As a knowledge worker, your business is to sell your knowledge.  Having the know-how that is in hot demand is paramount to achieving success. Do you know how to check whether your knowledge is aligned with the market needs?  In other words, can you determine your “knowledge market alignment”?

3 Steps to measure your Knowledge Market Alignment

1. Research your knowledge trends  - go to Google Trends ( http://www.google.com/trendsh) and enter the tag(s) that describe your know-how. For instance, in my case I’m a “business process management” expert, and the tag that I will be searching is exactly the same.
   

   The upper line is a measurement of the search volume, while the lower line represents a measure of the number of times that the tag was posted on google news stories.	This represents the location of the activity on the tag captured by google servers.

   Note: make sure you use the right tags to reference your knowledge.  For instance, I usually type BPM as an acronym for “Business Process Management”.  However, BPM is used to reference “beats per minute”, and it’s also a dutch acronym  for a disease.

2. Compare the trend with a RELATED known hot topic - continuing to use Google Trends, enter a known hot topic, that is related to your knowledge. In my case that is “cloud computing”.  It is important that the topics are related because the objective of this step is to allow you to compare trends, so you can have an idea of how the market is evolving.

You can see easily  that could computing is taking the world by storm, and that it is a relative new trend. From a distance, it seems the world is a lot more interested in cloud computing than in Business Process Management.	With no surprise India still ranks high but the United States makes the list in 6th position

3. Check the tag on the monster database - the job market reflects the present and what the market wants. Go to http://monster.com and enter the same tags. Go to the end of the page, and see the number of results

The tag “business process management” returns 180 jobs	The tag “Cloud Computing” returns 92 jobs

Conclusions

1. BPM may have achieved its peak - search volume going down is probably an indication that subject is started to be well known, and that people already acquired the necessary knowledge (no need to search for it). The knowledge of business process management may be at its peak, and its on its way towards commoditization.  This could be confirmed based on India’s huge traffic when compared with the rest of the world.
2. Cloud computing is RED HOT - “Cloud computing” is HOT right now. Jumping on the bandwagon may give you some strategic advantage in the future. If you can’t, it means that you need to start reading and preparing to acquire new skills. Even though there are twice as many jobs in “business process management”, it seems that “cloud computing” is not a fad, and at 92 positions, for such an early topic, may represent a clear shift in the market.

Wouldn’t it be easier if you could do this research more frequently? That was one of the many reasons to actively manage your knowledge using the oneCloud Individual Edition.  Stop guessing about the future, and get control of your future!

As a knowledge worker, you are in the business of selling your knowledge. You make money by applying your know-how to solve your customers’ problems.  This is true whether you work as a contractor or an employee.

Organizations (for profit or not) are no more that teams of workers, united under a common purpose, to develop services or products to solve people’s problems, right?  If organizations have their .COM domains, to indicate their COMMERCIAL intent and advertise their products/services on the web, why aren’t you doing  the same? If you answered:

“I thought of that many times, but I just didn’t know how to go about it”, then we have a solution for you!  Just click here in the link and read everything about how to be on the web with your own domain.

“I don’t know.  Why should I have my own .COM?”, then this could well be one of those blog posts that could change your future… just keep on reading.

