Throughout history companies have recognised that their employees are their greatest and most important asset, and successful companies have always invested in their employees both extensively and wisely. Driven by the recognition that in the employees there is an invaluable pool of experience, knowledge and skills, companies have sought to tap in to and benefit from every employee's full potential, and to turn it to corporate advantage.

But without the advanced tools that are only now becoming available thanks to advances and improvements in technology, real benefits have been hard to come by and even harder to identify. For example while companies have invested huge sums in learning in the workplace, which can best be viewed as knowledge and information sharing in a formal environment, studies have shown that learning in an informal environment can be up to three times as effective as in a formal environment. Yet until now companies have had difficulty encouraging such informal information sharing.

Thus it has been that in the past people within an organisation have connected by luck, often having to rely on serendipitous or chance meetings to share information in an informal environment. Indeed, it is no coincidence that modern companies often favour open-plan office space, since it is generally thought to encourage teamwork, collaboration, the communication of knowledge, and the serendipitous contact that is considered to be the basis of a company's most innovative and creative ideas.

But with modern technology it is finally possible to tap into the intellectual capital within the organisation, by encouraging and promoting information sharing amongst employees. And with this comes the recognition that employees anywhere in the company may have knowledge relevant to any initiative the company is engaged in, whether or not that initiative (or indeed that knowledge) is within their direct area of responsibility. It's a commonsense corporate policy, in which all employees are knowledge workers.

It may not always have been so, but today nobody disputes that a company's brand is more than just a tool of the marketing department, and is instead an important business asset in its own right. At BumperBrain we believe that there is an increasingly widespread recognition that corporate knowledge is similarly an important business asset in its own right, and that in the future the extent to which a company is able to benefit from that corporate knowledge will be an important measure of corporate performance.