Web 2.0 More Far Reaching Than ERP and CRM?

I was just reading the latest edition of the McKinsey Quarterly and there’s a very interesting article entitled: “Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work.” Surprisingly to me, the author states:
“Web 2.0, the latest wave in corporate technology adoptions, could have a more far-reaching organizational impact than technologies adopted in the 1990s—such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management.”

I say surprising because declaring web 2.0 could have a more far-reaching organizational impact than ERP and CRM is amazing indeed. Imagine if you can the billions upon billions of dollars spent over the last few decades implmenting these behemoth systems by companies throughout the world—and Web 2.0 could be bigger? That is an startling endorsement from a pretty traditional source.

And why on earth would McKinsey think such a crazy thing? Because they rightly see “…Web 2.0 as a way of unlocking participation” and “…the underused human potential at companies as an immense ‘cognitive surplus’ and one that could be tapped by participatory tools.” That is exactly right, as I have (often) said before—all that corporate IP locked in the heads of people throughout every organization with no good way to access it and leverage it for wide-scale productivity improvement.

Not surprising is their finding that as many companies are unhappy with their web 2.0 experimental implementations as are happy. “Many of the dissenters cite impediments such as organizational structure, the inability of managers to understand the new levers of change, and a lack of understanding about how value is created using Web 2.0 tools.” In response, McKinsey outlines six "management imperatives for unlocking participation"--which are certainly all true, but are disappointingly uninsightful or at least mundane. Besides these six, as we will see in the next post, is the unmentioned and most critical imperative--and the one that underlies successful Collaborative Knowledge Sharing.

Social Tagging Saves IBM $4.6 Million

I read a blog post on IBM developerWorks about how social tagging saved the company $millions. As background:

"The Enterprise Tagging Service in IBM aims to provide an alternative approach to helping people find information compared to traditional search engines... Social tagging allows people to add human semantics to keywords that they define that sometimes can amount to finding a resource faster based on what people think is relevant...IBM’s ETS cost $700k to develop and deploy across the worldwide intranet as a sidebar to a number of key web properties... Readers can tag any page with the widget, look up tags they contributed, find others who have used the same tag, and certainly find other relevant resources by that same tag."

And here's the best part:
"The ETS team instituted a survey to ask users how this tool helped them. What they found was amazing when you look at it in context: the average person saved 12 seconds, across the 286000+ searches performed through ETS each week. This sums up to 955 hours saved each week across the company. In terms of cost savings, it amounts to a rough estimate of $4.6 million a year, in terms of productivity gain."

It's great to see companies like IBM adopt tagging and other social media approaches to increase productivity--it shows that there is indeed hope that the enterprise will catch on! But, what is surprising is that they are so pleased with a 12 second improvement in searching--since the problem and opportunity is so much bigger than that. Remember from previous posts in this blog:

“IDC research indicates that knowledge workers spend 15-30% of their time seeking specific information and these searches are successful less than 50% of the time. For the Fortune 500, the cost of the fruitless searches represents between $60 and $85 billion in direct costs and twice that in opportunity costs.”

If we assume 20% as the average time people spend looking for info, that equates to one entire work day per week, or a whopping 10 weeks per person per year. That single 8-hour day multiplies out to 28,800 seconds per day, compared to the 12 seconds saved per search. If we assume that people on average make 20 searches today (I'm making this up, but it seems reasonable), each person would save a total of 4 entire minutes per day, or 20 minutes per week--which is 4.2% of the total time searching! I'm all for social tagging and I agree we should all include it in our arsenal--but it is clearly a very weak weapon to help us win the productivity war.

But, imagine if you could search knowledge down to the spoken word, access it at the exact point of interest, and have it all available in your favorite digital media formats (streaming, downloadable, mobile). And then imagine, after finding a knowledge nugget of interest, you could find the expert/author, see all of that person's work, ask the person a salient question, follow the person's future contributions, and be able to find, join and participate in the same communities of interest! Now that is a huge improvement--and that is the power of Collaborative Knoweldge Sharing.