5 top reasons to reserve your .COM domain… today

1. It enables others to remember you (always) - have you ever tried to tell someone at a business event, when you ran out of business cards, to call you at “456-987-2345″ ? no… right?  Wouldn’t it be easier to to tell people to go to “JohnBrooke.com”? Human are used to remember names and not phone numbers. A domain is a true life time address.
2. It shows your customers how serious you are about your career -imagine if you were recruiting for your own organization.  Would you prefer to see a resume with john3455@yahoo.com, or would you prefer to see JohnBrooke@JohnBrooke.com? With your own domain, your customers will immediately feel that you take great pride in your professional career. Would you go public if you didn’t?
3. It allows you to be perceive as more expensive - by having your own .COM you will be perceived by your customers as being an internet expert, on top of all your other knowledge.  In today’s economy, the web (or the cloud), is taking center stage. Because of that your customers will be willing to pay a premium for you.
4. It is the way of the future - do you expect others to have a cell phone?  What about an email?  Do you remember how you used to communicate before email and cell phones? How long do you think it will take for everyone to have a .COM domains?  Resumes and your connections can only take you so far. Become a global worker!
5. It sets your FREE - right now your web presence is associated to some other company.  You probably use your organization’s email address a lot more than you would like, and your personal email accounts has a Yahoo, MSN or Google domain.  Say goodbye to your “old poor web presence” and set yourself free by hosting your domain ANYWHERE you want.  Be on the web on your own terms.

Next steps

Did you decide to move forward? Fantastic. Here are the next steps

1. reserve your domain from a domain registrar. My advice is for you to use Godaddy - http://godaddy.com.  It is the most inexpensive domain registrar out there. A domain will cost $10/year.Note 1: I suggest you reserve your name for at least 10 years.

   Note 2: in case your “first name last name.COM” is already taken (which could happen if you have a popular name), please follow this link to get our suggestions- http://3wcloud.com/faqs/web/how-to-pick-a-domain-name/
   

2. After you have your own domain, it’s time for you to to publish your knowledge on the web, so others can find you. This is the exact area of expertise of 3WColud.  Please follow this link to know how we can help you have your own presence on the web (cloud)!

Congratulations on your new domain.  You are now officially a knowledge worker of the 21st century.

I’m sure that you are very happy with your current project/job.  Nonetheless, as a knowledge worker, you know how important it is to remain alert to new opportunities. You never know when the next recession is going to hit, or when your dream job call is going to come.

An easy way to keep an eye on the market is by having your resumes on job posts, or by having your profile on professional  networks, such as LinkedIn. However, this strategy has a big drawback because it can be very time consuming, mostly due to tons of emails and calls about positions you are really not interested in.

Wouldn’t it be much better if you could have a knowledge worker agent trying to match your skills with the needs of the market? Wouldn’t it be much better if the current recruiters would represent you, the knowledge worker, instead of the organizations that needs you work? Wouldn’t it be a lot better if you had your own knowledge worker agent?

5 Top reasons to get your own “knowledge worker agent”… and drop “your” recruiters

1. Increase happiness - the knowledge agent represents YOU and therefore he/she will only try to match you to opportunities that are a perfect fit for you. Because the match is ideal, you will be happy, and equally important, the organization will be happy.
2. Increase revenue - to represent you, the agent will have to really know you.  By truly knowing you, your agent will be able to find niche market opportunities, which are always better opportunities.
3. Learn more - because you no longer have to worry about  replying to emails, and spend time on phone calls that would never lead you to any opportunity, you will be able to focus on acquiring more knowledge, and thus increasing your future opportunities to even be more successful.
4. Be a trend setter - only very important people until now had agents.  In fact, for the most part, only VIPs tend to have agents.  By having your own “knowledge worker agent”, you will be perceived as someone that has already accepted that times are changing… rapidly.
5. Invest ONLY on knowledge needed by the market - to keep you happy, agents will need to be able to offer you a constant stream of jobs. The only way this will happen is if you keep aligned with the market.  Your knowledge worker agent will serve as a mentor for your continued growth.

How do you get a “knowledge worker agent”?

It’s really easy. Talk to your recruiter! They are for the most part very sharp people, and they have already realized that the market is changing.  Level with them, and ask them if they would be willing to represent you.

1. Talk to your recruiter and arrange a payment mechanism in case he gets you a job
2. Publish your knowledge on the web and allow your recruiter access

I won’t be able to help in your conversation with your current recruiter(s).  However I can share a secret with you. The best way to manage your knowledge is by using the oneCloud Individual Edition.  With this tool, you will be able to share with your recruiter, all the aspects of your knowledge over the web, which will allow him/her to make your knowledge ready for each individual opportunity.

