However there are dangers in this approach. If responsibility for business equity is shelved onto accountancy teams, other sections will not have an understanding of how their activities can lead to the diminishing or increase in business equity. Ideally everyone should understand their role in developing and maintaining business equity.

The role of individual employees
Individual employees will add value to the company by way of producing goods and service s for sale after mobilizing the inputs. Each person needs to take responsibility to ensure that they do their work to the best of their ability and to the specification that was given to them at the start of their contract. After all if the organization is to collapse, they will be the ones losing their jobs whilst trying to negotiate with unsympathetic venture capitalists. Where there is a need to appraise the company, local members of staff need to cooperate by providing accurate and timely management information in order to facilitate the quick award of funding to the firm.

The Role of the Corporate Finance Team
The corporate finance team is responsible for coordinating all efforts to obtain funding for business projects. Among these sources of funding will be business equity. They will need to assess that the company’s business equity levels are measured, quantified and documented. Furthermore they will be at the forefront of ensuring that in any business deal, the company business equity is not sold way below the market price.

They also need to raise management information for senior managers, prepare reports for potential investors and will be at the forefront of all negotiations. There is also an important role to sensitize the general workforce and senior managers about some aspects of accounting for business equity which may be relevant to their line of work.

The Role of Senior Management Executives
Senior executives will control the overall strategy of the company. If they are not versed with the basic concepts of business equity, they might make management decisions that are inappropriate in terms of trying to build a good business equity portfolio.

Management should also ensure that all parts of the business are aware of the existence of business equity and that all business functions are carried out bearing this in mind the need to maximize business equity. Finally they will be making the final decisions as to whether to agree to any investment proposal so it is imperative that they are quite well versed with the concepts of business equity.

Conclusion
As we can see from the above discussion, everyone working in an organization needs to ensure that they understand that business equity represents the value of their organization and that as they carry out each of their roles, they need to ensure that they consider the ramifications on this metric.

Human beings will be at the heart of any business IT project. They will be the working capital that ensures it is commissioned and at the end that it is used for the purpose for which it was commissioned. They will bring their own judgments, skills and failings to the project and could ultimately bring it down.

There is no way of controlling human influence in a comprehensive manner. What managers tend to do is to attempt influence employee action using the various management incentives and sanctions available to them. However this does not always work and could ultimately push the employees even further away from their managers. The basic tenets of good management practice can still apply here. Things such as supervision and reward schemes can counter some of the more negative reactions to new technology.

Where the project has been outsourced, the personnel issues are compounded by the fact the in-house managers really have very limited control on external staff. They will have entered binding contracts with their parent organizations and will really be free to do as they please. They also bring with them their own way of working that may not fit in with the company philosophy. Furthermore they do not bear direct responsibility for things when they go wrong and they have to use faulty technology. This means that they have even less incentive to get it right the first time.

This leads us on to the issue of accountability. This is particularly the case where there is a large organization with different people working on different projects all feeding into one big IT group. This can lead people to view themselves as separate parts of an entity leading to isolation and inconsistencies in practice. Even where problems are being resolved there is no one person who coordinates strategy. Any attempts to get some type of responsibility descend into a blame game. People start going off sick with stress and avoiding the senior managers.

However the biggest cause of failure has to be planning. Many failing organizations have a conceptual idea of what they would like out of their IT project but they will not have detailed plans as to how they are going to achieve the objectives. Commissioning will often be based on the personal whims of a particular manager rather than being an overall long term business strategy. Issues will be simplified with the attitude that they can deal with whatever problems arise on an adhoc basis. Therefore without proper planning the project is almost certainly doomed to fail.