White papers, articles & blog postings

The Brave New World of Learning, the lead article in the current issue of T+D magazine, by Sam Adkins

Workflow Displacing Courseware-based eLearning, by Sam Adkins, Learning Circuits Blog, April 1, 2003

LMS Vendors are NOT an Endangered Species, by Sam Adkins, Learning Circuits Blog, March 16, 2003

Will enterprise software companies take over e-learning?, by Kevin Oakes, Learning Circuits, March 12, 2003

Enterprise Software Redux: An Open Letter to Click2learn CEO Kevin Oakes, by Kevin Kruse, Learning Circuits, April 4, 2003

Enterprise Vendors are Good for the LMS Market: Both Kevins are Right, by Sam Adkins, Learning Circuits, May 9, 2003

Simulation in the Enterprise, Executive Overview, by Sam Adkins

LMS Roulette Anyone?, by Trace Urdan, Learning Circuits Blog, March 11, 2003

Strategtic Plans from Scratch by Margaret Driscoll, Learning Circuits, August 2001

The Strategic Impact of Corporate Learning by Margaret Driscoll, Chief Learning Officer, March 2003

Choosing an LMS: Taking Architecture into Account by Emily Hollis, CLO Executive Briefing, April 2003

Avoiding the Traps by Ed Cohen, HR Executive Magazine

The Emerging Standards Effort in e-Learning: Will SCORM Lead the Way? by Ed Cohen, e-Learning Magazine, January 2002

Terminology

Can you talk the talk? You will get a lot more out of the June 13 eLearning Forum is you understand these concepts. C'mon, you can do it.

Enterprise Applications are the ultimate in centralized control. Most are systems that promise to "automate business processes into an all-embracing architecture that dictates integration by means of an all-encompassing data warehouse." (Paul Strassman) Examples are ERP, CRM, SCM, and KM, all described below. More from Darwin

Enterprise Resource Planning software, or ERP, doesn't live up to its acronym. Forget about planning—it doesn't do that—and forget about resource, a throwaway term. But remember the enterprise part. This is ERP's true ambition. It attempts to integrate all departments and functions across a company to create a single software program that runs off one database. That's a tall order. Each of those departments, like finance or human resources, typically has its own computer system, each optimized for the particular department. Typically, when a customer places an order, the order begins a mostly paper-based journey from in-basket to in-basket around the company, often being keyed and rekeyed into different computer systems along the way. All that lounging around in in-baskets causes delays and lost orders, and all the keying into different computer systems invites errors. Meanwhile, no one truly knows the order status. More from Darwin and more from CIO

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategy used to learn more about customers' needs and behaviors in order to develop stronger relationships with them. After all, good customer relationships are at the heart of business success. There are many technological components to CRM, but thinking about CRM in primarily technological terms is a mistake. The more useful way to think about CRM is as a process that will help bring together lots of pieces of information about customers, sales, marketing effectiveness, responsiveness and market trends. More from Darwin and more from CIO

Supply Chain Management (SCM) optimizes the link that moves products between suppliers, manufacturers, wholesalers, distributors, retailers and finally consumers. Once a backwater of inefficiency and cruft, the Internet has transformed the old way of doing things into something closer to an exact science. An Internet-enabled supply chain may have just-in-time delivery, precise inventory visibility and to-the-minute distribution-tracking capabilities. With technology advances, supply chains have moved from the paper-heavy adventure noted earlier to a strategic weapon that can help avoid disasters, lower costs and make money. More from Darwin and more from CIO

Knowledge Management (KM) means whatever you want it to mean. More from CIO

Enterprise application integration attempts to get two or more enterprise apps talking with one another (ERP+CRM+SCM+...) Many of these supersystem projects crumble under their own weight but the new religion is that Web services will be able to glue everything together "seamlessly." More from Darwin

Integration The process of tying together—usually with software—two or more computer systems so that they can exchange information and functionality.

Middleware A layer of intermediating software that exists to exchange data among different incompatible systems.

Point-to-point integration Hand-coded programs that integrate two specific systems so that they can talk to each other but not to other systems within a corporate infrastructure.

Web services are the latest standards-based software technology that lets programmers combine existing computer systems in new ways, over the Internet, within one business or across many: interoperability. Web services let companies bridge communications gaps—between software written in different programming languages, developed by different vendors or running on different operating systems. And, here’s the kicker: Web services, in their perfected future state, will allow such communications to go on without people. Think hyper-automation. You may know some of the pieces: XML, SOAP, UDDI, and WSDL. More from Darwin and even more

Sources: CIO Magazine is a great resource for keeping up with IT management issues. Darwin is its lightweigh, feisty cousin. Both are sufficiently lucid that non-geeks can decipher them. CIO has a great collection of Resource Centers, even one on Learning. Pruning and snide remarks by Jay Cross.