This Friday I will be speaking at the 3rd Learning & Development Forum in Athens. Virtually. From Berlin.

I don't know Greek, so I am taking on faith that this is complementary:

Ο επινοητής του όρου “eLearning” και βετεράνος της βιομηχανίας του λογισμικού και της εκπαίδευσης, Jay Cross, θα είναι ομιλητής στο 3rd Learning & Development Forum, που διοργανώνει η Boussias Communications και το περιοδικό HR Professional, με τη στήριξη του ΣΣΔΠ την Παρασκευή 3 Δεκεμβρίου 2004 (09.00-18.00), στο πολιτιστικό κέντρο ΔΑΪΣ, στο Μαρούσι. Αντικείμενο της παρουσίασης του Cross θα είναι η ανάλυση της ουσίας, των πλεονεκτημάτων και του τρόπου εφαρμογής του Informal Learning στις επιχειρήσεις.

Ο Cross ήταν ο πρώτος που από το 1996 «πάντρεψε» την εκπαίδευση με την τεχνολογία και το διαδίκτυο. Είναι Διευθύνων Σύμβουλος του Emergent Learning Forum, ενός think tank 1.800 μελών από τους χώρους της εκπαίδευσης, της τεχνολογίας και των επιχειρήσεων, φιλοξενώντας μια παγκόσμια συζήτηση για φλέγοντα ζητήματα στο eLearning.

As it says, my topic is Informal Learning.

This morning I received a German eLearning ezine that looks quite interesting. Of course, I was drawn to this item:

Casual learning the whole week
Informal learning is considered to be more flexible

The Internet Time Group has examined the differences between informal and formal learning approaches. The informal approach wins the race, is their opinion. It offers just-in-time, rapid access to always up to date and pragmatic information that complies with the users needs. CHECKpoint eLearning had the opportunity to ask the expert Jay Cross some questions about the topic. more



I read through past issues of CHECKpoint eLearning, thinking to brush up on my very rusty (and never that good) command of German. My vocabulary is better than I remembered. Samples of eLearning-Deutsch:

Neue Killerapplikation oder nur quick and dirty?
edu.tainment ist ein multimediales Magazin fuer das computerbasierte Soft Skill-Training.

Eine Lernstufe kaufen - eine Lernstufe gratis erhalten
Herausgeber der Multimedia-Sprachkurse "Tell Me More" und "Talk To Me"

In sechs Wochen zum WBT-Autor
Time4you schult nach dem "Learning by Doing"-Konzept

eLearning im Supermarkt?
Die Oesterreichische Baumarkt-Gruppe bauMax testet in ihrer Filiale in Tulln das Konzept "Store as a Medium". Installiert wurden mehrere Plasma-Screens

Wunderbar!

Want to understand Workflow Learning and what all the fuss is about? Take twenty mintues to listen to my keynote presentation from the Workflow Learning Symposium. The Debut of Workflow Learning just went up online.

Ted Cocheu and his team at Altus Learning sync'd the slides with the video, so you can hop around (red arrow) if you get bored.

My talk leads into a presentation by Gloria Gery. When Gloria came up with the notion of electronic performance support systems, it was a radical way of thinking. We finally have the IT horsepower to implement what Gloria has been suggesting. Here's rough sketch of the antecedents of Workflow Learning.

Family Tree

An informal family tree for workflow learning.

If the notion of fusing work and learning rings your bells, please join us for the presentation and for other Workflow Symposium events now online.

Emergent Learning Forum CEO's Letter

Business.

The bottom line is, well, the bottom line. If investors don't understand the education business, funding stops and times get rough. Hence, some of our members must pay attention to the business of learning. Luckily, the Forum has a friend who is the leading analyst of our area.

Trace Urdan has helped us read the financial tea leaves on numerous occasions, both at our sessions and by sharing his weekly newsletters. Our archive keeps several years of analysis online.

Trace and his team (Connie Weggen and Jeff Lee) recently joined R.W. Baird, one of the largest investment firms in the country not headquartered in New York. The prestigious 2004 Greenwich Associates survey of U.S. small and mid cap fund managers ranks Baird No. 1 in "most independent and objective research" and "overall research and analyst services quality."

This morning we received the second issue of Class Notes from Baird. Click the "Industry Info" button on the Emergent Learning Forum home page to access our library of analyst reports.

Trace shared his take on market trends at the Workflow Learning Symposium. It describes a startling change in the emergent learning landscape.

• "Wall Street is terminally unimpressed."
• "Learning cannot be imposed by software."
• "Consumption, not content is king."

Remember the glory days? 1999, 2000.

• Old paradigm (circa 2000): $60+ billion market
• New reality: $6+ billion market.

Yesterday's dominant model was a Venn diagram of content, delivery, and services. Tomorrow it's outsourcing, enterprise apps, and business information.



Cross-posted to Workflow Institute Blog

I'll be attending Online Educain Berlin in next week. This is a great conference, bringing together government, corporate, and education pros from all over Europe and, increasingly, all over the world. Celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, Online Educa has grown larger than TechLearn.

Next year, perhaps I'll lead an American contingent to Berlin. Heaven only knows, we Americans are going to have to forge individual cross-border bonds if our government continues to tear up treaties and act unilaterally. Next week's agenda is so chock full of friends that returning to Online Educa feels more like a class reunion than a conference.

Berlin is festive this time of year.





I'm speaking at 11:45 on Thursday, December 2nd, on the topic of Collaboration and Informal Learning in a session on E-Learning Strategies in Companies and Public Sector Enterprises.

After the conference, Uta and I plan to drive to Dresden and then wind our way northwest to her hometown of Braunschweig. Travel tips are appreciated. The last time we crossed some of this territory, it was on a sealed train guarded by soldiers in jack boots.

I spent the better part of the day learning to use QuickBooks and dumping the year's data into its maw, something I should have done long ago. It makes one feel more like a pro than my former reporting system; that was made up of Excel spreads, Post-It notes, and selected emails. Learning was going fine until I needed to erase a few duplicate transactions. Trying to stay with the metaphor, I looked for an official way to erase mistakes. Ninety minutes later I found that Intuit had jumped out of the metaphor itself. The Delete function is listed on the Edit menu.

Having fried my brain toting up receipts for every airport lunch consumed this year and similar trivia, I turned to a project I've had rolling around in the back of my head for some time: harvesting and posting the best of my blog content. It's a work in progress. I'm populating pages on twenty different topics with white papers, links, hints, presentations, and whatever else seems useful.

Take a look here if you are curious or would like to help out.

