Learn to earn and then earn to learn !

Pricing of your Knowledge!
Does knowledge should be distributed free - like an open source platform? What should be the cost involved to make your employee smarter and most useful? In this flat world today - how much can employees or a student will be ready to learn all the time to meet up the increased stress and business challenges! How many skill-sets are needed to improve your performance? How to keep the business goals in perspective and time spent for to acquire new knowledge an opportunity but not a threat.

What makes you Smart
Can knowledge make you smart? How regular education and interaction is needed to boost up employees morale? Is Knowledge and education synonym? How to balance theories and practical experience? Do you believe that the knowledge should reach to the needy not that needy need to go for it?

Most of the time knowledge needs commitments, some freed up memory to hold it temporarily for a specific task. Occasionally you may have a luxury of a conductor who can pass the knowledge on to you, a mentor who can lead you with right information through sessions. Does expensive knowledge area make you smarter? What is the pricing structure of Knowledge?

A shirt costing you $15 during the summer may cost you $10 in the winter. The gas price in winter could be less but the oil price could be more. The knowledge that is specific to a certain product may fluctuate time to time. The price of learning Java or .NET programming may go up or down depending on the market need and trends. Can MS-Surface programming could be hot in 5 years time and COBOL could be obsolete in the near future? What happens to your $$ spent on these knowledge today?

What adds cost to learning?
Time, material, researches are the added factors to the pricing of any knowledge that are available in the market. Ideas and workable ideas are two different aspects of Knowledge process. You can think about some cool concept but executing a concept into reality or providing a prototype/or a provable summary is relatively harder to accomplish. Theories are in abundance but useful business remedies are crucial for success. Both in an enterprise or in a personal level.

Now the question is - how much information is important for an innovation? How much knowledge access should be given to everyone in an enterprise? The teaching vs. techniques to learn and resolve a problem. In a layman's term - should enterprise teach employees how to fish or give them the fish they ask for? Information is like a fish - where you can swim and fulfill your short term dream. But proper opportunity arises only when you set goals. You can't swim forever without a destination. An individual should be able to define a milestone and a purpose of life from every knowledge bite it takes in!

Bottom line!
The bottom line is to be happy and be financially free. How to come up with a million dollar idea and put the same price on it? Or ready to sell your idea to the enterprise for the exchange of annual salary of $50K? Employees think every aspect of their ideas in terms of benefits, bonuses and material gain. That's the reality in the capitalistic society. As long as you're contributing your time, efforts and services - enterprise want to keep you employed. The day you lack - you're fired, Either you are asked to take a lump sum bonus or leave the company if you don't perform as it is expected from you as defined.

In many companies entrepreneur knowledge is being recognized and nurtured. The outcome of the ideas may boost up business values which in turn benefit the customer relations, end user satisfaction and vendor loyalty. When employees are taught to be more innovative, creative - it creates value in saving resources, make work place environment friendly and in turn energizing employee to think more positively about their job. Then the job becomes part of life rather than a burden or just a milk-machine. How much happy/satisfied you are at your work shows your passion and commitment and object of life and purpose of living. How to make this attitude contagious at the firm? Can it happen in your company?

Knowledge of the Self:
How many people in the world really care about the inner knowledge or self knowledge? What is the purpose of life? If you ask any Yogis who are into self-discipline and spiritual practice - they say that the ultimate knowledge is the self realization and experiencing the self - is the real knowledge. Rest is all illusions. For them, short term knowledge has no values and nothing more than leading an animal life(assuming human are the highest ranked animal in our food chain by materialitic point of view). Spiritual Knowledge, which makes us apart from an animal life, is required to be alert and awakened! Surprisingly, the price to obtain that knowledge is not costly at all. Yogis say - the true knowledge has no price tag on it and should not be asked for any materialistic cost or gain. The only pure knowledge that stays within us and when we leave this earth is priceless and should be available free? Needs commitments but economically free, the materialistic knowledge has a price to learn but is not permanent. What an irony !

People need to unlearn the education that they've learned their whole life (which they have paid a big price already). When the real learning begins within the self - the cost minimizes but the commitment escalates. What an irony! Learn to earn and then again earn to learn is a vicious cycle of modernization. This routine has become a part of a digital reality of a virtual world ! Learning for materialistic gain and your inner self are two dimensions of life. Passion, love, socially candid, conscious and collaborative approaches are imperishable and priceless where as other materialistic knowledge are expensive, endurable but temporary!!

Re-Scalable, Re-packagable Knowledge:
The Knowledge architecture needs to be designed such that the global knowledge enterprise that is captured into useful, practical, environmentally feasible and friendly. Relevant for under-privileged people and inclusive to the entire population. Repackaging of the shared knowledge capital to the common people is a challenge in this ever growing economy. The role of technology to make it available in a flat, un-hierarchical architecture is the challenge of modern day software technology.

How to be open to learning and access the open learning tools are not only based on price and technology. What makes people happy, permanently special, open, learned, noble, moral, socially cooperative, sharing and caring - are the most practical knowledge of our modern times. Knowledge of the company’s product suite may make you tougher to replace - neither by outsourcing nor by automated tools but your inner knowledge is unique and has an infinite price tag!


