While executives emphasize the importance of measuring the performance of intangible assets, equal importance should be placed, up front, on aiding decision makers to recognize what intangible assets their company possesses, produces, and/or has acquired and how to identify, unravel, and approximate their value.
The real intent of a company’s information security policy (practices, procedures) is to ensure it reflects the real objective, that is, to sustain (protect, preserve) control, use, ownership, and value of its intangible assets!
Trying to ‘contain’ a company’s intangible assets following a disaster, absent an effective continuity-contingency plan that fully addresses intangibles, is comparable to the title of former U.S. Senator Trent Lott’s book ‘Herding Cats’.
Managing, stewarding, and monitoring a company’s intangible assets are not passive ‘I’ll do it when I have time’ functions, or tasks that can be delegated to the uninitiated who lack the requisite ‘fire in the belly’ understanding that 75+% of company value lies in intangible assets!
When 75+% of a company’s value and sources of revenue are directly linked to its intangible assets, they should be integral to continuity-contingency planning.
Terroism, hurricanes, earthquakes, and cyber attacks have changed the landscape for business continuity-contingency planning forever because intangible assets can become dispersed, inaccessible, and virtually irretrievable.