Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hello. Thank you for joining us. Welcome to what Counts, the podcast where we dive into the world of information governance. Here we highlight proven solutions developed through our experience working with companies across various industries, and we talk about how you can apply these solutions to your company.
Whether you're interested in information governance, have a need, or just curious to hear about information management challenges like email management or retention management or asset data management, this podcast is for you.
This is Lee, and in this episode, Mora and I will talk about intellectual property and how it fits into our information governance world.
Maura, take us away.
[00:00:42] Speaker B: Good morning, Lee, and thank you and good morning, everyone. Or hello everyone.
Yes. So last time we talked about contracts as a particular type of records and the view that they provide into a business outlining the obligations that you have to and from customers and partners and suppliers and other people, and the revenue streams that, you know, kind of the cash flow in and out of your company is all described through contracts as a particularly important type of record.
So I was thinking about where would we go next from there? And we've spent a lot of time in the last couple weeks talking about intellectual property, intellectual content, because we're looking at everything we've done, partially because of this podcast and needing to come up with our new episodes, and also because of other activities that we have going on where we're still working on distilling out everything we know and everything we've learned into something tangible. And that's a particular problem in the consulting space, because the main asset that a consulting firm has is its people and its brains, where you learn things, you have, know how you have particular approaches that are documented to some extent for each client, and then depending on how big you are and how disciplined you are, documented for yourselves.
And that was where I wanted to go today, was to talk about that aspect of intellectual property. So there's a whole legal side to this around protecting your intellectual property through copyright or trademark or other protective measures.
But I don't want to get into that from an information governance perspective and from a business owner perspective.
I really wanted to focus on kind of the value to, to us as small business owners and to other small business owners who are listening to this, of that set of knowledge that, that amorphous set of knowledge that we call intellectual property, or ip.
A good, good description of where I'm.
[00:03:04] Speaker A: Going here, I'll buy it.
[00:03:07] Speaker B: So, and to take it out of the consulting space, let's put it into a more tangible thing.
[00:03:12] Speaker A: Oh, don't. Not the bakery again.
[00:03:15] Speaker B: How about the Chinese restaurant? Okay, fine, but could have been the bakery. But do you remember many years ago that we had the chance to work for a well known Chinese restaurant, a large chain, and we ended up not, not doing the project. They. They didn't move forward. But the meeting that I had with them I found fascinating because I went into the meeting expecting that their biggest asset would be recipes.
And what we found out was they didn't write them down.
Do you remember they had ingredient lists?
And I wonder, I didn't ask this question at the time because with the project didn't move forward due to other circumstances in their.
But I wonder if they had the ingredient list for a couple of different reasons. One, shipping or shopping, ordering food, making sure that all of their outlets had the right set of ingredients.
But two, from a nutrition and other kind of the regulatory reporting side where you have to announce, if you're a food provider, you have to announce what's in the food because you have allergies or you could have other dietary restrictions, religious restrictions or whatever. People want to know what they're eating and I don't blame them. I always want to know. So I expected that they would have the recipes though, because they were a large. They still are. They're still a very large chain and their food is consistent from outlet to outlet.
So why not recipes?
And what I learned from the conversation was they brought everybody back to the headquarters and they had a huge test kitchen there and they taught everyone how to do the, how to cook, the recipes.
And so all that you would, if you went into any of their restaurants, all you would find were the ingredient lists.
And I was fascinated by that.
And, and the more. And that was years ago. Like that was probably 15 years ago that I had that meeting.
And every time that I remember it, I'm fascinated again, especially as we're looking at how do we make our intellectual property something tangible, something that lasts and not just an oral tradition handed down over time.
Because the value of what we do is it has to be outside of us. It can't just be in our heads.
Otherwise why are we here? Like we're not in business, we're just chatting.
So as one of our former bosses used to say, if you don't have a list out of your meeting, then it was just milk and cookies.
So if you don't emerge from the meeting with the list and action item list.