Information can be bought & be stolen, data can be transferred & be replicated, knowledge can be learned & copied but wisdom can only be realized !

Conscious (knowledge awareness) Management

Knowledge is capital. Knowledge saved is knowledge earned. Investment in consciously acquired knowledge creates a long-term competitive advantage rather than short-term ROI. Right knowledge adds capital value only if it is re-usable, sharable & accessible across an enterprise. Unless collaborative teams and areas such as HR, sales, R&D, marketing & customers utilize the knowledge consciously for better business decisions - the enterprise doesn't get its full return. Forget about the gain and profit. Saving knowledge, it requires an additional creativity and self-discipline, either in a personal level or in an organizational.

Some moves to gain conscious capital:

Smart purchasing is an effective key to saving knowledge. Taking an inventory of the current needs vs. what you already have - before you decide to acquire a new one is a saving route. Prioritizing your needs is a conscious methodology and a model to follow.

Begin with the biggest and crucial asset that has the potential to save more.
Depending on the timing of knowledge needs, tame the bulls and bears. If an employee is less productive – teach them the trends - allow them to learn during summer. Let them earn when the winter comes. Patterns built by knowledge assembly can easily be replicated.

Without even planting a seed, farmers work hard to produce the next crop. Are we working just as hard to market our conscious knowledge-crop? A logical or methodological individual can likely to teach the same to others. One can bring knowledge avalanche for its productive use.

Technology is easy to learn. Don't give your employees only fish - teach them how to fish. Teach your employees, sub-ordinates and colleagues - the reasoning power ! Teach your human asset to learn argumentation, be conscious on what they do the best, let them be effective thinkers and good at debating. It's the most social, coopertative, collaborative enterprise by which your PMO or CKO can find truth and resolve conflicts.

Are you ready for your second life?

The first digital life with digital content is NOT enough any more. People have been addicted to the digital content so much now that we needed another virtual world from our real world - which itself is a virtual in existence to begin with. We are adding countless number of mirror images to dodge ourselves. Are we lost in the digital domain already? What life means to us ? Are we creating our new dreamlands or adding another jargon to our nobility?

Life is not just Project Manangment, Enterprise ownership and Identity theft? Or does it have any peaceful meaning to it? To understand your Knowledge within and Interfacing with the world? Is not that what Second Life is all about? Are you ready to take a ride. Wish me 'Hi' when you meet me in your SecondLife. I just came back from my interview at HP, Visited SOA from IBM, went to Harvard Booth and had some virtual coke. It's not bad at all, I also learned how to fly in real - virtually !

'KnowledgeInterface-Kidd'

Challenges in collaboration of Knowledge Areas

Many technologies exist and so are the devices that capture information digitally. Most of them are needed for a certain purpose to accomplish a specific task or an activity. A collection of task leads to an assignment. A collection of daily assignments could turn out to be a job description of an employee. A collection of resources, time line and deliverables would produce a project. A collection of many similar or discrete projects make a department of a company. A collection of departments with their collective associated projects (HR, Finance, Sales, Marketing all have their short term and long term projects) become an enterprise.

A task involved to complete a project need to have a good understanding of its players, the availability of the tool sets, the resources to execute certain activity. For any collaborative project to be accomplished we need to identify all minute ingredients of digital chunk of data of different formats. They could be dispersedly available in an enterprise or not at all visible digitally. At times available but only locally. Some of the binary/ASCII/digital entity or data structures in a project toolbox are the following:

Documents, Spreadsheets, Forms, Messaging, Chat, Images, Audio, Web-Ex, Live-Meeting, Reports, Dash-Boards or ideally virtual world such as training in the SecondLife domain are all in different digital formats. They are used as tools in a collaborative information platform but how much is essential, absolutely needed and searchable need its proper management too.

Almost all IT related projects are associated or nearly embedded to these components. How analytical your efforts are, how wise and smart your enterprise is and how much authorities your position has and who all your team members are would decide the usefulness of accomplished digital capture hanging around as signatures from your project accomplished. Usually the specifications are defined but you can't assume that the volumous output process is structured and quantifiable in all the cases and directions. We leave a pile of digital junk which needs recycling.

Doing the right projects vs. doing projects right

Doing the right project is smarter decision than doing projects right. Bringing expert IT Project Managers to do the project right is one smart way...but ideally choosing the right project to begin with adds more value in today's competetive market. It a smarter move to choose a smart project to begin with. A domain expert having a look at your portfolio or programs may better suggest you than a PM who has been hired to do a certain task.

Succesful Portfolio management in any organization would be the ideal choice of a project to the right PM to produce right results with right bugdet within spcified time.

There could be many projects in an organization scattering around but putting the right resources (PMO, if there are any) to first identify the right project is worth spending time to. Time spent earlier to regocnize the right Project Charter would be fruitful than to start and realize later. Smarter and collaborative projects would introduce smarter results and a best choice of the enterprise resources.