It's a fact of business that an employee is rarely going to spend their full working life with one company - indeed a healthy economy is characterised by a healthy level of labour mobility.

However, as the UK becomes a knowledge-based economy, there is a growing awareness of the economic value that can be lost to companies when key intellectual assets - their people and their knowledge - leave the business.

Protecting, managing and retaining value from those assets is one of the great issues facing businesses today. Research shows that staff source between 50 per cent and 75 per cent of information relevant to their work from other people.

It also shows that more than 80 per cent of an organisation's digitised information is on individual hard drives and inside personal files.

That means that individuals - rather than the organisation - control the bulk of essential knowledge in a business.

So when the employees leave, they take with them a wide spectrum of extremely valuable knowledge, including client contacts, confidential data and relationships.

Those disconnected islands of data and knowledge are the Achilles heel of any business.

The real issue for businesses, large and small, is to ensure they keep that knowledge and information to build and retain value in their organisation.

In searching for a solution to identify, protect and retain knowledge in your business, you should look in the direction of your IT department.

Microsoft recognised that organisations suffer significant losses when key people leave and have developed a knowledge management solution called SharePoint. The system allows staff to perform better by providing a comprehensive information storage and tracking environment but gives control and ownership of knowledge back to the business.

SharePoint allows parts of the organisation to work together in an easy to use system. Information can be pooled from databases and applications, allowing ongoing utilisation of day-to-day tools which employees are familiar with.

The system will be as secure as your most valuable information and intelligence requires.

With the peace of mind achieved from knowing that you can harvest and retain knowledge created by key staff, SharePoint is a valuable strategic tool which can help you to protect you from the inevitable labour mobility that every business needs to manage.

Mark Joynson is regional managing director of IT specialists Technology Services Group. TSG provides consultancy, computer networks, software, training and service to over 1,000 businesses across the North-East. www.tsg.com 0845-155-0180