Learning to manage your company's intellectual property over time will enable its every-day business data to be transformed into valuable "business knowledge."

Ideally, virtually everything that a business "knows" should be reflected within the documents that embody that knowledge. Paper documents remain the most popular medium used to communicate an enterprise's collective knowledge.

The advent of electronic documents has given us the ability to generate more complex documents faster and easier than ever before. Unfortunately, this same document explosion has created a document management problem for most organizations. Such documents can constitute the most valuable of intellectual property assets, but only if those documents can be accessed by the staff, business partners, or customers that need it most.

A company's skillful management of its own intellectual property over time can provide a greater understanding of its existing systems and processes. This understanding can often inspire existing personnel to develop creative strategies for generating new revenue streams out of existing resources.