The New Learning Interactivity

Just in from our friends at learning research firm, Bersin & Associates is a blog post about eLearning becoming less interactive and more expert centric. I quote in part:

"A recent study, The Corporate Learning Factbook, showed that, with spending and staffing on the decline, today’s training organizations are developing courseware that is less interactive. Instead, more companies are now using "rapid e-learning" tools, software that converts PowerPoint documents to online learning materials. Rapid e-learning tools allow content to be created relatively quickly and easily (and cheaply), and also put power into the hands of SMEs to develop their own training and communications. Over the past several years, these tools have been an entry point for many organizations in adopting online training. Today, more organizations are turning to these tools due to resource constraints."

Yes, as we've been saying here at Altus Learning Systems for years (way before this economic meltdown!), the transfer of knowledge within organizations must become disintermediated--coming directly from experts to learners. But what is missing in the blog post's focus on "interactivity" is findability and accessibility--busy people care less about interacting with their learning maerials than they do about finding what they need to know quickly and being able to do directly to the point of interest. And the type of interactivity that people DO want to engage in is different than eLearning learning exercises--they want to be able to rate, comment, ask questions, find the expert, add their own user generated content, form communities of interest, etc. This is the new intereactivity that has been born out of people's experiences with web 2.0 and social networking.

The Info Technology Revolution Has Failed Us

The jury is finally back and the verdict is not what anyone wants to hear—the information technology revolution has failed us. After spending untold $billions over the last two decades on computer hardware and software, knowledge workers today still spend 15-30% of their time looking for the information they need to do their work—and find what they are looking for less than half the time! Who could have possibly imagined at the end of the first decade of the 21st century that individuals would still be spending 10 weeks or more per year looking for the information they need at work and still not be able to find it? And this dismal result after installing an endless number of three-letter acronym systems: ERP, CRM, CMS, DAM, DMS, LMS, etc., etc.—not to mention the explosive adoption of the Internet, Google, and countless other tools for creating and finding enterprise content.

I’m told the definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. How many more $billions do we need to spend over how many more decades to realize something is seriously amiss here? When are we going to understand that a change in thinking and approach is needed to address the single biggest productivity challenge organizations face? Fortunately, the convergence of video, search, web 2.0 and social networking has resulted in the emergence of a trend that that is overcoming the limitations of traditional approaches and is reducing this enterprise productivity gap for a number for global companies—Collaborative Knowledge Sharing.

Biggest Threats to the Meetings Industry

I’m very focused right now on the corporate meeting/conference/event space because cutbacks in travel are forcing companies to rethink how they transfer knowledge—and the movement from in-person to “virtual,” or more likely a hybrid in-person/virtual approach is inevitable (as discussed in earlier posts). And that is bringing my company many new inquiries from existing customer and prospects.

That interest has prompeted me to subscribe to meeting industry publications like Meetings to see what the folks in that business are thinking. The February 2009 issue had a very interesting lead story, “2009 Meetings Market Trends Survey.” One of the questions that was asked was: “What do you think is the biggest threat to the meetings industry?” The top responses were predictable: the economy (62%) and airline issues (18%). But, curiously, one of the possible threat answers was “virtual meetings,” and it only received a 5% response from corporate responders to the survey.

The data are not explained, so it made me wonder whether meetings professionals simply do not think they will be impacted by the inevitable movement to virtual (online) or they recognize the trend but are not threatened by it because they actually see it as a useful tool. Unfortunately, I suspect the former—that they don’t see the relationship of “the economy” and “airline issues” to the fact that meetings of the future are going to have to include an online component due to the reduction in corporate travel.

The other thing I thought was curious about including “virtual meetings” as a response option was that the author of the survey actually thinks in those terms—that virtual/online is a threat vs. seeing it as a valuable and complementary tool. I understand that the folks who actually run the conference centers, hotels, and related services will be negatively impacted by the loss of in-person attendance, but meeting planners should be focused how to provide the most robust experience for both online and in-person attendees. That will include live and on-demand delivery of the conference content combined with a lively integration of social networking capabilities. And even conference center managers should be thinking about how they can get into the online game by offering those capabilities to supplement in-person events held at their facilities.

Priority: Improving Sales Rep Access to Info

A recent study by CSO Insights, “Sales Performance Optimization, 2008 Survey Results & Analysis,” contains a treasure trove of information about improving sales, ranging from lead generation methods to the trends and issues with CRM systems. I found one table in that report particularly interesting and germane to what we do at Altus Learning Systems. When respondents were asked to state what their top priorities for sales improvement were for the coming year, the top mentioned item was not hard to predict: “enhancing lead generations programs,” with 36.4%. But what was less predictable and more interesting was the second most mentioned priority: “improving sales rep access to key information.” With 30.4%, information access ranked much more highly that some of the more usual suspects, like “revising our channel strategy” with only 18.6% and “implementing CRM tools” with 16.9%.

