by The Open University
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Modern business theory now views an organisation's intangible, rather than its tangible, assets as the reservoir of much of its value. Even a not-for-profit organisation requires information to be shared and protected for its mission to be accomplished. With this new perspective has come a re-evaluation of the methods to be used to protect the value of an organisation. Historically, four walls were all that was needed to demarcate the inside of an organisation from the outside; and four sturdy walls were all the protection necessary for complete safety. Today, it is those with whom the organisation shares information, and those from whom it keeps it secret, that determine organisational boundaries.
The existence of such organisational boundaries led Grant (1998) to the following observations concerning assets (in the most general sense):
assets should be shareable (i.e. available for use) within the organisation, or some part of it;
assets should be scarce (i.e. not available for use) outside the organisation.
You met these concepts in Subsection 2.2.
Grant goes on to assert that, in for-profit organisations, the combination of shareability and scarcity is the basis of competitive advantage. In not-for-profit organisations, shareability of information contributes to the discharge of the organisation's mission, and its scarcity is often required by law or by other codes.
We can elaborate Grant's argument. Any information asset has two regions associated with it. First, it has a shareability region that contains all the systems and people to which and to whom the information asset should be available. Second, it has a scarcity region, containing all other systems and people.
To maximise an information asset's utility (and thus its value) to an organisation, it should be available within its shareability region whenever needed: if such an asset is not available when some authorised person or system requests it, then this is a failure of shareability. You will have experienced such failures yourselves: not having access to your email when you need it, for example, or not being able to remember your password for some machine or system. In a wider context, an inaccessible customer or product database may have a serious impact on an organisation's ability to carry out its mission.
Moreover, for it to be useful to an organisation, an information asset should always be correct within its shareability region: if it becomes corrupted or damaged in some way it will be less useful, or even worthless. For example, you undoubtedly have had personal experience of word-processed documents that are unopenable, or can be accessed but have been corrupted in some way.
An information asset should either be unavailable in its scarcity region or, if needs dictate that it must be available, it should be damaged or disabled in some way to remove its value as far as the organisation that owns it is concerned. Examples of information that has to be released into its scarcity region are easy to find in the commercial world, especially on the internet. Demoware, for instance, is commercial software that has had some important function disabled, so that it can be freely distributed for demonstration purposes while ensuring that anyone who finds it useful has to pay a licence fee for the complete version.
(a) Identify one information asset that is valuable to your organisation. Explain why you feel it to be valuable.
(b) Is the information asset you have chosen shareable? Is it scarce? Draw a diagram showing the shareability and scarcity regions in which you would place yourself, your organisation, your contacts, and other elements of your organisation's environment, with respect to this asset.
(c) Consider the diagram you have drawn. Do the shareability and scarcity regions overlap? Does the shareability region correspond to any recognisable unit of activity in your organisation?
(d) How much control does an organisation have over the shareability and scarcity regions of its information assets?
To identify a valuable information asset for your organisation, you could start from your organisation's mission and consider which information assets contribute most to it.
To determine the asset's shareability and scarcity, consider whether it is commercially sensitive and/or covered by legislation, codes of practice, etc.
(a) The Open University's mission includes using the most effective technologies for learning, teaching and assessment. It gains its competitive advantage (within the university sector) in this regard through its model of teaching at a distance, which is partly based on tutor-marked assignments, or TMAs. Tutor Notes are marking schemes that guide tutors in how to mark TMAs accurately and consistently, and so are important information assets for the OU.
(b) Tutor Notes need to be shareable between the course team (who prepare them), the external examiner (who assesses them) and the tutors (who mark from them). They also have to be edited and printed, so other OU employees and systems will require access to them too. But, for obvious reasons, Tutor Notes must be scarce outside this region: they should not be available to students or appear on any system outside the OU in a recognisable or understandable form.
Figure 1 The shareability and scarcity regions for the Tutor Notes for an OU courseLong description
(c) The regions should not overlap, or else any system or person in the intersection could potentially act as a channel along which the information asset could flow into its scarcity region. In the case of the shareability region for the Tutor Notes, however, there is a potential overlap if an OU employee who would normally have access to Tutor Notes is also an OU student; this is overcome by strict regulations stipulating that the shareability region for a course's Tutor Notes explicitly excludes members of staff who are studying that course.
The shareability region for Tutor Notes does not correspond to a recognisable unit of activity in the OU. In many cases, however, the shareability region does correspond to a recognisable unit of activity within an organisation.
(d) An organisation needs to have control over the whole of the shareability region of each information asset. In theory, those parts of a shareability region that comprise the organisation's systems and personnel ought automatically to be under the organisation's control. If parts of a shareability region extend beyond the organisation, control will be harder to exert.
An organisation is likely to have little or no control over the scarcity region of an information asset. The wider world is a wild and ungovernable place!
Original Copyright © 2007 The Open University. Now made available within the Creative Commons framework under the CC Attribution – Non-commercial licence (see http://creativecommons.org/by-nc-sa/2.0/uk/).
