GeeKs Blogging @ dotCOM

Managing Intellectual Properties

by Nitin Jain

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hmmmmm.. Interesting!! Tell me honestly, have you ever thought of this aspect?

A very warm Hi to all the readers of my blogs here. I am expected to move in as a Business Analyst for an upcoming opportunity in NY State shortly. As a normal practice, I sat with the existing Technical/ non-Techie people of the team today trying to understand the application. Mark my words, it’s a complex maze of views, screens, integrations, lots of known / hitherto unknown IDs, and definitely, very colourful. I am sure it must be as per the client requests and a baby of the pretty abused term, the “Agile Methodology”!!

All in all, the application seemed very interesting. A thought struck my mind when going through this magnificent piece of art. I could see so many non-vanilla features in the application that I got thinking, “hey, are we tracking these anywhere?”. My point is, any application successfully going live (;-)), has an entire hive of people breaking their heads over it. The requirement could be as absurd as, hey, we don’t like the colour of the default application. Can you just make it just a little more greenish towards the top right?!! Don’t get me wrong, some really interesting and useful ones too!!

There are a lot of people working all through the chain, the developer’s slogging it out and making it technically possible in the end, the solution designers coming out with innovative solutions, the Business Analysts painting all kinds of rosy pictures to grab more and more business, totally unmindful of the poor people behind him when he is making wild commitments, or the business himself, who doesn’t really understand the technicality, but demands just out of intuition and his expected ROIs. Everyone is adding value to the entire process somehow at each step, one way or the other. In the process, they are coming out with some really nice features in the application which could be added as resouces in a separate repository, and pulled out to benefit the next implementation (yeah, I know. This is the shoddiest part of all. After all, this is the part which doesn’t add revenues in the short term to the company’s bottomline!!).

Well, if it is really innovative, and you really follow it up to lodge patents or something similar, you have actually created an Intellectual Property for the organization on the whole. So many of such innovations and IPs come forward everyday in an IT savvy organization. My question is, do you track them? How? What help do you take from IT for IT related IPs?

I understand that GAAP still doesn’t recognize them as Assets in Advanced Accounting, but all the same, the Reported and Actual Accounts are always differentiated.

A simple Googling brought up so many options for Software Solutions to manage these,
IP Menu
Decipher
Mindmatters
Protecode
Anaqua

In fact, a new term, IAM, or the Intellectual Assets Management has been coined for a broader coverage. I guess this is enough food for thought for the day. I will follow this up with my closing comments on what I feel of the entire subject.

Meanwhile, do feel free to put in your thoughts if there is anything you do in your workplace to build up such resources.

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