The CIO has a great article entitled "Taking A Systems View" on Intangible Management, written by Sue Bushell.

Some excerpts below but read it yourself; time well spent. I also encourage people to sign-up for the global cost to value taskforce as passive listeners or active participants if the topic of intangible management interests you.

"Talk about perverse consequences. BP sets out to slash 25 percent of its fixed costs and ends up killing 15 workers and injuring 180 others, in the worst industrial accident in the US in 15 years. Instead of counting its savings it finds itself having to sink $US1.6 billion into a legal defence fund, facing a congressional investigation and with some of its officers exposed to potential criminal sanctions."

"General Motors reviews the real impact of its IT cost-cutting initiatives, only to discover that all of its efforts have amounted to much ado about virtually nothing. CTO Tony Scott tells a CIO summit that not only had almost no money been saved, the effort had provoked perverse consequences that proved painfully expensive."

"Traditional business analysis, with its preoccupation with breaking everything down into its component parts and then studying the parts, is useful when dealing with machines," Parsons wrote in a 2000 paper called "Productivity Measurement in the Service Sector". "In the early days of the industrial age it was possibly convenient to adopt such an approach, but such thinking will mislead, often dangerously, when applied to today's complex conditions of existence."

"By December 11, 2007, he is confident the Global Cost to Value Taskforce (see "Going Global", page 48) will provide an agreed and tested method to let managers and executives quickly and easily financially estimate intangible benefits and value to create new ways to increase productivity, reduce costs and risks, and boost service, engagement, retention, profitability and shareholder value."

"One of the very interesting things is that productivity today is caused, from the Standards Institute perspective, by intangibles, and when we look at intangibles we're looking at activities to do with knowledge, collaboration and leverage," Standfield says. "So if we look at an organization and just basically say: 'Well, this particular organization has a certain number of staff; they're doing certain activities throughout the day, all of which can be broken up into those three different categories', basically we get a time fingerprint of the organization. Now from there what we do through the more than 40 international intangibles standards is to assess that fingerprint."

More to come on the taskforce and pilot-projects. As always, feel free to get in touch with us directly for discussions.