What the Drunken Monkeys* are Jabbering About

• New perspectives on the time variable. Faster > cheaper, but accounting does a poor job of assigning value to it.
  
• Building a community of practice around workflow learning.
  
• Reinventing learning as a core business process, performance-centered design.
  
• Future jobs. New form of slavery or “flow” experiences? Real-time. We can must influence this.
  
• "Flash meetings:" informal, neighborhood meetings of Emergent Learning Forum worldwide. Set one up in your neighbornood. How about next Tuesday evening?
  
• Metrics, creating the context for the measurement of value at all levels. It's all relative. My work involves helping training pro's understand and speak the language of business strategy.
  
• Future of IT and business: process management, loose coupling, adaptive, SOA, bottom-out, net-centric.
  
• Complexity and the breakdown of logic.
  
• On-the-spot, hassle-free authoring on the cheap.

*Buddhist metaphor for consciousness

Who Knows?

CLO June 2004. What would you think of an assembly line where workers didn’t know where to find the parts they were supposed to attach? Absurd, you say. Heads would roll. Yet for knowledge workers, this is routine. Consider a knowledge worker stymied by a lack of information—hardly an uncommon situation. In many professions, knowledge workers spend a third of their time looking for answers.

Emergent Learning

CLO April 2004. Pioneering online communities turned into ghost towns until we realized that eLearning is a bundle of capabilities, not a silver bullet. When eLearning technology supplements traditional learning, it saves time, money and drudgery. Properly implemented, eLearning is a powerful, cost-effective tool. No longer the “next big thing,” eLearning has hit the mainstream. Next...

Personal Intellectual Capital Management

CLO February 2004. Ultimately, you’re responsible for your own knowledge management, learning architecture, instructional design and evaluation. Professionally, we design learning experiences to meet concrete objectives. We plan ahead to prepare for the future. We build systems to leverage the knowledge we already possess. We gather feedback so we can do better next time. My personal learning and knowledge management are too important to leave to chance. So are yours.

What is Workflow Learning?

eLearn Magazine May 2004. A buff venture capitalist in a designer suit steps into my elevator. Soon she asks, “Workflow learning? What’s that?” I reply: “That’s something you won’t have to ask five years from now, for by then Web Services and the integrated, real-time enterprise will be commonplace. Learning will have become a core business process. It’s what will connect humans to their work.

Internet Time Group and the Workflow Institute maintain their mail lists in the same account at Constant Contact (good guys, recommended). This means you can easily join the Workflow Institute (free) by it visiting here and checking the Workflow Institute box.

Past Workflow Institute Newsletters: July 2004 | February 2004 | December 2003

Internet Time Blog has moved back to Blogger. Please use the www.internettime.com address to see it. RSS should be back up in a few days.

Recent Reading

Wider Than the Sky by Gerald Edelman

The Moment of Complexity by Mark C. Taylor

IT Doesn’t Matter; Processes Do by Howard Smith and Peter Fingar

Loosely Coupled by Doug Kaye

Eats Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss

Out of the Box by John Hagel

The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White

The Photographer’s Sourcebook of Creative Ideas by John Hedgecoe

On the bookshelf or nightstand:

About Time: Sync (Strogatz), Slowness (Honore), Competing Against Time (Stalk and Hout), A Sideways Look at Time ( Griffiths), Time for Life (Robinson and Godbey),

About IT: Web Services and SOA (Barry), Business Process Management, The Third Wave (Smith and Fingar), Workflow Handbook 2004, Workflow Handbook 2003

About value: The Support Economy (Zuboff and Maxmin), Business Without Economists (Hudson), ROI (Phillips), The Bottomline on ROI (Phillips), Dangerous Company (O’Shea and Madigan), Process Consulting (Weiss), Knowledge Management (Davidson & Voss), Good Business (Csikszentmihalyi), Thinkertoys (Michalko), What’s the Big Idea? (Davenport et alia), Who Really Matters? (Kleiner), How Images Think

Escapist: Kitchen Confidential, First Impressions, Balsamic Dreams

I need a sabbatical just to catch up!

Great Finds

Picasa organizes your photos. Free from Google.

Firefox is a better browser than Internet Explorer any way you slice. it. Also Free.

Capacity

Last week a small but hot young company was genuinely surprised when I told them that I had time to help them launch, to write papers and web copy, craft presentations, train the sales force, and introduce them around.That's what I do. Call me.