How it all begun

I was thinking hard what to write as the first blog post and it occurred to me that this might be an interesting topic since many people have asked us the same questions. Why are you starting your own venture when recession is ongoing? Would it be good to have a stable and decent income with an well-established company? What you choose to do this business? To me, it seemed like all predestined. I have just joined my previous company as a Systems Analyst and was asked to create a maintenance wiki of my system on the Mediawiki system (Mediawiki is the system that the Wikipedia is running on). That was my first exposure to wikis and hence begun my adventure with it. However, the initiative wasn’t that successful due to the limitations on the features. People are not adding new content because

• they are not comfortable with sharing everything with the entire organization and wanted some privacy within their teams
• information was hard to search
• very little traffic as the usage is very limited to documentations

Subsequently we migrated over to Confluence and I became one of the main evangelists pushing for wiki adoption at our workplace. Throughout the 4 years, I witnessed many benefits of using wikis in work (which I will share in subsequent blogposts) and also gained a lot of knowledge and experience through reading and practice. A confluence of factors lead to my decision to start Akeles Consulting:

• I have a deep belief that knowledge management will be valuable for many organizations
• I wanted to use my passion and experience to help more people and to make a difference to the world after reading Dan Pink’s The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need
• It made more economical sense for companies to hire external consultants
• There aren’t a lot of Chief Knowledge Officers in the corporate world. I have to create my own career path to pursue my belief and interests
• It will be easier to refine  the best practices and build up the experience by providing consulting to many companies instead of a single company
• One of the gurus, Stewart Mader went independent and launched his own consultancy
• The time was ripe. Recession is a good time to start a business as things are cheap and clients are more value seeking rather than brand conscious. In fact many long lasting companies were founded during the Great Depression

I hope we can share more interesting blog posts in the coming year. And I would like to wish you a Happy Year Ahead in 2009 🙂