So same thing here. If we can't make this tangible and able to be passed on, then the value is much less. There's value to our clients when we're with them and we're working with them and we're helping them build their own processes and build their own intellectual capital in how they manage their information, but then that's value for them, which is good, but it doesn't exist independently the way that we're trying to do it.
So think about any business you want to name. Think about a songwriter.
A lot of songwriters feel the music in their head. They see the notes in their head, they can play it.
But if they don't record it or write it down, then it ends with them.
You might. You might remember the melody kind of, oh, I heard that great song, but it doesn't live on.
So this. This value of intellectual property, I feel like, is really at the essence of a business having longevity.
[00:07:35] Speaker A: Okay, I. I don't know how to follow on with that. I was trying to figure out to tie it into information governance. Like, you know, information governance really is about policies.
And so intellectual property, do you have a policy? You can have a policy. You can have agreement. We've created an agreement between two entities and so forth.
[00:07:57] Speaker B: You can. But here's where I was thinking about it from an information governance perspective. It's about. These are records for us, how we document these ideas and these approaches and the artifacts that go with them. They are our records of our business.
So we talk a lot in this podcast about financial records and the transactions, like what we talked about last week with the contracts. Those are transactions. They document what's happening, what's delivered, what's received, what kind of remuneration is exchanged.
But these intellectual property records are also very valuable for us as records, because they live on and describe this business that exists today and that has existed for more than 10 years.
The IP records do that. So if you are setting out to manage your information and you're looking at an information governance program, you're going to start with the financial records. Those are always the easiest. Those are always the most obvious ones. Everybody knows about the irs. You have to have records to back up your tax returns. You have to have the contracts to ensure that you're getting what you ordered, getting what you paid for, that you have fulfilled all your obligations to other people.
But I want to challenge everybody to step back and say, what are those records that really are at the heart of our business, and what are we doing to protect and manage them?
[00:09:32] Speaker A: What's the special sauce?
[00:09:34] Speaker B: There you go.
Yes.
So for us, some of what we're doing, and there's things we could do better. Right? We are Managing these records, managing them as our client deliverables, stripping out client identifiers, and then we have sort of anonymized versions.
And we are beginning to put a life cycle around these records too, so that it's not just every individual instance of when we create an inventory form or we. Or those policies you were talking about, like the records management policy or communications and technology policies, end user use policies.
We have a lot of instances.
But what we are beginning to do really is look at the evolution of it and how has.
How has our approach to record schedule development changed in the past 25 years? It's changed a lot because when we started doing record schedules, they were still inventory driven, they were still kind of coming bottom up and you had many more categories.
That is not where we have been for the past five years. And I don't think it's going to be where we go. I think that the retention schedule process is going to get ever more tied into business process and less granular from a retention perspective because the tools we now have make it easier to manage records along with doing other business.
And the reason for the granularity 25 years ago was because it's hard to look at a room full of paper and know what you're looking at. So if you want to organize it in smaller chunks so you can go to the section that has what you need, today's tools don't require that level of detail.
So that's that. That life cycle aspect of our own intellectual capital is something that we're doing it. But I think we're getting better at it because we are taking a proactive approach now.
And so back to our central theme of managing information to do your business.
We're trying to live what we preach here slowly.
[00:11:58] Speaker A: That's good.
[00:12:01] Speaker B: So I like it. So to the audience, I didn't preview this topic with Lee. I just threw it at him this morning.
It was a little bit philosophical maybe, but it's a real thing. It's very practical. This is why you're in business, to do something and what makes you different.
That's where your intellectual property comes in.
[00:12:22] Speaker A: That's where your special sauce comes in. Yes, makes sense.
[00:12:27] Speaker B: All right, till next time.
[00:12:30] Speaker A: If you have any questions, please send us an email atinfo Trailblazer US.com look us up on the web at www.trailblazer.us.com.
thank you for listening.
Please tune into our next episode.
Also, if you like this episode, please be a champion and share it with people in your social media network as always. We appreciate you the listeners. Special thanks goes to Jason Blake created our music.
[00:12:58] Speaker B: All right, thanks, everyone.