Are you ready to be a knowledge VIP?

I know that you noticed how things are changing. Over the past 10 years, the world has transformed into a global village. Millions across the world now known what you know. The internet has flattened the world and anyone in the world, can now have access to the same sources of knowledge that you do.  The world has gained a new pool of highly educate people. The current economic slump, is making organizations all over the world, seek for these newly educated people, to reduce costs, and increase their agility.

Did you know?

Welcome to the global village! This is NOT the time to fear and instead to look to the future with great excitement. You are a knowledge worker, and the global market of knowledge (the knowledge economy) is full of opportunities, for people like YOU!

How are you competing in the Knowledge Economy?

Are you sharing with the world: 1) how your knowledge can assist others achieve their objectives more efficiently, 2) where you got your knowledge and why you did it (your passion), and 3) how can they can contact you?

Before you reply to those questions, please consider the way I’m sharing my knowledge, by clicking on my oneCloud - http://filipe-pinto.com.

Let me ask you now:

1. Don’t you think that  you should start today cataloging your knowledge, and publishing it on the web?
2. Don’t you think the time has come for you to show the world your .COMMERCIAL intentions, by getting your own .COM domain?

5 top reasons for you to catalog your knowledge… today!

1. Increase your revenue - sell your knowledge globally to the highest bidder
2. Stop losing hard gained knowledge - knowledge is a “use it or lose it” kind of thing. If you don’t use on a regularly basis, you will lose it
3. Increase your knowledge by partnering with others - allow others with similar or complementary knowledge to find you, and increase your knowledge through collaboration
4. Become immune to economic slumps - did you know that South America is today a vibrant market, that is not suffering the effects of the economic recession? The world doesn’t experience recessions in the same way.
5. Enjoy life on your own terms - publish your knowledge on the web and become an independent knowledge worker. Ready to start preparing the jump away from corporate world?

Need assistince documenting your knowlegde?  Look no further by considering the oneCloud product line - click here to know more about oneCloud.

A lot of our customers asks me how long will it take them to load all the knowledge they acquired in the past, into their oneCloud Individual Edition.

The question varies tremendously, and basically depends on the number of projects in which you were involved in your professional career. It gets even worst if you also create original work such as videos, presentations, white papers, etc.  The reason for that is that most likely you had to access 2-3 different sources of knowledge to produce a product with minimum quality. Cataloging your knowledge will also require that you determine, to the best of your abilities, what those sources were.

The answer that I have give my customers, is that it will take between 5-10 hours per year of professional experience.  If you are like me, and you have almost 20 years of experience, that means that you’re are looking at 200 hours of work.  If you do 2 hours of week, that will take you close to a year. You can see my work in progress just on my books section of my oneCloud - http://filipe-pinto.com/books.

The good news is that, cataloging your knowledge going forward will be a lot easier, and that the quality of your work will increase because, you will have the ability to complement it, with past knowledge that, for the most part, you had forgotten.

What kind of person are you?  Are you a Mac person, or are you a Windows person?  Do you want to know what kind of a person I am?  Follow this blog and I will let you know at the end.

I believe that at this critical juncture in time, Apple has, for the first time, a chance to challenge Microsoft’s dominance.  The funny thing is that this possibility has nothing to with quality or performance.

People do not want quarter-inch drills. They want quarter-inch holes.
Professor Emeritus Theodore Levitt, Harvard Business School

You and I are not worried about an operating system. We want to do our work (faster, with more quality), so we can enjoy life. As software-as-a-service (SaaS) continues to mature, more and more applications (processes) become available on the web.  This means that browsers are now starting to take the role that operating system once had.

No matter how indifferent you might be about the operating system, you know the browser still needs it. Moreover, you need a warranty that your browser will delivery its utility (reach your sites on the web) as needed, with sufficient capacity, continuously and securely. In other words, you cannot realize the promised value of your computer when it is not fit for use.  Which brings me to the power of great video.

