What Does It Mean for an Organisation to Be Intelligent? Measuring Intellectual Bandwidth for Value Creation

The importance of electronic collaboration has risen as successful organisations recognize that they need to convert their intellectual resources into goods and services their customers will value. The shift from personal computing to interpersonal or collaborative computing has given rise to ways of working that may bring about better and more effective use of intellectual resources. Current efforts in managing knowledge have concentrated on producing, sharing and storing knowledge while business problems require the use of these intellectual resources to create value. This paper draws upon Nunamaker et al.’s [18] Intellectual Bandwidth Model to measure an organization’s potential to create value. Following an analysis of initial data collected at the Netherlands branch of Galaxy Corporation, conclusions are drawn with respect to what it means for an organisation to be intelligent and how such organisations can create value through the use of information and electronic collaboration technologies to increase its intellectual bandwidth. For modern organisations, knowledge is increasingly being seen as a strategic resource that needs to be created and harnessed effectively in order for the organisation to survive and achieve competitive advantage. It is believed that managing this strategic resource can enable an organisation to achieve particular benefits such as minimization of costs, innovation of products, product development procedures, improved quality, flexibility in a dynamic market and improved customer service. For organisations to be successful, they must be capable of continuously acquiring, assimilating, disseminating, sharing and using knowledge [14,22]. Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) target professional