Tony Wall
王力宏牛津大学演讲稿
THE MEASUREMENT AND MANAGEMENT OF INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR: TAKING THE LEAD OR WAITING FOR DIRECTION? Abstract
This paper compares and contrasts the stage of development reached by the public and private ctors with regard to intellectual capital. Whereas the private ctor in many parts of the developing world has still not fully embraced the importance of measuring intangible asts, the public ctor, with its different objectives, has always had to focus on non-financial results. This has become more critical in recent years due to successive government initiatives that have required the u and disclosure of a number of prescribed performance indicators. Having briefly outlined the history of both intellectual capital and the culture of performance measurement this paper analys the results of a survey of public ctor organisations in Northern Ireland to asss how they are dealing with both the measurement and management of intellectual capital asts.
cancel的意思
Keywords
济南化妆培训Intellectual capital, government initiatives, performance measurement, performance management, intellectual capital management
INTRODUCTION
Since the 1970s there has been a major change in attitude amongst private ctor organisations as to what constitutes a revenue-generating ast. As the world has moved from an industrial age into an information age there has been an incread emphasis on the measurement and management of more intangible asts, such as knowledge, skill and customer relationships. Whilst there has been a widespread recognition of this phenomenon, accountants have struggled to find an acceptable framework by which to both measure and manage the intangible asts, collectively known as intellectual capital (IC). As a conquence of a lack of both direction from national regulatory bodies and a universally acceptable framework, the approach to IC in the private ctor has been fairly piecemeal. The only widely adopted practice has been the u of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC), which although now generally listed under the banner of IC measurement frameworks, was not originally created for this purpo.
bobsonThe picture in the public ctor is very different and it could be claimed that to organisations operating in this ctor the measurement of intangibles is nothing new. The major reforms of the public ctor initiated by successive Conrvative governments between 1979 and 1997 and that have continued under Labour since they took power have placed a major emphasis on performance
measurement and the achievement of predetermined targets. Therefore the annual reports of most public ctor organisations will disclo a number of measures of performance within what are regarded as the three main categories of IC – human, customer and organisational. However, although public ctor organisations might be more familiar with measuring IC asts, as is the ca with their private ctor counterparts there is little evidence of
an overall strategy to manage all aspects of IC. Moreover, although there is a similar widespread u of BSC, the practices of pioneering IC organisations, for example Skandia, Celemi, Ericsson and Ramboll – all Scandinavian companies, are not generally followed. Therefore although the public ctor would appear to be better when it comes to measurement and disclosure they are emingly no further forward when it comes to the overall management of IC asts.
pleasure的用法This paper investigates the phenomenon of IC in the public ctor by using a survey instrument to gather information about the IC practices of leading Northern Ireland (NI) public ctor organisations. The paper will ek to ascertain whether the widespread disclosure of IC asts (e Wall and Martin 2003) is backed up by their measurement and also if this is mainly as a result of adhering to a prescribed regime. It will also investigate if there is an overall management strategy that eks to co-ordinate the asts and u them to their optimum values.
the fray
INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR
Since the beginning of the 1990s there has been an increasing emphasis on the importance of intangible asts, often referred to as IC, by organisations operating in the private ctor. This has come about due to changes in the global economy such as easier access to the capital markets, improved telecommunications and rapid advances in technology. Although it is difficult to pinpoint exactly when the new economy or information age began, since the 1970s there has been a definite shift into a post-industrial era. Economies are no longer dominated by industrial machinery and are more concerned with exploiting the information technology (IT) available to ensure that business entities retain a competitive edge over their rivals. This has been
branch
struggle onparticularly evident in the United Kingdom (UK) where there has been a steady decline in the number of workers engaged in traditional industries such as shipbuilding and mining and a huge increa in tho working in rvice industries such as banking and telecommunications. The modern organisation operates using three types of capital: physical (plant and equipment), financial (cash and investments) and intellectual, with the latter continuing to grow rapidly in importance. According to May (1997: 91) ‘the old world was obsd with counting stuff – nuclear warheads, battleships, armoured divisions, military personnel, durable goods, purchas and machine tool orde
sptrs. The networked economy is driven not by what you can count, but on what you know. The traditional reliance on hard asts has been replaced with a new premium on soft ones’. Therefore the hard asts, i.e. tho that tend to appear on balance sheets, such as plant and machinery are now deemed to be less important than asts such as employee and customer satisfaction, distribution networks, ideas generated by employees and corporate culture. Decker, Herz and Keegan (2002: 36) state that ‘the historical balance sheet only captures, on average, about 20 per cent of the market value of companies today’ with the remaining 80 per cent made up of ‘intangible asts, non financial value drivers’ and the difference between the ‘historical cost and market value of the asts recorded’.
