Every company has at least one: the experienced manager we all like to go to for advice and decisions. He knows it all, because he’s seen it all. He listens, thinks… and gives us the wisest course of action. It looks like magic – or, if not magic, at least an amazing and inexplicable insight into situations and people.

In fact, the wise manager is using rules. From his experience, he has learned that if this happens, that will probably follow. Multiply this simple pattern by dozens or even hundreds of rules in multiple situations, and it all happens so fast in his brain that he isn’t even aware that he those rules operating.

The rules are trapped in his head, as tacit knowledge. He couldn’t explain how he makes those decisions – so he can’t pass on that knowledge to another manager.

And yet, that knowledge is part of the the capital of your company. We recognise that information is an asset. You know that your data, your special processes, your innovative ideas are part of the intellectual capital of your company, creating value that’s potentially negotiable.

You might not have considered that the rules your experienced managers use — largely unconsciously — to make their wise decisions are equally able to increase the value of your company.

The challenge is to get those rules out of the tacit knowledge base of the employee and into a more broadly usable form.

That’s where rules-based systems come in. Software can be designed that uses a centralized database and the rules your internal experts have developed through their years of experience to automate decision making. This software doesn’t replace your experts, of course, but it makes routine decisions on the basis of rules honed over years of real-world experience. It integrates these rules with the other systems you use to get your business done, and with the data you’ve collected, to create a seamless system.

In effect, you take the knowledge base of your internal experts and put it into the company as a whole via software. This is a specialty of ours at Clevertech. We assist your experts in bringing that tacit knowledge to conscious awareness, analyze and synthesize the information to identify the rules being used, examine how data is used in your company, and distill all this into custom software applications.

The practical benefits of creating these custom applications for your company are legion. You free up your experts for new ventures, limit repetition, speed up processes that rely on decision making, increase the number of people who can participate in the decision making process, eliminate human bias and inconsistency, standardize systems, protect data, and reduce interruptions in workflow.

But in a day when 45 to 75 percent of your company’s value may lie in intellectual property, reframing systematic decision making as a part of your company’s capital rather than a mysterious gift of the office savant also creates a direct increase in the value of your company. The ROI can be significant.

Contact us to discuss what this means for your company.

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