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.