No virus, no crashes, no headaches.

Did you noticed on how in 30 seconds Apple explained the warranty?

This is the power of great video. Simple, short, clean. Addressing key words only.

See my point?

Would it be great if you could have great videos on your iCloud and weCloud? I agree with you. It would be a lot easier to explain to your customers what you or your business are all about.

Interested in knowing more about 3WC video products? Please click here.

…before I go… I told you that I would tell you what kind of person I am. Ok. I’m an OUTCOME person. Windows or Mac… doesn’t really matter.

Another Sad Outlook Story

In preparing my Outlook files for upload to GMail, as part of moving my life to the “cloud”, I ran into some terrible indexing problems. It began when I deleted several thousand emails, and then move several thousand emails into different folders to get organized. GMail can create a label by the same name as the Outlook folder, so I wanted everything in the proper folders before the big upload.

Outlook Says: 25595 items are still being indexed

After moving these files, I started getting this error. “Outlook is currently indexing your items. Search results may be incomplete because items are still being indexed”. 25595 items remaining in ‘Personal Folders’.” And the message was true, I couldn’t find all the email received in the last few days, and it was VERY frustrating.

How I Fixed It: Part 1

So I went on an internet search, and found that the indexing program doesn’t run when your laptop is in “Power Saver Mode”. I’m running Windows Vista, and from the Control Panel you can go to “Power Options” and most likely you are running in “Power Saver” mode to conserve your battery when not plugged-in. The trick is that the indexing doesn’t run in this mode, even when you are plugged-in, apparently to conserve some mysterious resources. So I switched to “High Performance” mode. BUT, I was still getting the same “still being indexed” message above, even after waiting overnight.

How I Fixed It: Part 2

I then discovered that there is an indexing option on Control Panel. From there, you can set a few options, and force re-indexing. It is here, that I learned that I didn’t have enough space to complete the indexing. One of my other issues has been that I got a laptop with a 32-Gigabyte solid state drive (and a 200GB hard drive). The vendor reserved about 7 Gig of the solid state drive for a recovery partition, and left poor Windows with only 25 Gig, not nearly enough. So I’ve been constantly running out of space on my hard drive, even after moving everything I could think of to the D-Drive.

Well, it turns out that the Outlook and File Index is also stored on the C-Drive (the Windows drive), and it can be changed.
From indexing options in the control panel, you can set what is being indexed and where the index is being stored.

You click the “Advanced” button, then you can enter a new disk path on a different drive, and click the “Select new” button - then just a couple of reboots later your index files are moved. Finally, after another night of anticipation, Windows had indexed my email, and I can once again search in Outlook and actually find what I’m looking for.

What can we learn from this sad story?

1. First, you still have to be a Windows engineer to properly run Outlook on a laptop.
   
2. Second, never get a small disk drive for you primary Windows drive (I think it’s going to take a new disk and a full reinstall of Windows to fix that issue).
   
3. Third, you have to be a guru. So even as an individual, I lose hours of my precious time every year, trying to make Windows happy. I thought software was supposed to make my life easier, not harder. And I’ve been in the Information Technology world for 28 years.
   
4. Fourth, or pay a lot of money. Imagine a busy executive, or a work-at-home Mom or an artist selling his artwork online. Who do these people turn to for such issues? They probably bother a friend, or give up their computer for a few days to the local computer store, which might charge them $75 to $300 to fix such pesky little issues.
   

Conclusion

I’m anxious to get all my email on the Google GMail cloud, so I won’t have to deal with these issues any more. It will also give me about 2-3 gigabytes of disk space back on my laptop hard drive! Another advantage is that I can then access my email and several years of archives from any computer connected to the internet, not just my own laptop.