IC is generally identified (Dzinkowski 2000, Atrill 1998, Lynn 1998) as being made up of elements that fall into three categories: human capital, customer (or relational) capital and organisational (or structural) capital. The elements of all three categories interact and thereby add value to the organisation. Examples of the elements are: human – skills, abilities, knowledge; customer – customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, supplier relationships; and organisational – culture, intellectual property,
manufacturing process. Human capital is the primary source for organisational innovation and ren
ewal (Agor 1997:175) and is thus the category that will distinguish one organisation from the other, with key elements such as customer perception or corporate culture all being dependant on the qualities of the workforce. One of the earliest writers on this subject was Stewart (1994: 68) who highlighted the importance of the asts and also acknowledged ‘the difficulty of measuring and managing the chief ingredient of the new economy: IC, the intangible asts of skill, knowledge and information’.
With regard to accounting there are two major issues surrounding IC. The first is the external issue or the reporting of an organisation’s IC asts. Although failure to report such asts can mean that shareholders are not getting the full picture and are not aware of all the elements contributing to the overall market value of the company, the main argument against including them is that as no universally acceptable method of measuring the asts has been agreed upon they could be appearing on balance sheets at randomly lected valuations, thereby distorting the picture to the shareholder. There is also the competitive factor, whereby organisations do not want to disclo their IC in annual reports, ‘fearing they would give away competitive crets or attract litigation from disgruntled investors’ (Stewart 1994: 74). The recently launched operating and financial review (OFR), whereby companies will have to include an account in their annual reports of how intangible
asts contribute to overall value (Starovic and Marr 2003:24), will only partly solve this problem as the guidelines are fairly loo and thus subject to individual interpretation. The cond is the internal issue, the measurement and management of IC asts, which involves the classification and identification of the softer asts as well as the creation or
adoption of some method to measure them so that they are ud to their optimum levels of efficiency, thereby adding value to the organisation.
Although veral attempts have been made to create a universally acceptable framework by which to manage and measure IC asts, one proposal in particular has gained broad approval, this being BSC, which was created by Kaplan and Norton in 1992 and. ‘provides for the control of intangibles while simultaneously monitoring financial results.’ (Brennan and O’Connell 2000: 220). Since that time BSC has evolved from focusing primarily on strategy implementation and being a communication, informing and learning system to being recognid as a model for many of the IC reporting systems. Although BSC is not without its critics (Adams 2001, Bontis, Dragonetti, Jacobn and Roos 1999, Nørreklit 2000) it has been widely accepted throughout the world and is ud by both public and private ctor organisations. Despite this extensive usage of BSC and the general recognition that intangible asts will continue to have an increasing importance in the gaining of co
mpetitive advantage, work in the area of IC has been fairly limited. There has been a lot of pioneering work conducted in Sweden and Denmark and to a lesr degree in the United States of America (USA), Canada, Australia and Japan, but elwhere organisations have adapted a ‘wait and e’ approach and the end of the economic boom of the 1990s has merely refocud attention on financial as oppod to intangible outcomes. Although organisations would tend to measure some elements connected with IC, such as staff and customer satisfaction, surveys have shown that this tends to take place in isolation and there is generally no overall strategy. Surveys of note have been conducted in the UK (e Chong, Holden, Wilhelmij and Schmidt 2000) USA (e Bassi and Van Buren 1999 and Usoff, Thibodeau and Burnaby 2000)nothing compares 2 u
