Knowledge Economy

Who am I? Why have I come to this world? What role I need to play in life? At times all of us have to answer these questions raised by our own mind. Spiritual world has answers to all these questions. But I have no intention of giving you the insights of the spiritual world. Since our childhood our parents have taught us all that we need to know as a human being. I am trying to peep into the mind of a professional when he tries to seek the answers to these questions. A professional has the ability to earn his living by trading knowledge of his domain. Knowledge has a journey path. Information technology domain has a different story to tell when it traces the evolution of knowledge from data and information. Data is an entity which has otherwise no meaning to anyone unless it is converted into information e.g. a shirt hanging in a departmental store. Information is what we hold after we make a meaning out of data e.g. price of the shirt is $30, 100% cotton. We do not take any action on this information. Knowledge evolves when we digest information and take action on that, e.g. we compare the prices and purchase the one we like the most. Knowledge is taken to one step further when the shirts of the neibouring departmental store are compared with the one we have full information of. That is called intelligence. Information technology has given us the opportunity to convert knowledge into intelligence. Let's now look at ourselves when we call us 'knowledge professionals'. What is our role in the knowledge economy when communication band-width is made available to us by information technology world?
An economy is called 'knowledge economy' when information is freely traded in order to derive knowledge out of it. Here the word 'trading' has a different connotation; it means 'digestion'. Knowledge economy has provided us the opportunity to create information out of data and digest it as knowledge. As a professional, we started our preparatory work in the schools and colleges. We aspired to become someone who would like to make use of all the information coming to us as understanding; would process the information and make a decision out of that. A few walk extra steps to move in a different direction in search of intelligent decision-making. In this process, all our dreams are transformed into reality. Whatis the dream we generally have when we step into the advance stage of academic journey? We need to create something that no one else has ever thought of. We prepare ourselves for that; we sincerely listen to the discussion in the class and try to look beyond the subject for securing the dream. Some people always do it for scoring high marks in the examination. I have no intention to introspect that state of mind. I am only talking of those who want to make a difference in their professional life and our own role in the knowledge society to give them the right opportunity.
With the knowledge that we acquire in the school and colleges, we enter in the professional world and look for opportunities to convert dream into reality. Earlier in the production economy we had to find capital and skilled labour to manufacture something as a product of our choice. In knowledge economy, the product equivalence is intellectual assets. We can claim that asset as ours; we can trade that asset sitting in our drawing rooms. Band width has given us the opportunity. We can acquire any amount of knowledge from the rest of world; search engines are the magicians who throw us anything from the empty box. Are we all aware of our potential in the modern economy? Our religion as a professional in knowledge economy is to realise our potential into productivity using the band width.
I earlier started this article with three questions. Who am I? Why have I come to this world? What role I need to play in life? We need to understand the fact of our own life intelligently. We are not mere puppets in the hand of organization which would satisfy its profit-making goal by trading us as commodities and would provide us no opportunity to trade our knowledge for the creation of intellectual assets. No amount of money can lure us. In the Maslow's theory of hierarchical needs, money loses its charm after some time. When that time comes to your life, you would feel homeless. Our home as a professional is shattered by then. The prayer room seems to have done nothing in our professional life inspite of the fact that knowledge economy has given us more power to show our potential to the industry at large. Organization has only one role to play in knowledge economy; it acts just a medium for us to relise our potential to productivity, helps us reaching our dream home, the industry. An organization is a mute spectator in the whole game of transition where I am the giver and industry is the receiver. We have to understand this hard fact of the professional world around us.