I recently saw a list that showed the top 5 computer manufacturers:

1. HP
2. DELL
3. ACER
4. LENOVO
5. TOSHIBA

The above are all household names. BUT - the question seems to presume that the companies are resellers. According to Martin Reynolds, an analyst with the Gartner Group, “Google is the world’s fourth-largest maker of computer servers, after Dell, Hewlett-Packard and I.B.M.”.

Wow! Google has so many servers that they started manufacturing their own. It makes sense.
According to Wikipedia:

Though the numbers are not publicly known, some people estimate that Google maintains over 450,000 servers, arranged in racks located in clusters in cities around the world, with major centers in Mountain View, California; Council Bluffs, Iowa; Herndon, Virginia; Lenoir, North Carolina; Atlanta, Georgia; Dublin, Ireland; Saint-Ghislain, Belgium; Zürich, Switzerland; Tokyo, Japan; Beijing, China; …Racks are custom-made and contain 40 to 80 servers…
Servers are commodity-class x86 PCs running customized versions of Linux. The goal is to purchase CPU generations that offer the best performance per dollar, not absolute performance. Estimates of the power required for over 450,000 servers range upwards of 20 megawatts, which cost on the order of US$2 million per month in electricity charges.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_platform

Might I suggest that once you have over 100,000 servers, you consider manufacturing your own as well?

In case you have time, check this video, to have a better view of a Google datacenter.

Today, I received an email from a friend that went to Spain. He attached about 60 pictures from his trip.

As mentioned in my previous post, I’m in the process of converting Outlook to GMail. But even with GMail, I don’t need or want all his photos in my storage space. Here’s what he could have done.

So when my friend sends these HUGE picture, it just bloats the size of my Outlook PST files. I really do want to see his photos, but I don’t want them sitting in MY Outlook, on MY disk! And imagine, he copied about 10 other people on the email, so now all 10 of us have duplicate copies of his photos on our disks. What a waste!

I’ve tried to tell him to use Google’s Picasa service. He could have uploaded all his photos there, and then sent an email with NO pictures attached, just a URL to go view his pictures.

I need to start a serious education program for my friends!

With Cloud computing, you depend less (or not at all) on your own Personal computer. What this means is:

1. You can access (and even update) your website or systems from any web browser on any computer, yes even your friends MAC, PC, I-Phone, or internet cafe.
   
2. You don’t worry about backing-up your own personal computer, because all your data is backed up by automated processes that run the cloud.
   
3. 
   

There are some applications that do typically run only on a PC or MAC, for example intensive movie or photo editing software, but more and more, applications are moving to be web-based. This has been accelerated by new technologies and more friendly tools that make the web experience “richer”.

Let me give an example, comparing Outlook and GMail. I’ve been an Outlook user for probably 10 years. I have about 4 years of email on my laptop sitting in .PST files. I actually remember the days when I was scared to move my Outlook from a desktop to a laptop, because I wasn’t sure if the laptop had enough disk, speed, and power.

So, I could lose that entire history of email if either 1) I mess-up my own backups, and/or 2) My laptop is damaged or stolen. First, I risk losing email since the last backup. My Outlook files are huge, and I have to close Outlook to back them up, so I only do it every two or three weeks. I was backing them up to a Buffalo “Terradrive” but it died on me. I thought I had it protected with RAID, but I was wrong - and LOST EVERYTHING on the Terradrive. The backup takes several hours, and I had to buy special non-Microsoft software to back it up.

If I really wanted to be safe, I would also burn a DVD of my Outlook files, and mail to my parents or my accountant to have a good off-site backup - just in case of theft, tornado, or other home disaster.

The same would apply to your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. Do you back them up nightly? How many days of work do you risk losing? Are you backup procedures safe and secure? What if your home is robbed? Imagine how much data was lost in hurricane Katrina!

Right now, I’m moving all my Outlook to GMail, so a “little” company called Google can deal with the backup issues. They have thousands of brainy guys that spend 40-hours a work just worrying about stuff like that.

I’ll keep you posted on my “Cloud-ization” experience.