• What are the organization’s knowledge needs?
• What knowledge assets or resources does it have and where are they?
• What gaps exist in its knowledge?
• How does knowledge flow within the organization and to its clientele?
• What blockages are there to that flow?
• To what extent do its constituents, processes and technology currently support or hamper the effective knowledge management?
  

Using the various methods of eliciting knowledge listed in Module 1, you can identifying the tacit knowledge or knowledge in people’s minds in terms of how they can be of productive use by the community.

• Goal — what the intervention aims to achieve, the reason the knowledge assets are being measured—the purpose for exploring knowledge-based interventions, as differentiated from tinkering with the traditional factors of production. IC Method will identify and assess (audit)
  - knowledge assets needed to attain the goal;
  - their relative strengths and weaknesses

• Intellectual capital — the intellectual assets that the community has:
  - market assets— products and services the community produces or is capable of producing champions, customers and clients, evangelists, customer loyalty, repeat business, community name, markets for products and services, collaborations, and agreements
  - intellectual property assets—patents, copyrights, design rights, .trade secrets, trade marks
  - infrastructure assets—management/leadership philosophy, norms and morés culture, management processes, information technology systems, communication systems, financial arrangements, standards and value systems
  - human capital assets—employees’ education, skills qualifications, work-related knowledge, occupational potential, personality, work-related competencies

Associated with each intellectual asset is knowledge about it. Thus, there is market knowledge or knowledge about the organization’s market assets, knowledge of human-centered assets, etc. Knowledge about intellectual capital resides in organization members if they are tacit or are in information repositories if they are explicit. Theoretically, the greater the knowledge (or the more knowledge items) about an intellectual asset, the easier it will be for an organization to benefit from this intellectual asset.

• Dream ticket — set of knowledge items about the intellectual capital that has to be present for the goal to be met. It describes an idealized state, the optimal position the organization should be in for the goal to be achieved. Elements of the dream ticket need to be identified, ranked, and prioritized.
  
• Audit of knowledge assets — activity of gathering information on the relative strength and weakness of each element of the dream ticket. Audit is limited to the elements of the dream ticket to focus resources on assets that are deemed critical to the goal, not all the assets that the organization has. There are different methods of audit, depending on which asset indicator is being measured and the context The audit process involves the following
  steps and corresponding outcomes:

• Ranking — interpreting the status of assets, as indicated by the results of the audit. An index may be used to guide the interpretation. If status of an asset matches with that of the dream ticket completely, it may be ranked at 5; if it is weak in comparison to the latter, it may be ranked at 1; if the organization did not even know the asset was required, it is ranked at 0.

• Target — a snap-shot of the organization in terms of its strengths, weaknesses, and trend of development. It summarizes the status of all assets in one visual representation. A set of 6 concentric circles represents the ranks of the assets. This is divided into 3 sections reflecting the 3 asset categories audited. Points indicate the position of the assets and arrows show whether the situation is expected to become better or worse. (Adopted from Brooking, 1999)

• Customer interview—asking customers or clients questions in order to get from them information, opinions, or feelings about the organization and its
  products and services. In an interview, the critical tasks are: 1) formulating the questions in order to get the information you need, and 2) asking them in a manner that ensures that the answers you get are true as far as the interviewee is concerned and unbiased by other factors.
  
  
• Document analysis—obtaining information and extracting their meaning from existing documents: reports, databases, listings, etc. For example, from records of participants in the community’s livelihood projects it may be seen how many projects a particular community member has participated in, and from that the document analyst can infer if he/she believes in the usefulness of the community’s livelihood projects.
  
  
• Self-assessment—inventory and analysis of one’s own qualities related to the element being assessed. Self-assessment requires a clear explanation of why the information is being asked, and assurance of the confidentiality of the personal information to be divulged. A set of clear, unambiguous guidelines are needed to facilitate self-administration, as well as questions that do not imply a judgment of the participant’s achievements or non-achievement.
  
  
• Knowledge elicitation—bringing out and documenting a participant’s knowledge of a particular process. The facilitator must ensure that the participant describes the process as completely as possible, indicating clearly the start and finish points, activities in their actual sequence, as well as decision points that could lead to different sub-processes.
  
  
• Inventory—listing, description, and classification of all items related to a particular domain or area. A useful inventory of knowledge assets describes each asset and indicates its classification, its location within the organization or community (source), and likely users (destination). It should begin with preparation of a discrete guide for classifying the assets to avoid confusion, as well as a system for cross-checking.
  
  
• Competitor analysis—collecting and analyzing information about competitors of the community or organization, and comparing these with that of the community/organization in terms of specific parameters. Knowing the competition has been a practice since the 5th century B.C. in China, and the book that contains Oriental strategies of going to war and winning, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, has been translated to several languages, and is required reading in many business schools in the West. Business organizations devote considerable resources to business intelligence in order to know what the competitor has and does, to learn valuable lessons from the latter’s experience (and at the latter’s expense), toward finding ways to improve on them to enhance performance.
  
  
• Environmental scanning—systematic collection of external information to identify changing trends and patterns. Scanning may be done in 3 levels of the environment of an organization: 1) the task environment, 2) the industry environment, and 3) the macro environment, or the social, technological, economic, environmental, and political (STEEP) sectors that affect organizations directly or indirectly.