Lokking Back before Looking Forward II

I signed off last time with a note on what I had learnt and this month I will dwell on what I learnt thereafter.

The next phase was consolidation of my business activities, and on a personal level, raising of a family. There were up and downs, but we (my wife and I) consolidated to such an extent that I could get away from the running of a business and divert my attention to consultation. The reason I diverted to consultation was a quest to learn new things and apply them. The scope for such activities was limited in the trading and the service business.

I picked on telecom management as a field for consultation as in 1991 telecom had been opened for private investment, and a lot of value added services were available in the market all of a sudden. Being throttled for years together, users were exposed to a plethora of services in telecommunications. However users were not disposed to make use of such services as they were just thrilled with the opening of various services, and proper management was not on their minds. Due to competition prices were dropping, and that was sufficient for them.

Simultaneously, I was also attracted towards knowledge management, but I soon realized that it was old wine in a new bottle. Even today I hold the same view. Who has created this word knowledge base or BoK (Body of Knowledge) ?. It’s been created by IT software vendors. Can anyone explain in an objective manner, how different it is from the databases of yesteryear? In my opinion it is nothing but a database and information, and the appropriate word could be a rich database as users may not have to filter or extrapolate from basic data. No doubt IT has helped in making it possible entirely. The earlier technologies were simply not capable of doing so. This is nothing but information management, but calling it knowledge… sorry, no way, in my opinion.

As I moved on I realized that IT is grossly underutilized in a majority of organizations, and I therefore added training to my consultation area. I started with MS Office as by 2000 most organizations had braced themselves with MS Office as a tool to handle word processing, spreadsheets and presentations. Microsoft (and its followers) has packed numerous features, but there was no one who could explain the practical aspect of the same, and that’s when I first realized that productivity matters in offices too.

While looking at ways to improve productivity I studied Lean or TPS about 4 years ago, and wrote my first newsletter on “Lean Office” in January 2006. My efforts to popularize this concept and improve productivity in offices and the service sector as this has no “traditional” production cycles, have met with lukewarm response from industry. I put forward my analysis in later newsletters. Due to recessionary trends, from August 2008, my training activities were almost nil, consultation zero and with advancing age and me entering the Senior citizen bracket, I decided to slow down.
I am satisfied with what I have achieved and look forward to the next 10 years. I will talk about it next blogspot.