Elearning - February/March 2009 - (Page 32)

collaborationtrends ing to make money. Communities aggregate relationships; portals aggregate content. Some tools aggregate all of these things. There are even some tools that allows you to integrate e-mail, IMs, tweets and other messages from other social networks. Eventually, e-learning will have to address overload on the part of all these relationship/social network/community streams of information and deal with them in one screen. Collaboration comes to industries and processes. Finding where collaboration has value within a particular company or industry is key. The day of the horizontal collaboration vendor is coming to an end. They will have to start to move into a greater common context between the people trying to interact with each other — like a critical process in an industry that you can collaborate on. Collaboration technology doesn’t have a lot of value unless it’s within the context of a specific critical process within an organization; that’s where you get the leverage. We suggest that you look at industries that have adopted collaboration quickly: health care, pharmaceuticals, government, high tech, education, manufacturing, consultants, professional services and telecommunications. Within that context, examine how collaboration can create leverage in six critical processes: >> sales & marketing; >> customer service/support; >> R&D; >> value network management/relationships with external organizations, DPM and project management; >> training; >> decision support/crisis management. Maximizing its leverage, collaboration can be worth an enormous amount of money. But you also have to apply it at a right time in the process. Changing distribution channels for collaborative tools. In the past, vendors would offer licensed software, often bought on a per-user basis and used behind a firewall. More and more, we’re seeing hosted or SaaS services outside the firewall. The big advantage to SaaS tools is that they’re low-risk, so you don’t have to bring in your own servers, and you don’t have to train your own IT people. They’re lowcost, so often there’s a free trial period, 32 February/March 2009 Elearning! 6 8 9 7 making a great value for small to medium businesses. There’s no versioning or updating or getting new CDs in the mail. Whatever you access online is always the most up-to-date version of that tool. There are a lot of advantages to the SaaS model. It’s moved from client/server architecture and from site licenses to subscription services where you’re paying only for what you use. A lot of vendors are going this route because they don’t want the distribution channel to get in the way of making the sale. In this context, the people who are buying collaboration tools also are changing. No longer is it just within the purview of the IT department. Mobile professionals are buying them in the consumer space and then moving them over to the enterprise space. Communities are changing. Web 2.0 can help support communities of practice, communities focused on a topic, communities focused on doing a project, communities focused on a particular role, internal communities, external communities. Because there are a huge number of new distributed project management tools coming out, including some in the last few weeks, there’s a lot of innovation in this space. Mobile collaboration. More and more, we’re seeing mobile endpoints become smarter, have more processing power, have more memory, and therefore have more value. My iPhone has 16 gigabytes of memory, which is more than a supercomputer had 10 years ago — yet I carry it in my pocket. “Smart phones” are actually on the rise, although the mobile phone market in the U.S. has been pretty static. The big problem here in the U.S. is infrastructure: we’re 10 just starting to adopt a 3G infrastructure whereas the rest of the world is already on 4G. There are very few mobile video applications, yet mobile phones are becoming the platform of choice. Collaboration moving to a virtual world. “Virtual worlds” that use mostly three-dimensional technology are fairly new. In some cases, 3-D is better to use, and in other cases it’s not. You need enough RAM, enough processing power and enough graphics processing memory to work with any degree of speed. You need to make sure that you have a Vista-compatible computer, and I would recommend the more RAM the better. Some things work better in 3-D like training and education using Second-Lifetype simulations. People are selling cars on Second Life and some people are even doing on-line interviewing and recruiting in Second Life. It’s a very interesting environment, and it’s undergoing more sophistication as we speak. —David Coleman, founder and managing director of Collaborative Strategies, has been involved with groupware, collaborative technologies, online communities and social networks since 1989. He is a frequent public speaker, an industry analyst and author of books, blogs, newsletters and magazine articles on these topics. Most recently, he has coauthored his third book called “Collaboration 2.0, Technology and Best Practices for Successful Collaboration in a Web 2.0 World” (Happy About Publishing, 2008). He currently writes the “Collaboration Blog” that can be found at www.collaborate.com. Reach him at (415) 282-9197 or davidc@collaborate.com. http://www.collaborate.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Elearning - February/March 2009

Elearning - February/March 2009 Contents Editor’s Note News Social Networking Popular Learning Needs Technology On Competency Management IT Employment Drops Trendlines Deals Learning Roles in Talent Management Informal E-Learning and Web 2.0 Cover Story: Learning Your Way to Profits Collaboration Trends, Strategies 12 Wishes for LMSs, LCMSs Tips: Recession-Proofing Your Job Case Study: Military Training Case Study: City of Arlington, Va. New Products Pop Quiz Last Word

Elearning - February/March 2009

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