The business landscape is changing from manufacturing to a knowledge economy, but most businesses are still run on managing money, i.e., budgets, revenue, and profits.  I contend that the expertise of professionals creates the real value in the knowledge economy.  While time and money are related, you can pay for more resources and get more time, but in the desire to create value for the customers, it is not that easy to throw money at creating more value.  Human resources are not as easily exchangeable as money is. A knowledge worker can be substituted with another person, but never entirely replaced. Likewise, I can instantaneously borrow money using a credit card or a line of credit, but I cannot as easily and quickly create the knowledge needed to run my business.

Time is the most precious commodity for business in the knowledge economy, but it is treated as expendable.  What is the real value of time?  Time defines how much duration we have as a human being.  As a person, we spend most of our time supporting our work.  For example, if you ask a person ‘who are you?’, they will answer ‘I am a lawyer, an engineer, an accountant’ and so forth. They will answer according to their line of work.  We as humans spend the most productive years of our lives towards our professions.  What is the value of our lives?  To understand the value of our lives, ask a 40-year-old cancer patient on how much money should be spent on granting them a few more months or years of living productively.  The point is that time is more limited than money, especially when it comes to people with specialized skills in the knowledge economy, yet the financial systems are developed to only focus on the money.  I want to emphasize that businesses need to manage the time of their resources much more effectively than their financial budgets.

So what needs to be done?  The finance people can continue to manage their budgets in monetary value, but managers of the people should be focused on maximizing the value of time of their human resources.  My observation is that we have a popular profession of finance and accounting focused on money and budgets, but in the knowledge economy, we also need professionals with expertize in maximizing human capital.  Again, humans work in hours and minutes, not in dollars and cents.

How can managers budget human resources in time when they need to use time as the tool to manage a business and not money?  We need to look at our time budgets and figure out if we are using time in the most resourceful method.

Firms have expense tracking policies, but they throw away endless time without much scrutiny or thought in meetings and socialization.  The bigger the firm, the more of the waste. Technology changes that behavior.  The current technologies, techniques, and systems are designed more towards budgeting and managing money. We need to create tools that also effectively managing and budgeting time. We care about how much money is spent on parking, but we fail to realize how much money is wasted in meetings.

TimeSolv’s budgeting and project planning tools change the thought process of the managers and their knowledge workers.  When a manager has planned time down to each task for each professional, they naturally become more focused and productive by making the best use of the most precious resource of their lives.  When they achieve tasks per the budget, the company succeeds and the employees have a much higher sense of self-worth, self-esteem, progress, and security of their future.  TimeSolv’s tools change how your business will maximize the use of the precious use of time and expertize.