Select a TopicArtilcesBlogsCommunityDesigneLearningEmergent Learning ForumFirst PrinciplesGlossaryHow People LearnImplementationKnowledge ManagementLearning StandardsMeta-LearningMetricsPsychologySocial SoftwareString TheroyTimeVisual LearningWorkflow InstituteWorld Clock

At first I called this "Internet Time Archives," but then realized that could be confused with traditional blog archives. Hence, I call this new section "Keepers."

expect typos: this is live.

Midway through this afternoon, I checked my gmail and found an invitation from Jeff Ubois to a meeting on Open Source a few hours later at the Hillside Club, which is less than a mile from my house. How could I resist? Now I'm sitting about 5' from the CEO of MySQL, a founder of Apache, the author of SendMail, the leader of BSD, and Kim Polese, now running a start-up to marry Open Source software with commercial enterprise. Here they are, in just that order:

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Kim Polese -- 20 years in the software industry. went to cal. grew up here. her interest = applying cool software to solve problems. start-up reduces the complexity in conglomerates of open source components. Moving up the stack...honored and excited to be part of it.

I told Kim I knew her only by reputation, but I was curious what it felt like to be the exemplar of woman-in-the-driver's-seat in Silicon Valley when she made her mark leading Marimba. (Kim was the Anna Kornikova of pre-crash Silicon Valley, the difference being that Kim had more than looks.) She said it made it awkward to engage with people publically, but that her goal throughout was to lead her team to success. Celebrity opens doors. She took it as a passing phase, ho-hum.

Kirk McKusick -- got into Open Source in the mid 70s when "I was plopped into an office with Bill Joy." Kirk could have been a single digit employee at Sun when Bill left to found it, but Kirk decided to study for his Ph D. Continued with BSDi. Linux vs BSD is secondary; the issue is Open Source. The Fortune 500 buys it.

Things that make Open Source interesting: How do you organize it? Relying on volunteers who will do what they want to do. They're transicent. You need a structure that allows you to bring in new people and get them to move through it.

What are the issues for Open Source today? Licensing is working pretty wall. The patent law is more problematic.

Erik Allman. Best known for writing SendMail. SendMail was a classic scratch-your-itch situation. We had a very open-source ethos at Berkeley. Erik's first computer was an IBM 1401. The IBM SHARE conference was hot stuff in the late 60s. This is not a new movement.

The stuff that's really successful is infrastructure pieces developed by people writing software for themselves and their peers. You know the problem you're trying to solve. This doesn't work as well for apps. OpenOffice is nice but it doesn't hold a candle to MS Word.

Open Source is not something separate and pure, apart from commercial osftware. The big things are hybrids. Apple builds things on top of open-source software. Linux, the poster child for Open Source, is heavily supported by HP and IBM.

Brian Behlendorf. While a student at Cal in '91, switched from physics to computer science. Set up a Gopher site (lots of time on his hands while doing maintenance for Haas School of Business) that also ran HTTP. Watched the scientists (Berners-Lee et alia) discussing the basics. Not Commie; just radical inclusiveness as the norm. Around '94, became the sysadmin for Wired. Was using the NCSA webserver. Sent in contributions to the code; no one heard back. Netscape was being founded. Nerds began trading software patches since the brains at NCSA had left to join Netscape.

Rumor had it that Netscape was going to be charging $1000 a server for their code. Screw that.

Brian came up with the name of the last tribe to fight it out: Apache. A colleague said it was a good play on words: they'd been trading patches. A-patch-ee.

Soon, Apache had 65% market share. And kept it.

Marten Mickos, CEO, MySQL. Made the mistake of graduating (Hold it, says Erik: I graduated). In '97, after Marten had tried to discourage the founder of MySQL from getting into the Open Source business, the concept began to gain traction. Open Source has been able to stretch from extremely commercial to extremely noncommercial. Money is not the measure of everything.

Forking. The right to revolution. If I disagree with Linus Torwalds, I can build on his code and go in another direction. The good managers try to keep the team on path.

Brian explains the world to newbies:

1. GPL -- viral. Free as in freedom. Intended to build a larger and larger pool of free software.

2. BSD license school. Says this body of work has value -- and you'll give us credit as you go forward. It's a huge giveaway. For Apache, we didn't want anyone to have an excuse not to use it. As a result, Apache code has been incorporated into IBM, Sun, and other offerings. * * * Kirk: Plus People are encouraged to contribute code; then they won't have to put changes back in with every new release.

OSI -- Open Source Initiative. You can't restrict how people use code.

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How Berkeley... The audience is starting to hurl pointed questions to the panel. Arthur Keller is asking about openness in general, e.g. voting machines with paper trails. Marten responds that trust comes from openness and that's the way the world is going. * * * Ray Bruman: Microsoft has almost lost control about security. Walter Mossberg is warning people in the WSJ not to use Windows without massive protections.... Why hasn't open source crushed them like a bug? Erik: Excel is hot. PowerPoint is a pretty reasonable tool. Word is a push. Programmers don't give presentations or run Excel what-ifs. OpenOffice -- all the documentation in still in German. In order for any Open Source to succeed, you need a critical mass of programmers. OpenOffice didn't have it.

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Irony. How about Bernard Maybeck as inspiration for software instead of the current technocrats? No pattern language. Rather, a visionary whose brain synthesized beautiful design with his neurons. The software school of beaux arts.

Brian: What if automobiles came with the hood welded shut? Would people care?

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The Hillside Club is a treasure. Some background:

Hillside club promoted idea of simple and healthy living
By Susan Cerny (06-30-01)

Berkeley Observed

Looking back, seeing ahead


In 1898 a group of north Berkeley women founded a club devoted to educating the public on the healthful benefits of living simply in homes designed to provide plenty of fresh air, sunlight and greenery.

The club was called the Hillside Club. The ideals promoted by the club were published in pamphlets and distributed to the public.

In reaction to the excesses of the Victorian Age, the club advocated that homes should be simple and free of unnecessary decoration; wood siding should be left unpainted to weather naturally; and interiors should be filled with handmade or homemade furniture and decorative objects.

The club believed that the benefits of country living could be developed in Berkeley, thereby creating a new kind of city that was in harmony with the landscape.

Writer and naturalist Charles Keeler, a great proponent of this “arts and crafts” philosophy and an important influence in the founding of the Hillside Club, wrote a book “The Simple Home” in 1904 that describes how to achieve such a house.

Architect Bernard Maybeck, whose name is associated with the concept of “building with nature,” designed his first “simple home” for Keeler at the top of Ridge Road in 1895.

The house was built of unpainted redwood, both inside and out, and all the construction members were left exposed. Soon the north Berkeley hillside was covered with unpainted wood-sided houses set in lushly informal gardens.

Even the neighborhood public Hillside School was designed in the rustic, back-to-nature style.

It was built in 1915.

It was covered with unpainted brown shingles and its wide covered porch was supported with posts of unpeeled redwood logs.

