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experience and skills that propel the organisation into its highest level of
proficiency and efficiency. Tacit Knowledge is normally controlled and
owned by the employees in the organisation. Traditionally, an
organisation responds by predicting and reacting using pre-programmed
heuristics measures. Today, the organisation demands from employees
to be proactive and respond to the faster cycle of knowledge-creation.
The intellectual capital can consist of three different areas:
Human capital consists of skills, experiences and expertise of the
people in the organisation. Human capital is embedded in the
organisation as tacit, complex, not articulated and not documented. It is
difficult to capture or document this knowledge in a simple and
articulated format. It is important for an organisation to realise the
importance of human capital and make an effort to capture and maintain
this type of knowledge within the organisation. Encouraging knowledge
sharing and knowledge transfer between people within the organisation
is one of the methods that can be effectively employed to manage human
capital. Encouraging staff to participate in seminars, workshops,
continuous education is another way of enhancing the human capital
within the organisation
Customer capital consists of business transactions, customer
satisfaction and relations. Customer capital is relatively easier to
capture as opposed to human capital. Some performance indices can be
used to measure the customer capital, such as repeat business
transactions, market dominance due to market strategy, customer
feedback and so on. In order to capture customer capital, it is a pre-
requisite to have a comprehensive database to capture the business
transactions. Some IT applications such as data warehousing and data
mining are used to generate these performance indices or customer
capital.
Structural capital consists of manuals, databases, procedures, and
company culture and practices. They are the technologies,
methodologies and processes that enable an organisation to function. For
example, a company may have a comprehensive information system that
uses many computer-based applications such as financial system and
material management system, etc. These applications are running on a
computer system and information is transmitted over a network
infrastructure.
Intellectual capital unlike tangible assets does not appear in the
balance sheet of the organisation. However, it is an element in the