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by Jay Cross, Founder, Internet
Time Group, and CEO, eLearning Forum
If the hare and the tortoise
were to rerun their famous race, the hare would win. The slack has
been knocked out of the system. No one naps. Competition is continuous,
and it takes place in real time.
Major corporations around the world have automated
huge chunks of their operations with ERP, CRM, SCM, and other enterprise
systems. Each has consolidated thousands of job-shops and piecemeal
operations. They have replaced family farms with collective farms,
but it hasn’t been enough. Production remains unconnected to consumption.
Three or four mammoth silos stand where hundreds once stood.
Now Web services are forging links between the remaining
silos. They are plugging together information flows like so many
Lego blocks. Applications are talking to applications. IT’s Tower
of Babel is eroding. The computers of suppliers, producers, partners,
sellers, and buyers are all speaking the same language. Interoperability
is becoming a reality, and the real-time corporation is being born.
Take a robust ERP or CRM system. Add collaboration.
Add enterprise content management. Add product life-cycle management.
Add business process management. Add simulation and real time eLearning.
Each element makes the enterprise system more powerful, but the
resulting real-time enterprise is greater than the sum of these
parts: it links strategy and execution in real time.
I remember my excitement many years ago as I read
about “Executive Information Systems” that would seat senior managers
in front of a dashboard of as-it-happens information for decision-making.
What’s about to happen is so much better.
A real-time enterprise system gives every knowledge
worker a dashboard. What’s more, it also provides a steering wheel,
accelerator, and brakes for acting as well as observing. By disseminating
information about the current situation and decision-support to
all levels, the whale of an organization becomes as agile as a school
of fish, each acting independently but headed in the same direction.
By squeezing the float and inefficiencies out of communication,
the organization’s reaction time heads toward zero.
When I heard Sam Adkins describe his vision to the
monthly meeting of eLearning Forum a year ago, I found out more
about the future of enterprise learning in 45 minutes than I had
in the previous year. I called Sam to explore how we might work
together.
It turned out that Sam had worked first as an employee
and later as a consultant to Microsoft. He set up the first online
learning business in the world (Microsoft Online Institute). His
entire career has focused on online learning. He has read the latest
reports from all of the major research houses; he felt they didn’t
“get it.” He has developed the most all-encompassing, logical, up
to the minute analysis of enterprise integration and the eLearning
that is part of it.
Before hearing Sam, I thought I understood where application
integration was headed and what that would do to eLearning infrastructure.
The computing and learning fields are not new to me. I was selling
and programming mainframes before integrated circuits and disk drives
were invented. I wrote the very first business program for what
has become the University of Phoenix. My company, Internet Time
Group, has advised many of the top eLearning companies. I’m CEO
of the eLearning Forum. Naturally, I thought I had things figured
out.
Then Sam opened my eyes to the sea change that’s just
now starting to sweep through IT. I scaled back Internet Time Group’s
consulting activities to make time to promote our vision of workflow-based
learning™. I want to ride this wave. I am absolutely delighted that
we are publishing Sam’s Simulation in the
Enterprise, the first comprehensive description of the emerging
real-time extended enterprise and the eLearning that
will be integrated into it.
Over the next six months, we’ll inevitably be working
with partners, promoting the services we believe in, communicating
our findings through other media, and helping pioneering companies
sell their wares. Experience has taught me not to dream too far
ahead of my customers. Call or email me if you’d like to explore
what we should be doing with you.
Jay Cross
Berkeley, California
1.510.528.3105,
jaycross@internettime.com
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Center
for Excellence in Enterprise eLearning