The children went to school in a building very much like the homes they lived in.

On September 17, 1923, a raging wildfire swept down from Wildcat Canyon destroying much of the early hillside neighborhood including the original Hillside School.

Only a few of the early homes north of the university campus still stand.

From September's Harvard Business Review

Seven techniques can help you get control of your top management agenda and make sure meeting time is spent building value.

1. Deal with operations separately from strategy.

2. Focus on decisions, not on discussions.

3. Measure the real value of every item on the agenda.

4. Get issues off the agenda as quickly as possible.

5. Put real choices on the table.

6. Adopt common decision-making processes and standards.

7. Make decisions stick.

Long post below.

Looking for Service Innovations for the 21st Century? Start here. Or click on one of these: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Google Scholar debuted on Thursday. Here's the buzz, followed by my experience using it "to stand on the shoulders of giants."

Google Graduates to Vertical Search
Motley Fool

By Rich Duprey
November 19, 2004

Google Scholar is a free service that searches peer-reviewed papers, books, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature. It accesses information from universities, professional societies, and academic publishers, then orders the results based on the relevance to the query and even lists how many times that particularly reference has been cited. Users can then click on the citations for further research. Many of the search hits lead users to sites that require password access. While that means you might not be able to read the entire text of the documents (unless you have access), it does bring to the fore areas that were previously hidden to searchers.

Scholar was a project dreamed up during "20% time," that is, the time Google allows its employees to sit around dreaming up cool stuff. Other Google features created during such free-thinking hours include Froogle, Local Search, spell-checking, and "define" -- getting the definition of words simply by typing in "define" and the word you want the meaning of in the search box.

ResourceShelf:

The world of online "scholarly" research is changing today as Google introduces Google Scholar. This specialized new interface -- which will NOT be linked from Google's main search page -- will allow users to search a treasure chest of "scholarly material."

Search Engine Watch:

"The goal is to allow and enable users to search over scholarly content," said Anurag Acharya, a Google engineer leading the project.

Much of this material has been added to Google over the past few months. However, the new service allows searchers to specifically search against just the academic material.

Google has worked with publishers to gain access to some material that wouldn't ordinarily be accessible to search spiders, because it is locked behind subscription barriers.

For example, in a search for search engines, the current fifth site listed is for a paper called "ProFusion: Intelligent fusion from multiple, distributed search engines." That paper is only available to those with password access to material within the Journal Of Universal Computer Science, which comes with a subscription.

Normally, such material would never get spidered by search engines such as Google, so the material would be "invisible" to web searchers. But Google's made arrangements with publishers to get into these password areas.

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Test Drive

Input: Brian Arthur (top of mind; I was reading him last night)
Output: Many pages of abstracts, citations, and full-text articles. Sometimes, pre-publication submissions of research papers. Some password-protected dead ends; other cite "No abstract available." Complete citations on abstract pages are great; downloadable source material is so marked.


Input: Tom Clancy (who is obviously not academic)
Output: The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, The Cardinal of the Kremlin, and Circulating T-cell response to Helicobacter pylori infection in chronic gastritis. Whoops. That last one is by another Clancy.


Input: Stephen Downes
Output: The economics of online learning; Kierkegaard, a Kiss, and Schumann's Fantasie; Agents and Norms in the New Economics of Science. Clearly, there are a lot of people named Stephen Downes. The Canadian researcher and blogger doesn't use his middle initial, so you must eyeball each entry to find the Stephen you are looking for.


Input: Multiple Intelligences
Output: Many, many links to Howard Gardner's books and articles, as well as derivative works by others. Here's a great feature: Click a book. The WorldCat service has a box on the book's page titled "Find this item in a library." I entered my zip code and found that JFK University and University of Santa Clara have the book I was checking. Another click pops me into their card catalogs: both universities list the book as CHECK SHELF.

Will I use this service? Only occasionally. That's because I'm fortunate to have a library card at a major research university within walking distance of my house. Cal has oodles of libraries. However, when I visit in person, I'll arrive better prepared. And I expect I'll spend significantly less time hunched over a green-screen monitor on a shelf in the bowels of the library.

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Speaking of school, click this:

Today I received an email from SAP saying that they were closing down their Community Member Rewards program. The letter explained, "Many of our members were discouraged from interacting due to the lack of helpful interactions they were seeing in our Executive Blogs and forums. As we strive to keep the SAP Community an important source of desirable information, the large amount of 'good blog' and 'I agree' comments diluted the value in our members' eyes. Therefore, to stop the trend we have made this decision."

Well, okay. I'm not a member of the SAP Community. I'm not a customer. Never have been. Then I noticed that the letter came from. Walldorf. Humbug! I've been there. One L, not two. It's Waldorf.

It's getting to the point that you can hardly trust anything you read these days.

Summary Page

On November 17 & 18, 2004, IBM hosted an inquiry to explore "services science" at its Almaden Research Center that attracted a wonderful, multidisciplinary crowd of original thinkers from academia, government, and the corporate sphere as well as IBM itself.

Services (the wrong name but the only one we've got for products that are created and consumed at the same time) account for 80% of the GDP. Having grown up in an era when industrial-age thinking was top dog, government and management are in denial that the service sector is meaningful. There is no agreement on metrics or best practices, and few have studied how to make services more effective. The session at Almaden was designed as a wake-up call and an invitation to join a nascent community of practice.

I blogged the event as it happened. This record is incomplete and I plan to add to it. IBM will be posting many of the presentations and resources, so I don't replicate them here. Your suggestions and corrections are most welcome. This is my real-time interpretation of what was being said; consider it totally unofficial.

Agenda | Breakout Sessions | Blog entries 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

IBM's Almaden Researh Center sits atop a beautiful
piece of rugged, open parkland south of San Jose.


The Lab (white arrow) houses more that 400 IBM researchers,
more than half of them Ph.D-level scientists and engineers.


This is where the relational database, SQL, and the
little red Trackpoint on my ThinkPad were invented.

This was a fine event. I love it when I head to bed, knowing that I'll awake the next morning full of new insights ""the boys in the backroom" have come up with.

Robert Vastine, US Coalition Service Industry. CSI, founded 1982, is 45 service companies who collectively have 2.2 million employees and more revenue than Canada. Goal of CSI is to educate about role of services in US economy. www.globalservicesnetwork.com Services role in the US very poorly understood. Developing adequate measures slow but steady effort. BLS' new Quarterly Service Survey, BEA refinement of measures of trade/investment, recent Brookings book on services productivity. The Federal Government thinks service workers are hamburger flippers; more likely they are professionals.

