. Their knowledge has not been captured; their knowledge has not been transferred or made available to others. This knowledge is lost to the organization.

New regulations, including Sarbanes-Oxley, require documentation of workflows and procedures. Security and privacy rules and concerns including HIPAA, Basel II and the ever-present legal exposures require knowledge of how the organization is run. Global organizations have an even more demanding requirement given differences in language, accents, culture, time zones and communication modes (phones, videoconferencing, email, conference calls and the absence of the water cooler discussions).

HR directors are very concerned with employee turnover. It costs a company one-third of a new hire's annual salary to replace an employee.² Therefore, HR directors have been tasked to preserve the intellectual capital of their organization, and corporate officers are bound to preserve the assets of the organization.

Intellectual capital is such an asset. The challenge is to capture and leverage the knowledge and to expose it to the rest of the organization by providing a knowledge base that is easily searched. The solution is to capture knowledge from key employees, to store and organize the knowledge and make it available to new hires or transfers (part of training), to existing employees and to employees in other departments.

Metadata

Intellectual capital can be captured in metadata, which would include business definitions, valid values (domains), business rules, data ownership, data sources, data genealogy (how did the data get here), security and privacy, and data timeliness. As intellectual capital goes beyond classical metadata, you will want to capture organizational history, stories of success and failures, postmortems, case studies and corporate culture. In this process, you will be expanding your notion of the types of information that can be captured in metadata. Intellectual capital can be captured in a data modeling tool, with user-defined parameters, definitions and notes with tools such as ERwin (CA), PowerDesigner (Sybase), ER/Studio (Embarcadero), Rational Rose (IBM) and Designer (Oracle). Intellectual capital could also be captured in a variety of metadata tools, including Metadata Manager (Informatica), MetaStage (IBM), Rochade, Advantage Repository (CA), Mega and Persistent.

The types of knowledge that would be relevant are data definitions; business processes; business rules; technical knowledge; culture of the organization; management styles; culture of the industry; history with customers, suppliers and partners; and how data flows through the organization. It includes how customer leads become sales, how the sales become orders, how orders generate invoices, how invoices are paid and how payments become revenue. In short, it is the information supply chain.

Capture Process

The capture process would include structured interviews specific to each department and specific to the types of knowledge the sponsoring manager would deem important. The results of the interviews would be validated for accuracy and usability. A capture mechanism would employ the capabilities of the data modeling tool or the metadata tool. The knowledge repository must be organized to make it useful and accessible. Employees accessing the knowledge base must be able to use a Google type of search using appropriate keywords. There is other enabling technology that can help with both capture and dissemination such as wikis, portals, threaded conversations and concept maps (c-maps).

Socialization of Knowledge

Knowledge builds off of other knowledge; it is cumulative. One thought or idea is built from preceding thoughts or ideas. The Internet and computing technology offer many vehicles for the socialization of knowledge: groupware and collaborative software, wikis, portals, threaded conversations, email lists, online chats, social networking, c-maps and mind maps.

Knowledge Encyclopedia

You can use a wiki as an online encyclopedia; it can be authored by anyone and everyone. Anyone can edit someone else's entry, allowing knowledge to evolve by using prior knowledge as a building block. People, therefore, have a sense of ownership because they are personally contributing to the corporate knowledge base.

There are dozens of wiki "flavors" to choose from. Some are open source, some offer hosting; some you host yourself. You can visit http://www.wikimatrix.org for a great comparison of all the major wikis; as of this writing, there are 75 wikis represented on this site. You can even run a wizard to choose which wiki is right for you.

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