Reflecting on a the statistic from a previous blog post, I guess this finding should not be so surprising—when 15-30% of knowledge workers’ time is spent looking for the information they need to do their work, and they find it less than 50% of the time, this is a very large problem indeed. Few productivity problems rise to this level of magnitude and urgency—at least 10 weeks per year per sales person looking for the information they need and finding it less than half the time—you do the math for your company.

That is precisely why we at Altus Learning Systems have focused with laser-like precision on collaborative knowledge sharing—enabling people throughout the extended enterprise to share what they know and making it all searchable and accessible at the point of interest. And that is why we are fortunately seeing more and more companies making the transition for a reliance on formal eLearning (online training) to collaborative knowledge sharing with Altus—because people need easy access to whatever they need to know, whenever they need to know it, from whoever in the organization has it, on whatever electronic device they are using. Notice that “improving formal training for sales reps” was not on the priorities list, but “improving rep access to key information” ranked second.

Virtual, Not Virtual Worlds

The natural inclination people have when applying a new technology to an old problem is to try to recreate or simulate the old experience. We certainly saw this years ago with the application of internetworking technologies to learning—the result was 'eLearning.' Because people previously had to attend 'training courses' in-person, eLearning tried to simulate that experience by creating online courses, making people register for those courses in learning management systems, taking tests, etc. That was all fine and dandy—but the much larger opportunity was and is that the web (and more recently web 2.0) unleashes the ability of people throughout the extended enterprise to collaboratively share their knowledge. The uber opportunity that the modern web opens up for learning is to enable everyone to have access to whatever anyone else knows, whenever and however they need to know it (what we at Altus call Collaborative Knowledge Sharing)—not simply to take training courses online.

This same 'paradigm transfer' problem is happening with corporate meetings, events, and conferences. The current economic downturn has forced companies to drastically reduce their costs, and the first thing to go has been travel—specifically, travel for internal meetings and attendance at in-person trainings and conferences. Since the no-travel mandate limits in-person attendance, companies are naturally thinking that they should conduct these meetings, conferences, and trainings 'virtually.' But that’s where the technology train jumps off the tracks—instead of simply thinking that such meetings need to be online vs. in-person, they leap to the conclusion that virtual means virtual worlds. If people can’t be present in person, the reasoning goes, then we need to simulate the in-person experience online via a virtual world environment. This leads to the thinking that participants have to represent their presence in the online meeting with an avatar and move through the conference center to find the room in which an interesting presentation is taking place, find a seat, sit down, and look at the screen in the 'auditorium.'

The tendency to leap to the virtual world conclusion, although natural, is mistaken. The reason that people have to physically move around in an in-person meeting is because they have to transport their physical bodies. But, when online we can go from one presentation to another presentation with two licks of the mouse—so, why recreate the most unpleasant aspects of in-person meetings online when we are completely free of that physical imperative?

The illogic of transferring the physical presence paradigm to the online experience is that hundreds of millions of people already watch video and network socially with each other every day online—and they don’t use avatars to do it. Think Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. ad finitum—none of the most popular social media tools in use today use virtual world technology, so why would we want to impose that awkward paradigm on business people who are attending knowledge sharing events online? Why not stream video like YouTube (live and on demand) and let people interact with the existing tools that they are already familiar with (without having to create yet one more personal profile)?

While companies are working furiously with virtual world vendors to try to simulate the physical meeting experience online, the real game-changing strategy will be to create a seamless environment for people who want to see video live and on demand, interact with each other using familiar tools, and collaboratively share their knowledge by taking full advantage of what today’s technologies are fully capable of. That’s why God invented mashups—take the best of the best applications, mash them with up as web services, and apply them in ways that truly enhance the user experience. Making my avatar go up and down the escalators to get to presentations held on different floors of the virtual Moscone Center is not the way to enhance my learning and networking experience.

