Posted by sogo Bolumole on September 05, 1999 at 18:18:48:

In Reply to: Re: What's the goal in Intellectual Capital Measurement? posted by Kees de Vos on September 05, 1999 at 07:09:16:

1. isn't stockprize itself an nice indicator of the value of your company?

It is, if your only interest is how the stock market values company. If you are interested in the value of your company from an internal point of view, then the stock price will not be enough. Take FreeServe for example (A UK ISP that just went public), the stock market valued it at about £2.5 billion. Are we to belive that freeserve has the necessary knowhow to deserve such a valuation or is the valuation a result of the fact that freeserve is the first ISP that went public in the UK, a situation further influenced by similar cases in the states

2. ONLY what gets measured gets done. Deciding to measure one thing implies not measuring another.

Says who? Can't management base their decision on the results of more than one measurement program? I hope they can.

3. in my opinion measuring knowledge will be highly subjective. Measurement as an instrument needs objectivity and needs to be repeatable...

At first, subjectivity will be inevitable, but over time and with the aquisition of new insight into how a measurement system works, modifications can be made to improve it. I'm sure the current accounting methods went through the same phase.

4 ...perhaps context is changing to fast to get stable and therefore effective measurements; e.g. what is the value of COBOL programming at present and how will the passing of Jan 1st 2000 influence its value (as Cobol is widely used in repairing Y2K issues)?

Maybe. But, you are still looking at this from a Dollars and cents point of view. Maybe it is enough to know that we have people skilled in cobol programming on staff rather than assigning a value it.

So will IC measurement deliver better management information to management? Or will it provide numbers to be influenced by management decisions that are targeted at changing THE MEASUREMENTS, not THE OBJECT MEASURED?

Hopefully, it will give management a better understanding of the abilities of their workforce which will inturm enable them to structure their strtegic objectives to suit this work force or vice versa (structure work force to suit objectives)

Regards
Sogo

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• Re: What's the goal in Intellectual Capital Measurement? Kees de Vos 18:33:32 9/06/99 (0)

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