The e-Learning Manifesto

Importance of e-Learning
What is e-Learning?
Why now?
What is the impact?
What are the challenges?
Where's the payoff?
Pet rocks and e-Learning

Importance of e-Learning

The convergence of computing, communication and content technologies has spawned a new e-Learning Economy with an entirely new set of rules, opportunities, threats and challenges.

Five fundamental economic assumptions that were the foundation for business success in the Industrial Economy have crumbled:

• No longer are interaction and collaboration costs high
• No longer do physical assets play the central role in value propositions
• No longer does size ultimately limit returns
• No longer is access to information restricted and expensive for organizations, their customers and trading partners
• And no longer does it take several years and deep pockets to build a business with global presence

This sea-change in fundamental economic assumptions has created sizeable threats and tremendous opportunities for established organizations. Some are just now beginning to realize they're fighting to win a game that no longer exists as they watch nimble competitors create better value propositions and steal market share. Others have not yet awoken to this new reality. At the same time, new organizations built on the new economics are searching for ways to maintain their initial success without resorting to short-term payoffs such as paying outrageous sums to lure capable workers or instituting the 1250-hour work-week.

Organizations can increase their ability to survive and thrive by continuously innovating and adapting to customers' changing demands — responding with new strategies and new business processes enabled by flexible and scalable technology and well-trained people. This requires more than a collection of web pages, e-Learning channels and "e"-enabled processes: it demands an enterprise-wide vision for creating a new future and the talent to execute it. This scale of change has always been daunting, but in the e-Learning economy, it must occur quickly, simultaneously and globally. The key is approaching the strategy and the change process intelligently.

What is e-Learning?

e-Learning must be understood in the context of the enterprises that conduct it and the environment in which is happens.

An eEnterprise is one with the capability to exchange value (money, goods, services and information) electronically. It has properly designed business processes for this new way of conducting business. And it understands the human performance challenges not only for its workforce, but for other people in its value network: learners as well as the people working for its partners and suppliers.

e-Learning is a new way of doing business—the way of doing business on the eEconomy—that involves openness, connectivity, and integration.

• It opens up the enterprise to include partners, suppliers, customers, and learners.
• It connects the new, expanded enterprise through a universal electronic medium.
• It requires the integration and alignment of technology, processes, and human performance with a continuously evolving strategic intent.

Why now?

e-Learning is inevitable. At current projections, the e-Learning economy, or "eEconomy," will overtake the traditional industrial economy by the year 2003. These are the forces behind the e-Learning:

A reasonably favorable deregulatory environment increases the competitive tempo which encourages businesses to seek means to obtain or retain a competitive advantage. Technology offers business new opportunities to offer value to its customers, increase its efficiency and extend its reach. Consumers respond to the increased value by favoring these leading businesses. Thus rewarded, these businesses reward the technology providers with additional purchases. Consumers also favor governments which have permitted and encouraged the new value streams. Each circle of activity has been reinforcing the others.

What is the impact?

e-Learning extends an enterprise out to ever-widening circles of impact. The eEnterprise is participating in a radical redefinition of industries, markets—and of the global economy itself.

From Enterprise to Learning Enterprise
Becoming an learning enterprise requires:

• Opening up the enterprise to learners and suppliers
• Getting to know learners as individuals
• Creating mutually successful solutions
• Evaluating sourcing options

• Define and stake out value network roles
• Develop deep specialization
• Embrace collaboration
• Share infrastructure with competitors

From Industry Transformation to Learning Transformation
As entire markets and the entire economy are redefined, the learning enterprise must:

• Focus on customer intentions
• Exploit hybrid markets
• Manage the alliance network strategically

What are the challenges of e-Learning?

For most organizations, taking advantage of the opportunities of e-Learning means facing some combination of the following challenges:

• Supply chain integration
• Integration of inventory and service management
• Integration with legacy systems
• Coordinated content management
• Alignment with strategy
• Managing channel conflict
• Coordinated branding
• Effective linkage with business partners
• Customer acceptance
• Employee skills and attitudes

It requires more advanced-technology capabilities: advanced internet and "extranet," moving into cross-industry nets. But it also requires attention to the dimensions of process innovation, enlightened strategic intent and human-performance improvement.

Organizations need to look beyond their traditional boundaries. Winning in the e-Learning economy often requires multi-company collaboration within and across industry boundaries. The traditional mindset is of a single company in a single industry. From there, companies must leap to a new lifecycle curve: multi-company collaboration within an industry. Finally, this collaboration begins to occur in multiple industries.