From F2F to On-Line Conferences

As mentioned in an earlier post, and consistent with the theme that is emerging here, the down economy is forcing companies to make significant changes in order to reduce costs. Travel was the first expense category to be axed—and when travel gets cut, other changes are sure to quickly follow. One change that has recently been hastened is the shift from face-to-face (F2F) attendance at business meetings and industry conferences to on-line participation.

A recent industry survey of over 1,000 corporate managers found the following expectations about F2F meetings for 2009:

• 42% expect participation in physical trade shows to be down by as much as 50%
• 64% expect to have fewer physical sales kick off seminars - or none at all
• 60% expect training, management and other internal events to be down 20 - 50%.

As a result, over half said their companies had already begun conducting events on line and a significant portion of the rest said they were planning to do so to supplement their physical events in 2009.

In terms the downsides of substituting on-line for F2F meetings and conferences:

• 61% said they would miss seeing people in person
• 36% said they would miss enjoying the social activities
• And only 20% said they would miss seeing speakers in person.

Cost cutting aside people mentioned several aspects of virtual participation to be particularly appealing:

• 75% appreciated that there is no travel required
• 64% liked that they can attend the on-demand sessions on whenever convenient
• 58% found it useful to be able to "forward" to their colleagues on-demand sessions that they thought would be of interest to them.

Again, difficult times precipitate difficult decisions, but often those decisions actually exemplify needed changes to the underlying assumptions about how people and companies learn and work. In this case, the “no travel rule” is forcing companies to question the need for F2F participation in meetings.

This survey completely corroborates what we have heard and seen at Altus Learning Systems from our enterprise customers. And that is why they are turning more and more to Altus for live webcasting, searchable on-demand video, and on-line interactivity to supplement or replace F2F participation.

Crisis Forcing Changes in Learning Industry

When times get tough--the tough make changes. The hardships to companies and individuals in the current financial crisis cannot be overstated—layoffs are all too common and budgets are being slashed. But as some pundit recently said, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Companies are being forced to make difficult decisions, which may ultimately lead them to adopt much more efficient and effective ways of sharing knowledge than prior attempts using formal e-learning.

In better times, companies could afford to have a multiplicity of redundant learning/training solutions, technologies, and vendors. And they could afford the lengthy and expensive process of creating instructionally deisgned courseware. But no longer. The following are examples of the significant changes and consolidations that we at Altus Learning Systems see our customers making these days:

• A major storage systems company eliminated its annual sales meeting and invested in Altus to capture and deliver the essential training on-demand that would have occurred face-to-face in the meeting.
• A leading enterprise software company cancelled its annual customer conference and invested in Altus to capture and deliver the product-related training on-demand so its customers did not have to travel to the event.
• A major networking company eliminated travel for internal transfer-of-information meetings for the sales force and invested in Altus to capture and deliver the knowledge live and on-demand.
• Another electronics manufacturer discovered that it was using three knowledge sharing solutions and decided to reduce costs and improve the end-user experience by eliminating the other two vendors and consolidating with Altus. The same company is considering replacing a significant amount of its off-shored e-learning courseware development with on-demand presentations made directly by subject matter experts recorded in the Altus system.
• And an automotive company decided to abandon the expensive satellite television system it was using to broadcast technical updates throughout its domestic dealer network and substitute the Altus on-demand system for easy reference by automotive technicians.

In each case, companies decided to invest in Altus after reviewing all their options and coming to the conclusion that it was the most cost-effective solution for sharing mission-critical knowledge.

The Training Industry 2009: A Look Ahead

According to IDC learning industry analyst Cushing Anderson, “Respondents to Chief Learning Officer magazine’s Business Intelligence Board survey view the coming year with guarded optimism. Most of them acknowledge the threats posed by economic problems, but also see opportunities for improvement.”

But what is particularly interesting are the changes in industry priorities for the coming year. Three areas have increased their standings in the Top 10 Priorities: informal learning, knowledge management, and sales training.

• “Informal learning is up four spots, while measurement (fourth place in 2008) is no longer in the top 10. (It landed at 11 this year.)”


• “Knowledge management also continues a steady upward trend, up three this year, and up six spots over the past two years.”


• “Sales training made an appearance in the top 10 for 2009, although it did not in 2008. Sales training has increased in importance in light of the economy. As one executive put it, “In the tight economy, the performance of our sales team is the company’s top priority. We are refocusing much of our efforts to drive productivity in the sales teams.”

