Kathy Harris

In this economic downturn, organizations have lost much of the value of their intangible assets and many have sacrificed intrinsic workplace capabilities. Among the diminished capabilities are those focused on enabling productivity, innovativeness, collaboration and knowledge management. Organizations have worked long and hard to foster these competencies only to surrender the  supporting resources to the economic downturn. 

To be fair, organizations must decide what to stop doing in recessionary times. And, while most people acknowledge these capabilities are valuable, few organizations have formal processes to assess their value or articulate how it contributes to the business. When management cannot connect the capabilities directly to business deliverables, projects are stopped, people are displaced and value is lost.   

As we struggle through the recession, someone must take care not to lose sight of these capabilities. In fact, organizations will need them even more when the economy improves and business begins to accelerate. If you’re an advocate of or responsible for innovation, KM or collaboration, you can do things now to prepare for an upturn. Start simply by making intangible value visible in the business case for every project or program:

• Adopt the proposition that the full value generated by any initiative goes beyond the financial return on investment to include intangible value. Talk it up in your team and with your management — make this a part of the business case discussion.
• Build a simple process to identify key intangibles such as knowledge created, productivity improvement or capacity released. Assign a future value to these capabilities along with the tangible and financial value.
• Include both value classes in the formal business case. Just get used to quantifying the value of both.
• Deliberately track, measure and manage the full returns on your investments – if you’re not getting the expected returns on intangibles, manage this as you would any business case component.

Once you include these intangibles in your business case and make them visible, decision-makers will begin to notice and expect this full information. And, as you improve your skills at identifying and assigning value, the better the business case will become from every perspective.