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Roland Rust, U Maryland. Spurring Service Innovation. Boom in the service sector is attributable to the growing role of information. Manufacturing companines are service businesses. GM woke up when their cars no longer made a profit but their financing arm does. The Business Reality: goods are comodities; service sells the product. Current research (Fornell & Rust 2004) shows that customer satisfaction drives aggregate consumer spending.

The Bottom Line.
Service Innovatoin --> Customer Saisfaction --> Consumer Spending --> GPD. Most service is a longtemr trend.

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Summaries

Organization, Technology, People. Business and innovation issues: How to make customers effective co-producers? What services can be effectively produced through self-service? How to collaborate effectively within the value chain? Social issues: Where does the time go? What are the human-capacity limits on technology use? What is the impact of services on quality of life?

Growth and Optimization. Need formal ways of studying service creation, predict performance, identify growth opportunities, optimization opportunities. Challenge: two orders of magnitude. What's the low hanging fruit? Productivity isn't the only measure. (How about labor, asets, costs, outsourcing.) Why has KM failed in the past? How much commodity stuff should an IBM bring to the party?

Productivity and Client Satisfaction. How do you meausre performance? How do you improve them? Services is an act of value transfer. A business model in which acgtivites are conducted to exchange values. Services can be both transaction based (facial treatment), on going evolution-based services (a one-year hair-care package), a service over time continuously (an insurance policy). Giant issues: How do you measure the intangible? Manage customer expectations.

Data and Policy. Privacy. Confidentiality. Standards. Fairness. Quality of data. Ethics of data collection. Firewalls. Government intervention.

Models and Decisions. Emerging network of agents. Do models need to be predictive? Or merely useful? Descriptive and explanatory.

Analytics and Metrics. Interest in controlling/improving service delivery. Metrics drive behavior. Wrong metrics drive wrong behavior. Current metric frameworks over-applied.

Strategy and Transformation. Types of service: direct delivery, physical/hands-on, knowledge-worker delivered, information/automation. Aspects of strategy: scope, modeling, goals, value, lifecycle models, barriers to entry and exit, disruptions. Culture. Third-world models.

More to come...but time has run out for today.

Day 2. Jim: Service Innovation is going to be the key thing business and nations talk about. People have asked for a definition and taxonomy of services. Mike: Coming up with a definition is part of the reason for this meeting. Service: value-based relationship.

Jay: I feel that talking about service and products (and even about clients and providers) leads us to a false dichotomy. Service is co-created, not one side or the other. The "client" sometimes provides; the "provider" sells.

Scott Sampson, Associate Professor, Marriott School of Management, Brigham Young, provides an academic perspective. GDP is 80% services already. "Most people still view the world trough manufacturing goggles," says Fred Reichheld, Bain & Co. And indeed there are few courses in this major area. Academia invented functional silos! We pigeonhole everything into a discipline. "I may not be talking about your school." In manufacturing, it's more clear what department is in charge of each function; it works; students are prepared for real jobs.

The 7 Roles of Service Customers.

1. Customer = supplier. "With services, customers provide signicant inputs into the production process." There's service supply chain management. Patients bring the cavities to the dentist. Fliers bring suitcases name tags and not dynamite.


2. Customers provide the labor. With services, customer-labor may ignore, avoid, or reject technologies or process improvements (innovations)...What do providers want from customer-labor? Competence.
   
   
3. Customer = QC. With services, the customer-product is averse to rework, and remembers any experience with inspection and rework." Process vs. outcome? Damage of the attitude in rework.
   
   
4. Customer = product. Customer as inventory. Move it out. Don't put the customer in storage for a year.
   
   
5. Customer = quality assessment. In process.
   
   
6. Customer = design consultant. Experiential design. Customer feedback systems. Service blueprintns.
   
   
7. Customer = customer. The chief competitor is the customers who can provide the service thense

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How do we measure expectations?

Suvrajeet Sen, National Science Foundation. OR and Service Enterprise Engineering. A service is an action or a series of actions in response to customer requests arising from a desire to change states. "Any discipline that has to add science to its name probably isn't."

The next presentations were primarily informational, so it's best to look at their slides to get the details of their academic programs.

Is this science? Or is it engineering and optimization? That leaves out the human element. What do we call this? Customer Science? Co-creation? Customer Arts?

Service Oriented Architecture
Yesterday, MIT's Carl Hewitt asked a panel yesterday of the likely impact of Service Oriented Architecture. One panelist talked about the danger of hackers and another talked of how his company looked at things. Amazing as it seems, many people here don't seem to "get" the power of web services. In a breakout session, my suspicion was confirmed. Neither professors nor people from IBM Global Services understood the importance of web services!

On Tuesday, at TechLearn, I addressed SOA and web services and their potential impact on learning and suggested that SOA is inevitable because it's:

• Incremental, pay-as-you-go
• Overlays existing infrastructure
• Lays foundation for interoperability
• Provides componentized flexibility
• Gives process owner ability to execute
• Lower-cost maintenance
• No vendor lock-in
• Shortens time to get things done
• Extreme payback

The Workflow Institute has lots of material on this. And I'll write up an article on it here

This passage from Blur strikes me as relevant to the discussions here.

Forget products.
Forget services.

They're converging. Blur talks about "a meltdown of all traditional boundaries...

In the BLUR world, products and services are merging. Buyers sell and sellers buy. Neat value
chains are messy economic webs. Homes are offices. No longer is there a clear line between structure and process, owning and using, knowing and learning, real and virtual. Less and less separates employee and employer. In the world of capital, itself as much a liability as an asset--value moves so fast you can't tell stock from flow. On every front, opposites are blurring."

Davis calls product-service hybrids "offers." He writes that vendors
who sell unconnected, stand-alone products "will be viewed as no better than snake oil salesmen..." The "offer" seeks to create a lifelong relationship.

Davis presents these "Management Mindsets" for products, services, and the offer hybrids.

Source: Internet Time Archives

Tim O’Reilly was our dinner speaker for the Almaden function.

"A change in worldview that calls everything you know into question."

Open Source

||s IBM-PC & Open Source
How many use Linux every day? Google? PayPal.? Then you use Linux.

Source code is not distributed and it wouldn’t be useful to many developers if it were.

Licenses triggered by binary software distribution have no effect.

Most Open Source apps are wildly proprietary

The Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits, HBR Feb 2004-11-17
“When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value chain because a product becomes modular and commoditized, the opportunity to ear attractive profits with proprietary products will usually emerge at an adjacent stage.”

The PC stack, lock-in by data, and the top is lock-in by network effect.

The Long Tail by Chris Anderson in Wired.

LAMP: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP or Perl or Python

Scripting languages weren’t getting any respect. Why the P matters so much. Babbage actually played the Mechanical Turk (the chess automaton) in 1820. (An inspiration). A man inside the machine. Finance.yahoo.com had a programmer between the ticker and the service. Often you find a lot of workers inside.