And, when asked which topics should be given more attention by the training industry, “…the top two choices were knowledge management and informal learning. Given the high impact that these two activities have on training programs, this comes as no surprise. However, social networking was the third-place choice.” Although undefined, or defined variously, “Social networking also is seen as another avenue for high-impact informal learning and one that should be managed proactively rather than haphazardly.”

These findings are indeed gratifying to see, since they have served as guiding principles behind the development of the Altus Collaborative Knowledge Sharing solution for the last several years.

• Underlying the Altus informal learning solution is the principle of creating the shortest path from experts to learners—hence, our recording of expert presentations with no instructional designers as intermediaries.


• When these presentations are aggregated into a full-text searchable repository, they collectively serve as a knowledge management system that enables people to quickly find whatever knowledge they need whenever they need it—and at the exact point of interest.


• The effective adaptation of social networking technology and behavior has been achieved by adding a number of features that enable people to interact with the content, form communities of interest, and collaboratively share what they know.


• And when the power of this solution is applied to enabling direct and indirect sales, significant and demonstrable ROI has been achieved in client companies including Cisco Systems, IBM, and NetApp.

Support for Video-Powered Knowledge Mangement

Here’s a blog post from Terri Griffith, professor at the Levi School of Management at Santa Clara University that supports the video-powered approach to KM. i heartily recommend her blog for those interested in keeping current with the latest developments in learning technologies.

The World Is Flat Redeux

I wanted to take a minute to respond to a very legitimate comment made on an older post of mine, when I was discussing how I thought Friedman's flat world analogy pertained to the field of learning. Here was the comment from Rigasite:

Dear Ted, all this nonsense about competing in a flat world is in fact a way for large companies to impose the idea that they need less controls in hiring staff, less controls in reporting profits, less controls in doing business. How else can you interpret its presentation: " transition towards a more integrated global economy poses some monumental challenges for many European democracies, burdened by inflexible and engrained structures and cultural rigidities An environment of continuous innovation must be created as innovation is becoming the key driver of economic success. " So innovation would mean just a more liberal and less controled environment. Unfortunatly history has proved this idea to be wrong. A cooperation between entreprises, governments, education, and research institutions has never emerged "naturally" but under some institutional pressure. Industrial strength has never been without the actrive support pf the government. And the US is the best proof: the weigth of large public markets on the corporations that rae providers of the government (and large innovators also) is a simple fact. What really bothers me here is not the historical falsness of the arguments. But rather the fact that the online learning technologies are relaying this ideology (just in the same way that ten years ago "organizational management" was the voice of large corporations).

My response: I certainly do not disagree with the notion (reality) that the "flattening" of the world economy could be considered a euphemism for further exploitation of the global workforce (capital will flow to the least expensive locations). But that is not my point. The point that I was trying to make in the previous posts on the subject was to draw a parallel with Friedman's concepts and modern learning/collaboration technologies. When anyone in the world with a computer and internet connection can express themselves for all the world to see (via blog, podcast, YouTube, social networking, etc.)--that is as flat as it gets! And we can take advantage of this opportunity to flatten the ways we go about facilitating enterprise learning--by enabling unencumbered collaborative knowledge sharing amongst employees, partnbers, and customers.

And, as a side note, here's a link to a podcast series with a number of thought leaders that Eilf Trondsen and I produced a while back on this very subject. We interviewed a number of interesting academics and industry leaders, including:

• John Seely Brown, past Director of Xerox PARC, author, and visiting scholar at USC
• Regis McKenna, Silicon Valley marketing guru
• Curtis R. Carlson, President and CEO of SRI International Bill Coleman, CEO, Cassatt Corporation
• And many others

Video-Powered Knowledge Management: Part 2

A major problem that has always plagued KM strategies is that accumulating knowledge requires active methods, such as experts making an extra effort outside their normal work processes to proactively inject their knowledge into the system. Simply recording experts while they are giving presentations to share their knowledge makes their participation in the knowledge management system passive – the experts don’t have to do anything other than deliver the presentations they were already planning to make. And passive systems are much easier to maintain than active ones.

An additional benefit of using audio and video to capture expert knowledge is that the files can be transcoded into a variety of popular formats, ranging from streaming video to downloadable MP3 audio and MP4 video files. Add an RSS subscription to a category or subject area and you have instant audio podcasts or video vodcasts that people can access through iTunes to keep themselves updated.