Where's the payoff?

Let's face it: e-Learning is exciting! It's cool. It's captured the imaginations of the world. But so did the hula hoop. Is all of this simply "hype"? e-Learning is only important if it enables real business value.

And it does.

Organizations will find new forms of business value in a two-step process:

• Improvements in efficiency
• Transformational changes in value creation for the organization and its partners, suppliers and customers

Improvements in Efficiency
In the business-to-consumer market, cost reduction is dramatic. Consider these examples:

In the business-to-business market segment, the incentives to increase profits and to reduce costs are too compelling to resist for long:

• Immediate return on investment, usually in the form of reduced cycle times and channel costs
• Significant new revenue sources, tapped by expanding quickly into overseas markets, levying transaction fees for use of electronic infrastructures, and brokering customer interface to third-parties with valued-added services
• Preferred vendor status, achieved through ease of interaction and business-to-business process integration

And the early leaders are realizing strong results, particularly in three areas: revenue enhancement, cost reduction and asset intensity reduction.

	Revenue enhancement	Cost reduction	Asset intensity reduction
Key e-Learning economic levers	New value    propositions  New    channels, new    reach  Individualized    customer    lifecycle	Lower    general    and    administrative    expenses  Lower    marketing/    selling    expenses  Lower cost of goods sold	Increased    working    capital    turnover Reduced    physical    infrastructure
Improvement range in e-Learning enabled business	Typical range:    10-20% Best case:    55%	Typical range:    20-45% Best case:    70%	Typical range:    20-60% Best case:    90%

Transformational Value Creation
When companies move beyond improvements in efficiency, they will find that e-Learning is redefining value creation across the entire economic spectrum.

The Enterprise: Value creation begins at the enterprise level, with the alignment of the key elements of the organization:

• Strategy: an e-Learning-enlightened strategic intent
• Technology: an Internet-enabled technology
• Process: virtualized or "e" processes
• People: an "e"-enabled workforce

The Learning Enterprise: Here, the focus of value creation moves to relationships with customers and suppliers. As the enterprise "opens up," the elements of strategy, technology, process and people extend out to cover these new relationships. The learning enterprise will find new opportunities in:

• Product/service innovation
• More powerful and efficient channels
• Customer relationships

Industry, Market and Economic Transformation: As extended enterprises cooperate and collaborate, the traditional industry boundaries are blurring. We are already witnessing the blurring of distinctions between markets such as publishing and retail, entertainment and retail, health care and insurance and finance and real estate. This trend will accelerate. e-Learning will reshape all existing industries and markets, and the entire economy.

Pet Rocks and e-Learning

Remember the Pet Rock craze 25 years ago? Advertising man Gary Dahl was joking with friends at a bar in Los Gatos. The bull session turned to bitching about how expensive and troublesome it was to take care of pet dogs and cats. Gary said he had a pet rock. It never disobeyed. Upkeep was free. Never ate. Never had to go out.

A fun idea. Gary took a manual for training German shepards, substituted "rock" for "dog," and created the Pet Rock Training Manual. He stuffed the booklet and a rock into a box with breathing holes, and took it to the San Francisco Gift Show. The idea caught fire. More than a million people bought pet rocks at $3.95 apiece!

Virtual Pet Home Page

Last week I spent several days with a dozen thought leaders in Silicon Valley working to create a definition of e-Learning from the viewpoints of investors, corporate buyers, vendors, and learners. It reinforced my contention that e-Learning is to traditional training as e-Business is to smokestack industry. Substitute "learner" for "customer," and you can recast a treatise on e-Business into a manifesto for e-Learning.

We're on Internet Time here. Let's do it! I downloaded a great overview of e-Commerce from Andersen Consulting. Then I used search-and-replace to substitute "learning" for "commerce," "learning" for "extended," "e-Learning" for "economic," and "learners" for "customers." I deleted a few portions that no longer made sense and replaced hard assets with human resources. The previous sections here are the direct result. It's a fraud. Or is it?

If you gained insight into the potential of e-Learning, great! And if this did ring true, won't you agree that e-Learning is not defined by a technology or set of technologies? Rather, e-Learning is simply learning, taking advantage of the environment of the information age. Just as real time is no time, perhaps e-learning nivana occurs when we are always learning but never aware of it, when learning is a subconscious flow experience that's simply another dimension of life.

Internet Time Group