The Relative Importance of Aspects of Intellectual Capital for Software Companies

Intellectual capital (IC) is both the key input and tool used in the development of software today. It covers the value provided to an organisation by the employees, the processes and products that support the organisation, and the knowledge held in the relationships between the organisation and external parties - covering human capital, structural capital, and relationship capital respectively. This paper presents a method that seeks to understand the level of alignment between the different success-critical stakeholders in the importance of different aspects of intellectual capital. The method is applied in a case study and provides a number of interesting insights, with the authors concluding that the groups do not necessarily need to be aligned as each groups has a different informational role within the organisation to fulfill.