The Architecture of Participation. Linus Torvalds. Windows source code wouldn’t have helped. It’s built as a monolith.

User Relationship -or- Commodization

eBay --- the user is the service. Google – page rank, which is of course user-dependent. Amazon – no natural place, but further along. Amazon: middle copy: most popular. Central list is a combo of everything they know about this title.

Amazon: What they own is the relationship with their suppliers. Not duplicable by any of their competitors. Barnes & Noble: Their #1 book is something they publish. Nothing drawn from users.

Mapquest. Still a commodity. No tie to the users. NAVTEQ is the sole source of map content. An Intel-Insde kind of play. Tim figures it goes to the data level. “Control the data and you control the world.” Jeff Bezos, with ASIM, will end up with the namespace for physical products.

Paradigmatic advice a la Tim: Find ways to have increasing participation to increase your profits. How to architect systems to give you this sort of advantage?

Red Hat. They drew the circle around a component, not the integrated whole.

Rules of the New Paradigm
1. Leverage commodity economics of open source software suppliers
2. Understand why Perl, Python and PHP have been so important in web-based services
3. Create a system in which users help to build the value of the platform
4. Understand the power of data as the “Intel Inside”

“Perl is the duct tape of the Internet.”

Software as a service, including user-contributed data, requires an entirely new approach. Up and down the stack. What data are you going to own? What can you create that they cannot?

“I am an inventor. I become interested in long term trends because an invention has to make sense in the world in which it is finished, not the world in which it is started.” Ray Kurzweil

Brent Lowensohn, Kaiser

Building the Care Product Institute. Bottom line: Too many visits, too few providers. Great healthcare; sick people don't die; they get an additional chronic disease. Not enough doctors, not enough nurses. We spend $1 trillion on chronic disease alone. Change is slow. Self-service is the answer.

Care Product Institute's goal is to push healthcare services out of the expensive system and into the home.

Peter Gassner, Salesforce.com. Build or buy? No, subscribe. On-demand utility. Chief electricity officer was once a real position.

Traditional CRM 50% odds of success, 17 mnth breakeven, go live after 12 months

salesforce.com >90% success, 6 month breakeven, go live in 6 weeks

web servicess move IT up the value chain

less manufacturing of systems, more service up the value chain

We see what our customers are doing

Luke Hughes, Accenture. Service innovation through technology. ubiquitous internet (putting it out into the real world).

Sensor advances go with scientific revolutions (Galileo)l Where business is conducted.

Personal reality online. Pull out your medicine. RFID tells you if you grabbed the wrong one. Online playroom. Online wardrose. Personal awareness assistant. Virtual home services.

Marcello Hoffman, SRI Consulting - Business Intelligence. Making sense: from data to infromation, to knowledge, to insight; converting organzational knowledge into value as perceived by client; how to quantify the value of information for planning purposes; and how to differentiate in a clutter of intangible competitors.

Andy Hines, futurist & ideation leader, dow Chemical. True believes in Open Innovation from Henry Chesborough. New management comes on board. Dow as choreographer.

Ramu Sunkara, Oracle. everything is fastere and this is just the start. Increasingly virtual, mobile world. IP world. 800 million users of internet every day. 1.3 billon mobile telephones, all of which will become IP. 43 day process cut to 3 days thanks to internet technology. The 3rd generation enterprise will be 100% real time.

Gary DeGregorio, Motorola. Better definitions of services, getting closer to the customer. Motorola involved in services innovation for last ten years of its 70+ year history. Decisions, plans & scendarios, and requirements don't talk with one another. Consolidate them with Strategy Architecture Design. Baseline requirements, decision frameworks, planning forecasts. This is also a catalyst for collaboration. Motorola used the model with customers, asking "What can we and you do together that others cannot?"

---

Service Oriented Architecture: Important?

Yes, says Andy of salesforce.com; a third of his traffic goes through web services. Soon it will surpass. It is the fundamental way to create an ecosystem. Let's hope the standards stay simple and in place. Ramu: no question.

Bob Johansen, Institute for the Future

Andrea Saveri, Technology Horizons Program, IFTF

10 years into the future. They have been doing 10-year forecasts for 27 years now, making the Institute one of the few futures research firms to outlive its forecasts.

services, ART, and sciences. Key - era of the engaged customer. More demanding. And current customers are not happy campers.

Army War College now calls itself VUCA university. Virtual, Uncertain, Complexity, Ambiguity

Key transformation...

From provisioning goods and services to catalyzing experiences & transformation

Rethinking property rights required

Steady, explosive growth in services. Demographics, more choice, competition, internet, mobile & pervasive computing

Business services and institutional (health) services have tripled in the past 30 years but consumer services are mostly flat. Consumer complaints tripled 1995-2000.

Triangle. Services reflect comploex interdependence. Understand consumer content. Value intangible assets. Make complex knoweldge transfers. Mobilize diverse information, data, expertise.

Innovation: Platform oriented (cf. eBay & its trust mgt program). Social and transactional networks (Microsoft Netscan for cooperative problem solving). Cooperation based. New practices (world building games like Second Life).

Final line: Services Arts & Sciences.

IBM Almaden Research Center
Service Innovations for the 21st Century
November 17-18, 2004

Jim Cortada
IBM Global Services

author of 50 books. Has been working on a 3-book series on the role of technology over the last half century

Past -- Present -- Future
all businesses are in the services business. Some just don't realize it. Services have been, are, and will continue to be vitally important. In the factory, fewer than 10% are bending metal.

All industries implement new services incrementally but continuously, borrowing from fellow companies and other industries. It's evolution, not revolution.

Speakers will have seven minutes to make a presentation. After half a dozen iterations, we'll open up to Q&A.

Tom Hein, John Deere. Plows to tractors to construction equipment, to credit ('58), healthcare ('85), and tech services ('98). Well diversified. * * * Deere offers a GPS-based reference signal that enables a farmer to position a piece of equipment within 3 cms. * * * Ag market: industrial farming and "recreational farming" (where they do it for fun: the only growth sector). * * * Business process optmization, moving innovation through established channel * * * Future needs: repeatable process for designing and implementing services.

Bill McAllister, Siemens Power Generation. 1998 acquired Westinghouse Power Generation BU. Heavy manufacturing. What's new here? The first power plant was in 1885; probably the service plan for that plant was their second sale. Bill wonders if he's just here to explain to the adolescents in the IT marketplace how a mature industry operates. Service innovation is a major focus in Bill's business.

Alec McMillan, Rockwell Automation. Automation standards and conformity. Once created, standards never go away. Think about government as a partner.

