Valuating Business Social Networking Services as Intangible Corporate Assets: Experiences and Ideas

Valuating Business Social Networking Services as Intangible Corporate Assets: Experiences and Ideas

Adamantios Koumpis (ALTEC Software S.A., Greece), Epaminondas Christofilopoulos (Help-Forward Network, Greece) and Nikos Melanitis (Hellenic Naval Academy, Greece)
Copyright: © 2012 |Pages: 14
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61350-168-9.ch026

Abstract

Services both as a science and as a practice in today’s corporate environments are seriously suffering from many different suboptimalities. Some of these suboptimalities are structural (lack of a coherent framework to apply the service), other metaphysical (lack of a supporting culture that would increase the demand and strengthen the market for the service) or of transcendal and ephemeral nature (lack of an appropriate technology to support the service idiosyncracies – can you imagine amazon.com without any Internet?). For some others, a framework that would comprise both organisational and technology aspects could be an answer to certain pitfalls and shortcomings currently faced. Whatever the context of a service, this does not exist in a vacuum; it is provided by people who are working in an organisation to customers that are part of a more or less structured part of the society.
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Overall State Of The Play

Service Company Value

What makes companies worth many times the value of their recorded assets? What is the nature of additional value that is perceived by the market but not recorded by the company? Why do some companies have a higher market to book ratio than others? In essence: why are some companies perceived to be more valuable than others?

Stock analysts, the most influential arbiters of corporate value, state that a very significant factor for achieving high value is the quality of a company’s investment in its people, accompanied with the necessary corporate service infrastructure to make the best use of all its human resources (Abrahamson, 1992).

Though both the results and the outcomes of services are in many cases tangible and visible to us, and the same holds for their constituent elements and ‘ingredients’, services themselves are of a rather intangible and immaterial nature. There are many interesting definitions that try to organise knowledge in the area of services with aspects of the service delivery process.

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