Asset management

Any and all organisations have assets. They range widely from the obvious and tangible assets such as buildings or collections to the more intangible or ephemeral assets, such as your brand and the goodwill your customers have towards the organisation; the creative works or other products or services that you have developed — with the intellectual property rights that underlie these. Collections of content and / or data can often be regarded as or turned into assets.

“An asset is an asset for as long as it is being actively used or there is a decent chance that it will have an active role to play in generating economic benefit to your organisation in the future.”

While your team and their know-how on their own aren’t in themselves intangible assets, their power to enable you to use or otherwise exploit your intangibles is necessary for those intangibles to be regarded as assets — or the knowledge can be documented and captured, and this on its own represents an asset.

In fact, the riveting read which is the International Accounting Standard no 38 says an asset of an organisation is any identifiable thing which will probably generate economic benefits for that organisation, which either results from legal rights (under a contract or through the law, like intellectual property) or which can be separated off from your organisation. You also need to be able to accurately measure the cost of its creation.

So under that wide definition, as a creatively-driven organisation you are creating new assets every year and in each programme or body of work.

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Asset management