Surinder Prakash, IBM. Best practices. GE, Siemens, and IBM all focused on services from the top. Service Evolution is from traditional product to product-related services and finally to services innovation. Need execution: The Paper Jam at Xerox Gets Worse. It's all about the customer. You've got to have the skills. A robust deliver infrastructure. Solution companies are not built in a day. Execution, Execution, Execution.

Scott Matthews, The Boeing Company. Structured flexibility and management leverage: value capture with real options. Real Options. The right to start, stop, or modify a business activity at some future time. Contingent -- do what is right at the time. Options are valuable because they provide access to significant upside potential while containing downside losses.

Christian Crews, Pitney Bowes, Futures Strategy. Jim Collins, "Some of the most amazing inventions in history are not technology or products; they're social innovations." We're beyond the services economy; we're in the experience economy. Ray Kurzweil: The law of accelerating returns. Industry creation to Product Era to Service Era to Business Process Era. (Check this chart on the follow-on slides.) "We're moving to becoming experts in our customers' business so we can help them help their customers." Dator's Law: Any useful statement about the future should seem ridiculous.

---

A question about the impact of Service Oriented Architecture was answered by responses about the web ("We can't afford to have someone hack a power generating plant.") This strikes me as old-school thinking.

Providing the best solution probably requires more than one supplier. SOA is the road to providing joint solutions in real time. Yet Boeing, Siemens, and Deere reply with "we," as if their company is the sole provider.

IBM Almaden Research Center
Service Innovations for the 21st Century
November 17-18, 2004

Global Innovation Outlook

Needless to say, Almaden has wi-fi, so I'll be updating this blog throughout the event.

Mark Dean, VP in charge of the Almaden Research Center (500 researchers working atop a hill in the middle of a beautiful, immense park south of San Jose). Focus today is service innovations. If we don't find a better way to implement services, we're going to run out of people. Mark is looking for greater simplicity in systems and computing. (If his mom can't run it, it's too complicated, and she can't remember to press the Start key to cut off her laptop.) IBM in general, and Jim Spohrer in particular, is founding the discipline of Service Systems, much as it developed Computer Science as an academic discipline 1950-73.

Ironically for a meeting on this topic, we arrived early, as requested, only to be told that we'd have to wait 15 minutes in the lobby while registration was set up.

Jim Spohrer shows that 70% of the U.S. labor force is in business and the rest of the world is just a time-delayed echo of the U.S. case. IBM needs to figure out how to lead innovation in services. Innovation is, in fact, IBM's business. Technology alone is not enough to drive this.

• Service Science. Current R&D group is multidisciplinary: capital management, computer science, O.R., MIS, MBA, Game Theory, Experimental Ecoomics, Insdustrial Engineering, AI, Computationsal Organization Theory, etc.
• IBM has 180K services people.

Mike Radnor, Northwestern, heads up a consortium of companies (MATI) that have focused on how to improve the process of technology management for the past eight years. MATI has recognized service innovation as one of its highest priorities.

Take-aways sought.

• Strengthen services innovation community
• Maximize breakout interchanges
• Focus on "where from here" steps at end

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The Future

Solutions - the Intersection of Business and Innovation
Gerry Mooney, IBM, Corporate Strategy

Market Realities.

• Rudest awakening of uncertainty since the Depression
• As Larry Ellison said, "The is the recovery. Enjoy it."
• IT spend is down (companies are doing more with less; stuff is cheap)
• Legacy of IT boom and bust, overpromising
• "IT Doesn't Matter"
• Customers demanding more alignment between business results and IT investments

Five histrical cycles
innovation (eruption, frenzy), crash, deployment (synergy, maturity)

Customers (and IBM) want solutions. Hardware alone a commodity business. Migration is tough. Being adaptive is the key to migration. Deloitte Research on 650 global companies finds that #1 preoccupation of CEOs is New Product and Services Launch. (#2 is Economic Turnaround.)

Rethnkiing the Enterprise

• 5% profit
• 45% retained business processes
• 45% outsourced business processes*
• 5% spend is on IT

*redeploy resources to core

Gerry used a speaking technique I plan to steal. He began with self-deprecation, saying he didn't know why he, of all people, had been invited to speak. This really wasn't his area. Then he blew our sox off with an astute, convincing presentation. Lower audience expectations and then exceed them. I'd seen something similar in service delivery the night before. JetBlue had signs posted at JFK that this was to be a foodless flight. Then they pass out taro chips (blue, of course) and biscotti. Later, you get cheese and crackers. Like Gerry's talk, it's a pleasant surprise. Service metrics will need to factor in client expectations.

IBM must start thinking about process-specific companies: FedEx, ACS, Exult, Amazon associates, State Street. Not so important as IT (Accenture, EDS, M'soft, HP, Sun Dell, Cap Gemini) and ISVs (PeopleSoft, SAP, Siebel, mro, Sungard). The innovators are willing to give away the infrastructure in order to generate revenues from services. Think of Amazon; they take 7% for supplying a world-class platform.

A solution is an offering that combines technology and high-value services to solve a client's business problem. Soutions spend continues to gain momentm and is estimated to represent nearly 72% of the overall IT market by 2007. CAGR of services is 12%; for products, it's -1.4%

Uh-oh. Longer sales cycles, value-based pricing, realignment of the entrie organization, solution providers...

Process-driven innovation and Offering-driven innovation. (Is this different from managing core and outsourcing the rest?)

Question from the crowd: What's SMB? (Small and medium business). People won't be asking that one a year from now. * * * I'm sitting in the second row; the first is reserved for speakers.

Need value creation, value capture, value delivery

Software as a business model. Customer market pull is driving the SaaS (Services as Software) market.

The goal is to create integrated apps available online that provide "resturant-in-a-box" functionality

It's hard for me to imagine the breadth of stuff a senior strategy guy for IBM must deal with. We sat together at dinner, and I asked Gerry how much time he devoted to learning; he told me 80%. And how did he go about it? Meeting with other people is his primary mode of learning.

Standards

Robby Robson is very savvy on learning standards. Two issues dominate the standards conversation today. The first is the convergence of standards, i.e. the recognition that learning standards must cross boundaries, for example learning and multimedia. Second is IP, intellectual property. Copyright law forbids the reproduction of documents. This makes common practices on the internet technically illegal (e.g. verifying compliance with a reference model). This one’s going to be incredibly tough to figure out.

The Expo

Three aisles of 10x10. Last year, the expo booths faced center-of-aisle tables, which made for good schmooze. This year it was narrow aisles.

I'll admit that I no longer try to talk with lots of vendors. Instead, I ask cognoscenti what's hot and home in on those. What did I see?

Grassroots Learning is a PowerPoint converter with a twist. Left in the hands of amateurs, death-by-PowerPoint slides are converted into death-by-PowerPoint training. Grassroots adds an instructional framework and design templates. For marketing departments and others tasked with preparing training resources but lacking instructional designers, (think of, say, a marketing department) Grassroots makes great sense.

