Accounting for information: information and knowledge in the annual reports of FTSE 100 companies
Article Type: Abstracts From: Strategic Direction, Volume 26, Issue 11
Cummins J. and Bawden D.Journal of Information Science, 2010, Volume 36 Issue 3, Start page: 283, No. of pages: 23
Purpose – studies the approaches adopted by UK companies and the language that they use when discussing the information and knowledge that flows through their organizations and to view how they account for such information in terms of its intrinsic economic value. Design/methodology/approach – a review of the literature of the approaches used for accounting for information and knowledge in companies is presented. Describes the study, which was undertaken in August and December 2008, and which analysed the annual reports of 95 the UK’s largest publicly listed companies, those comprising the so-called FTSE 100 representing the performance of the 100 largest UK-domiciled blue chip companies. Reports how content analysis was used to count the occurrences of words or phrases in a sample of texts, usually with consideration of the context of the occurrences, through “incidence analysis” and“textual analysis” based on a set of categories proposed by Oppenheim et al. (2003). Findings – the results indicated that information and knowledge are discussed in various contexts, and companies strongly imply the importance of information and knowledge to their business, and there was evidence from some companies of a desire to put a monetary value on information assets, despite the difficulties of doing so using traditional accounting methods. Notes, however, that knowledge was not nearly as prominent as information in the language that companies use, while information and knowledge did not seem to be “linked” in the psychology of these companies. Research limitations/implications – a popular way of assigning a value to information assets was through goodwill and this area would merit further research. Originality/value contributes to the research literature where there is a paucity of empirical research into the way that companies value these assets, and how they are presented and valued in reality.Article type:Research paperISSN: 0165-5515Reference: 39AS085
Keywords: Accounting, Economic value analysis, Information,Information management, Knowledge management, Organizations, Surveys, United Kingdom
