So says Mary Adams, author of the new book Intangible Capital: Putting Knowledge to Work in the 21st Century in a post entitled How can we use IT to optimize our Intellectual Capital?  We all live and work in the knowledge era, and we all know knowledge is where competitive advantage lies.  But it is the “operationalization” of knowledge that is the real key to success:

The real value comes when it is captured and operationalized in re-usable form.  Think training content or work processes.  Even better is when these processes are automated.  Then knowledge becomes re-usable and almost infinitely scalable.

That’s where IT comes in.  Information technology is the “steam engine” of the knowledge era.  It’s the technology that changes everything.  To a huge extent, however, it is still viewed as isolated tools that we use because we have to.

But IT has the potential to create infinite value by helping you capture and operationalize knowledge.

Hellooo, BI people of the world!