The Marriott Marquis Hotel

Marriott must have hired the Mad Hatter as architect for the Marquis, probably the most confusing hotel I’ve ever been to. Once you find the front door (it’s between two storefronts on Broadway, behind the tank traps, with discreet signage, given that everything else fronting on Times Square is over-the-top, garish, gigantic advertising propaganda.

Throughout TechLearn, none of the elevators opened up on the ground floor, so you’re required to use the narrow escalator. Since half of the elevators on the upper levels are kaput while being renovated, the wait there takes forever. Most of the time I played their silly game of taking the escalators. At least one escalator was broken most of the time we were there. TechLearn Registration was on the 5th floor. Mega-sessions and keynotes were on 6. Breakouts were on 7. (Hotel registration was on 8.) Some breakouts were in tiny rooms which quickly filled to capacity. Others were down a couple of narrow hallways. Half the room signs there were covered up. A hotel employee happily pointed me to the wrong room. When Tom Peters went into overtime, all sessions were delayed 15 minutes, but no one informed the presenters to follow (they were out of the room setting up). None of the signs were modified. While some rooms were overflowing, others were totally empty. I’ll admit that I’ve had a problem with Marriott ever since the elevators broke when I was staying in Dallas, no one could tell us when they’d be fixed, the staff really didn’t seem to care, and I ended up fuming as I carried my son up to our room on the 8th floor. Bill sent me an apology but sheesh; this outfit should really invest a little in its customer service.

The Party

I don’t mean to be a grouch. The turkey was good. The wine and beer flowed freely. But Planet Hollywood is not a good spot for a party where networking is on the agenda. Loud music, dark corners, a focus on gambling with fake chips. Ugh.

Extreme Times Call for Extreme Learning

Elliott

Speed of Business. Speedometer reading for your business, but one that you can set.

Readiness???!!! Speed of learning determines the speed of your business. Time to market.

Time to compliance. In the coming year, 50% to 60% of training revenue will come from compliance. Elliott is on several boards; all of them require training in Sarbanes-Oxley; there’s no certification, so he has to take it again and again.

Audience participation: Hire and train 500 to 1000 people for a new project. You have a month. Extreme On-boarding. Do things in parallel. Re-sequence the pieces. Start the orientation before they apply. Do a readiness exercise at your company.

Most Consortium members undergoing major change.

Three things to take away:

1. Tidal waves of games and simulations. Not games, but game tech.
2. Small chunks aggregated
3. Expertise location

Jay's presentation

Only time for a summary right now.

Monday morning. 8:20 am at the Marriott Marquis. Elliott is opening the show. “How many of you are …?” Plug for the 190 organizations in the eLearning Consortium. Elliott is a New Yorker by birth; New York is not a big city; it’s a collection of neighborhoods.

What keeps you awake at night? What is your measure of performance? (Find a partner!)

Things that keep Elliott up at night?

Self-service at the airport: in a year, most people switched to it. Elliott claims to interview people (with a dummy microphone) when at the airport. About 5% say the self-service kiosk is the best thing that ever happened. Self service is a reality now. It is the future. Elliott figures the airline kiosk is transitional. In about a year, they’ll be cheap on eBay.

Form factors. iTunes. In the old days, we want out of our way to make eLearning like class. “Hello, student Elliott…” When was the last time you finished reading a web page? Remember Wayne’s talk yesterday: EVERY ONE LEARN. People get what they want and leave. We should celebrate this: they go tit and left. Bravo!

Elliott thinks that courses will go away. The average person in America does not work at a desk. He or she is on a tractor, in a truck, on the ranch… On mLearning, America is behind. For seven cents a day, a person in China can receive a chapter of a novel daily via phone, The conversation about the connected workplace is hot.

Many LMS’s are used as CMS’s (compliance measurement systems). They are cover-your-ass systems to track your honest effort.

Missionstatements.org: you can buy a mission statement for $10. They look good on the wall.

Credo-based management. It gets to be about our neighborhood’s values, not compliance. eLearnig can dirve the mission and credo of the organization become part of the conversation.

Elliott hates the term Subject Matter Expert. He will never say “SME” again. We are draining them. They are the largest drag on developing content. He will pay a dollar for each time he says SME. Photo: Elliott paying Lance Dublin for not one, but two, mentions of SME.

“I love content,” he says. “But context is easier to digest. You’ll remember what you learned in table groups, not the speech. I went around the expo yesterday and I did not see a single context manager.”

The metrics of learning are business metrics. (Glad to hear that Elliott’s reading my stuff.)

eLearning. The experiment is over and it was mildly successful. Experimentation is over. Implementation is here. Rapid development is the order of the day. We no longer have 18 weeks to develop new courses. These days 18 hours is more like it. One financial institution is shooting for 18 minutes. Learning at the speed of business. How can we operate at the same pace? Let’s stop re-inventing things like navigation; it’s as if USA Today started each morning asking, “How do we want the front page to look today?”

The most critical decision you will make is what’s your scorecard? “We are looking at building the balanced scorecard for learning.” (I have talked with the inventor of the Balanced Scorecard about this very topic and am working on it at this very moment.) “I would love to have a dashboard that reports on employee confusion.”

“This will be my final year with TechLearn. I’m energized by what’s next. Your future is not in eLearning. eLearning is a delivery system. Your future is in making your organization strong, profitable, resilient, successful….”

Jason Fish tried to fill the big shoes. He tells us to visit the 65 vendors in the Expo. The crowd mumbles.

Lee Kraus of Advanstar just took the stage and announced that TechLearn 2005 will convene at the Bellagio in Vegas.

Tom Peters!

Walmart has 460 terabytes of data! (Twice as many bits as the internet.)

These are crazy times, and crazy times call for crazy people. Tom’s slides are at tompeters.com

Tom hates the word “best.” It implies there’s someone at the top. Later, he twice uses the word best.

Only the constant pursuit of innovation can ensure long-term success.

Not “out sourcing.” Do Best Sourcing.

Papa, what do you do? “Son, I’m overhead. I manage a cost center.”

Maybe it’s just me, but I’m finding Tom boring. I don’t think he prepared for this talk. The slides are mainly pages from his latest book. He doesn't seem to know what slides are coming next. He's running overtime. I've heard almost all of this stuff before. Tom is, I fear, over the hill. All histrionics and no content.

“Every time I pass a jailhouse or school, I feel sorry for the people inside.” Jimmy Breslin

“My kid’s on the Honor Roll.” All that means is he colored inside the lines.

The Bottleneck is at the Top of the Bottle.

Where are you likely to find people with the least diversity of experience, the largest investment in the past, and the greatest reverence for industry dogma?

