Jay Cross kicked off the keynote session by briefly reviewing the evolution of “eLearning” in its brief five-year life. Just as so many companies suddenly became eLearning companies, at least in name, it's likely that we see lots of Workflow Learning companies in the next 3-4 years. This time, the change is real.

Several forces are converging to make this happen:

• Speed: everything is going faster and faster
• Complexity: the boundaries between disciplines are blurring and falling
• Flexibility: as in the need for, or why there are no brick buildings in San Francisco anymore (rigid buildings have a hard time when the ground shifts)
• The Role of Workers: shifted from following a script to improvisational theatre
• Time Management: which will require changing the way we do things.

It's all about networks – neural networks, social networks, communication networks, organizational structures…

Networks are just nodes and connectors. They all look alike. They all reproduce like bunnies – no, faster than bunnies. Add one node, and you have exponential growth. Look at the evolution of civilization, from hunting bands to kingdoms to democracy. Look at the evolution of retail stores, from mom & pop to chains to ecommerce networks. Look at the evolution of computing, from standalone computers to client-server architecture to the internet. There's no center anymore. We see the same thing in learning: we've evolved from learning in the family unit to formal education in schools to informal, workflow, grab knowledge wherever you can networks.

Business is all about taking raw materials from suppliers, doing something to them, and selling them to customers with needs. The “doing something” happens in departments that are separated by walls or even moats. From a value chain perspective, it looks like suppliers à departments à customers.

Now, with outsourcing, you can take pieces out of the system and still have it be part of the network, e.g., turning your payroll over to ADP. Business Process management – that's where instructional design has to be headed. Instructional designers will have to be able to change the flow, reprogram the system, rewrite what's going on in the organization. There are about ten textbooks out on that subject already.

With the web, you can connect and disconnect processes; you can unplug any particular process and go shopping for a better one. This plug-and-play capability makes for a very flexible organization. Before, IT would determine business processes; now business processes will determine what IT does.

Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto coined the original “80/20 rule” when he observed that 20% of the people had 80% of the wealth. In business, the new 80/20 rule goes something like this: 20% of the time is productive, 80% is slack time. 20% of the time people are adding value, 80% of the time people are looking for stuff, reinventing the wheel, waiting on the computer, waiting for approvals, etc. In the typical American Factory, it's worse – sometimes as little as 5% of the time is spent productively. Managers are productive between 5 and 25% of the time, Knowledge Workers are productive between 5 and 25% of the time.

We humans are networks. Collectively, we are neural networks. Learning is optimizing your network. Better connections between the nodes = learning. Tying business and workers together in the same network creates the Real Time Enterprise. It's the Big Bang of Business – everything is networked with everything else. Interoperability standards set the context for how people will work. The Workflow Symposium will be dialoguing on the question, If that's the future, what is our role going to be?