Other valuable derivative knowledge assets can be easily added, including an indexed transcript, PowerPoint files, and even PowerPoint files with transcript segments inserted into the notes sections of the slides.

To be effective, however, any technology must fit within an overall KM framework. This must begin with a strong organisational foundation that includes vision, culture, resources and processes. Once these prerequisites are in place, video and related search capabilities can be productively employed to help capture, share and locate expert knowledge. But no system can be effective long-term unless there are steps taken to market, share, monitor, and improve it as well.

Video-powered knowledge management is being used by very large global organisations to overcome many of the limitations of traditional knowledge capture and retrieval methods. But all its capabilities can only be fully realised when video is integrated into this overall knowledge management framework.

Video-Powered Knowledge Management: Part 1

In immediate violation of my promise to focus on specifics vs. general topics, I submit this blog entry. It is Part 1 of a short article I wrote recently for The Knowledge Board that discusses the Altusw approach to KM 2.0. Although written in the general case for this site, it is a thinly veiled overview of the power of the Altus Collaborative Knowledge Sharing solution.

I recently read with interest that 52.6% of Microsoft SharePoint users are not satisfied with it’s search capabilities. One would think that any product that has reportedly sold nearly 100 million seats and has generated $1B in revenue could do better than that. But, the $1 billion frustratingly spent on SharePoint is actually just a drop in the corporate bucket. According to research from IDC:
“…knowledge workers spend 15-30% of their time seeking specific information and these searches are successful less than 50% of the time. For the Fortune 500, the cost of fruitless searches represents between $60 and $85 billion in direct costs and twice that in opportunity costs"

And why is it that smart people with expensive tools each spend upwards of 10 weeks per year looking for the information they need and find it less than half the time? According to CIO Insight: “...over 80% of corporate data is unstructured, or does not reside in an indexed, organized, or easily searchable database.” And when software company QCSI looked into solving their knowledge management problem, they estimated, “About 90% of the company’s critical knowledge resided in the heads of about 10 percent of its workforce.” The reason people at work cannot find the information they are looking for is that much of it exists only in people’s heads and is not findable.

People in organizations try to share their knowledge by making presentations in a variety of settings, ranging from conference calls and sales meetings to new product seminars and classroom training. But, verbally transferred knowledge is highly problematic for a variety of reasons: many people can’t attend synchronous events; people don’t need the information at that time it’s presented; and people forget what they learn very quickly. Since studies show that people forget two-thirds of what they learn within twenty-four hours, it’s critical that the knowledge be made available later on-demand when people need to refer to it.

Getting that knowledge out of people’s heads and into a searchable database is where video can play an important role. No matter how or where people share their knowledge, it can be video or audio recorded. Once the knowledge is captured, the audio/video can be transformed into searchable data by transcribing it, timing the transcript with the audio, and putting the indexed text and timings in a database with a full-text search engine. People speak on average at 160-170 words per minute when presenting, which means that a one-hour presentation has roughly 10,000 transcribed words. All this data, plus the 1,000 or so words from the PowerPoint deck of an average one-hour presentation can all be made searchable and accessible at the point of interest.

Back After Long! Hiatus

After a very long hiatus from blogging, I decided as one of my New Year's resolutions to start it up again. The reasons for ceasing were many, foremost of which was that my obligations as CEO sapped my energy to write about what was going on. But, we have built a great team at Altus over the last few years and many of my previous day-to-day responsibilities are now being handily managed by others more capable than myself. And the reasons for starting up again? I strongly believe that the current financial crisis that is so negatively impacting companies small and large today actually poses a tremendous opportunity for those of us in the collaborative knowledge sharing space--if only we understand how to take advantage of that opportunity (more to come on this critical point in the future). And times have dramatically evolved in many other ways in the last few years (for the better I believe!)--hence the change in the name of this blog from Rapid elearning News to Collaborative Knowledge Sharing. I didn't start a new blog, since much of what has been said here is as true today as it was a few years ago--and the points made then continue to serve as a s strong foundation and background for what will be said here in the months ahead. And the focus of the blog will change, from the general to the specific—from reflections on the learning industry in general to what is actually happening on the street, in Altus Learning Systems, delivering CKS solutions to many of today's most advanced, technology-based, global companies.