Tom tried to return his MBA to Stanford after he saw his accounting prof on t.v., testifying as head of the audit committee of Enron and figured his five credits in accounting should be taken away.

I arrived in New York this evening, my first trip back here in years. Six? Seven? I wandered four blocks from my refuge, the Williams Club, to Grand Central for a wonderful dinner at the Oyster Bar. Curry-lentil-crawfish soup followed by a platter of salmon, calamari, giant shrimp, and Caesar salad, topped off with Normany apple pie and a snifter of Calvados. Yum.

Do I need to see the site of the World Trade Center while I'm here? I remember making sales calls in the WTC years ago. Grabbing a bite at its underground restaurants. Taking in the view from the top floor. Staying in the one hotel there. The day after the towers fell -- Jesus, what a sight! Goddamn buldings coming down as if they were filled with air and someone had pulled the plug -- I drew this image to memorialize the occasion.

I enjoy being on the road. (Willie Nelson is singing On the Road Again from my hard disk through a JetBlue headset as I write this.) In the Oakland Airport at 8:15 this morning, I noted in my journal, "Most people I know consider business travel a burden. Not I. To me, travel is an escape. It puts me in a contemplative mood. It gives me time to reflect. I enter into my little travel cocoon, sealed off fromphone calls and household chores. Since I’m only using my laptop, technical crap is minimal. And it’s times like these that I return to my journal." (Someone asked Baba Ram Das if his upcoming 22-city tour for SEVA wasn't going to jangle his psyche. No, he replied. "I'm always right here." I can identify.)

I mentioned I minimize hassle by traveling with a bare-bones laptop. The laptop in question, a new IBM X40, is a three-pound marvel. I've had it a month. I promised myself I'd keep this machine lean and mean. No weird software add-ons. It's not a desktop replacement; it's my travel machine; it's my PDA. I just glanced down to the lower right of my screen.

What the ...?

Last weekend at the Accelerating Change conference at Stanford, BJ Fogg, who's inventing the field of captology, i.e. computer persuasion, showed a short homemade movie starring stuffed monkey Bongo. Bongo goes on line to gather information for an upcoming picnic. Bongo fights with all manner of familiar obstacles. “Do you want to download updates from Microsoft? Your virus definitions are out of date.” I’ve been there, Bongo. Several times. Today.

Sunday

Emerald's On the Horizon has published part 2 of my history of eLearning.

On The Horizon - The Strategic Planning Resource for Education Professionals
Volume 12 Number 4 2004 Pages 151-157

The future of eLearning

Abstract: Corporate CEOs are finally telling the truth when they say "People are our most important assets". Intellectual capital has become the primary factor of production. To raise their "corporate IQ", managers treat workers as if they were customers of learning. This article explores why people learn much more about their jobs in the coffee room than in the classroom. It hypothesizes that equipping people intellectually to prosper will become a corporate discipline every bit as important as marketing or finance. Web services will mark the advent of workflow learning in real-time organizations.

Keywords:Information Media; Learning Styles; Workplace Training; Knowledge Management

When I have time for a breather, I may post a synopsis.

This Tuesday, I'm giving a presentation at TechLearn. This is six years to the day since I described a model for eLearning at TechLearn 1998 at Disneyworld. I talked about a scenario planning exercise I'd just completed and invited people for a ride in the Internet Time Machine, which was modeled on the Back to the Future DeLorean. We were looking way out into the future...all the way to 2004.


These were brand-new ideas at the time. No vendor talked about eLearning until nearly a year later.

On Tuesday, I plan to give an update. The Internet Time Machine has gotten a lot cooler. And we've come a long way in six years. In retrospect, our boundless enthusiasm back then seems naive. Now we've got real business to do. I'm still incredibly optimistic. We are going to change the world. But it's going to be a bit more complicated than we thought back in the last century.

I am concerned about the worker of the future. We have the potential to create wonderful, challenging, inspiring jobs. Or to take a small-minded, short-term, demeaning approach.

Imagine what this guy would do with the ability to monitor work right down to the keystroke. Networks work both ways. Surveillance of workflow creates the oppportunity for surveillance of workers. Join me if you'd like to discuss the Dark Side as well as the upside of the next phase of eLearning. It's a thorny issue, for the very nature of work is changing.



Of course, it's hard to imagine TechLearn in New York instead of at the Coronado in Disneyworld.

While others were paying steep rates at the Coronado ("Have a magical morning!"), I've booked a lot of time in $25/night motels outside the Disney gates in Kissimmee. I've seen gators in Gatorland leap out of the water to grab chickens, bought crap at the big swap meets, piloted an airboat through the swamps, rode a jet-ski, walked the streets of Centennial (Disney's Stepford community), shopped at ersatz factory outlets, and eaten supper in all-you-can-eat honky-tonks, surrounded by over-amped, Disneyfied children and parents whose exhaustion was palpable. What a weird place, Florida.


Moi, riding gator. (Dead gator).

The change of venue is nothing, however, compared to the impending change of maestro. Elliott's contract with Advanstar expires soon. Everyone expects him to arise again, taking the Consortium with him, and leaving Advanstar with little to show for the millions it spent for the franchise. ("Those who do not learn the lessons of history...".) It's as if they bought the barber shop but failed to see that without the barber, all you get is an empty room.

For me, TechLearn has always been Elliott and his entourage. Images pop into my head. Elliott and Cathy personally greeting everyone as they enter Tomorrowland or Main Street for the party. Stan rushing around behind the scenes making things work. Cathy's indefatigable family, the DeMicelis, AnneMarie and the dad and Matt... Elliott's mom, when she was still with us. Jen. Others I can see in my mind's eye but I'm blanking on their names. And the "regulars" like Beth Thomas, Diane Hessan & the SoundBytes, and Wayne Hodgins. These folks create community. In the early days, TechLearn was closer in spirit to Woodstock than to, say, an ASTD conference; we're all in this together, man.


The SoundBytes


The rolling schwag bag


From the stage during Lance Dublin's and my presentation in 2002.
We had an overflow crowd. The program mistakenly said EIliott would be speaking.


I was delighted to run into one of the
Raspini brothers in my local supermarket!


And you thought they were just buttons.
No, this is another way Elliott gets people
to talk with one another.
TechLearn has been a fun ride. I'm a marketing guy and designer at heart. Elliott is a marketing guy, too. He senses what people need and he delivers it. Elliott is the most savvy, effective, natural-born marketer I've even seen. Aside from that, he's a true mensch, with a big heart. I have learned so much at TechLearn I can't begin to describe it.

Elliott and I haven't talked in a year, so I'm unaware of his plans. I'm sure they'll be larger than life, and I hope I can take part. Elliott and Cathy, thanks for a great ride.