With regulated learning such as compliance training perhaps an exception, a learning portal is really what is needed in the workplace. I advocate an Informal Learning Environment or ILE (http://tinyurl.com/informal-ILE).

When we shift our object of measurement from activity to outcome, it makes more sense to use the LMS to manage formal assessments and record competence.

For the majority of customers, Dave nails it. Most customers need categories, comparisons, and so forth. LMS is in their comfort zone.

Early adopters are after something else. These enthusiasts want to be involved in putting together solutions that out-do the current products. They’re willing to experiment with things that don’t yet have a name.

The new view, I’ll call it the Workscape perspective, weaves informal and social learning into workflow. That’s something no LMS is ever going to do; it’s basic infrastructure. Training departments are not going to take over core corporate functions.

Workscapes have not crossed the chasm; LMSs did so at the turn of the century.

Dave and Tom would be fools to abandon their LMS customers. We’ll see if their organizations can pull off a rarity in business, the ability to persevere through a phase change.

This reminds me of the old joke about how God could create the Earth in seven days. He didn’t have an installed base.

We at Internet Time Alliance are trying to create the future. Our clients are out to break the mold. Many LMS customers are happy to concentrate on what’s worked in the past; they don’t have the bandwidth to experiment.

Beautiful day here in Marrakech.

jay

Not sure I buy that most IT groups want an OTS solution, and if they do, it’s liable to be SharePoint. True, I advocate that the folks in charge of the learning infrastructure be, if not the learning organization, then IT coupled with the learning organization (and I think there’ll be a merger there somehow). So I do want the learning org playing a role, but with a broad view of learning (including performance support and eCommunity) and a facilitation approach, not an ‘event’ based model. And, yes, this is in conflict with compliance and certification, but that stuff is well-understood and not worthy of much cognitive effort, even if it does need to happen. It’s necessary, but not interesting, and less so than the issue of competitive advantage. As I’ve said elsewhere, optimal execution is going to be only the cost-of-entry, the real advantage will be innovation – solving new problems and creating new services and products – and that’s not going to come from compliance or certification. That’s going to come from impassioned self-developed experts, not butts in seats.

I *have* said (repeatedly) that if a system (even with LMS as it’s DNA instead of social or content management or whatever) includes portal and community capabilities, it’s a good thing. I question calling it an LMS then, as I think you’re hindering it’s validity to a broader audience (while maybe you keep the LMS label when selling into the learning unit), but I think the value prop is to more than just the learning org (unless it’s the unlikely situation where the learning org has real credibility in the C-suite).

And I think you’re arguing apples and oranges about the RFP. I’m not a tool vendor, so I won’t reply to an RFP for a LMS. I would reply to an inquiry about learning strategy (and have). Then I’d work with them to look at what they have, what they need, and what the best solution would be. There might be an RFP for a LMS that came out of that process, but it might also be an RFP for a portal solution, or a social network solution, depending on the contextual circumstances: their existing infrastructure, needs, IT department, and more.

I see that a more capable system that includes (and even is based upon, orginally) an LMS, is a valuable framework for what I’m talking about. I jut don’t want to talk about *learning* ‘management’, and I don’t want to focus on rote formal learning, which is what I’m afraid the CORE functionality of an LMS is about, and worse is what comes to mind when people think about it and use the term to address the core purpose.

As for your concern about the name “LMS” and the word “management” in the name in particular… I don’t really get it. I mean, all the social learning tools — wikis, blogs, forums, micro-sharing, social bookmarking, social networking profiles, etc. — admit to some level of “management”. For instance, blog comments and forum postings can be moderated. Wikis can allow direct edits, comments only to some pages, or even workflows for approval. And all of the above can be governed and hence managed by social media governance policies and so on. Wise companies will shift some of their instructors/instructional designers/etc. into Community Manager roles — note the word “manager” there. Do you disagree with this notion, core to the very name of the Community Management Roundtable group, and increasingly a job function in organizations?

Further, all the participation can be tracked and reported on — and this is a major selling point of the most robust platforms (including the LMSes that offer all or some of these Web 2.0 tools). So what is the hangup with the word “management” and the name “LMS”? I’ve read all your posts on this Clark, but I still don’t grok it. Here is my perception: it *seems* like you have an inflexible, rigid concept of “LMS” — that is all and only delivering and tracking “courses” (formal content, not informal, social, user-generated stuff). It seems like you formed your concept of “LMS”, many years ago, abstracted from the dominant concrete instances of LMS from say 1990s until say 2007 or so, but cannot now expand the concept to include informal/social components, and how those — more loosely speaking, but still accurately speaking — can be managed by the LMS platform. And I sense the same issue with postings from Cross and Pontefract — an unwillingness to let your concept of “LMS” expand to include social/informal functions, and the way in which they are accurately said to be “managed” in an org.

Where am I wrong here?

And lastly… there is no way the industry will start having RFPs/etc. for software called Workscapes or “performance ecosystems”. I just highly doubt that. I like Jay and your and Pontefract’s *concepts* here — I’m just saying those won’t ever be the genus names of a product or offering type that people sell or otherwise provide in the marketplace. Or that they even put into reports to the C-Suite as what they accomplished in the past fiscal year… as in “We instituted a workscape to better enable social learning in our organization.” At least, I doubt it that will happen. I think far more likely will be people in the industry will expand their concept of LMS along the lines Dave and I are suggesting they should — and/or expand their concept of social software to include formal learning management (IF those vendors ever add that functionality) — at which point we’ll have convergence (again, something I Dave was saying could happen).

— Tom Stone

I can understand your argument for the branding problem, and I sympathize. While ‘learning’ still has some baggage, I like a ‘learning platform’ or a ‘learning infrastructure’ approach (it’s the term ‘management’ that to me is the problem). I think ‘knowledge’ has some baggage too, of course. In fact, trying to find a label that conveys the right image (not dragging up any images of ‘training’ that will lose your ability to talk to the C-suite) but covers the whole range has been problematic. Hence my use of ‘performance ecosystem’ and Jay’s ‘workscapes’. Good luck!

First the caveat: while I fully support the federated argument and think it’s a valid approach (maybe even preferred approach), I don’t think we should underestimate the effort to “glue” it together. Minimally it requires a shared profile that can be accessed by multiple apps, a unified activity stream that can take input and send output to multiple apps, and multiple search API’s in addition to SSO and all that. (I’m assuming here that reporting takes care of itself if you can have a consolidated profile and activity stream.) That’s a glue my friend… ; ) Is it doable? Sure, but it’s real work and you also have to worry about changes that individual vendors might make that could blow it all up. At some point, it might be easier to just build the social apps you need (which is I guess a third model if the IT / IS groups are invested).

Second the explanation: as I noted in one of my earlier comments to you, there are a lot of factors when you rebrand not just the company, but the market you serve. If we stopped referring to ourselves as an LMS, would we still be included in RFP’s? Would analysts still include us in Waves and Magic Quadrants? Would buyers who are still buying “pure” LMSs think of us or would we be “too big” for their needs? My previous experience with this was many years back with KP, and it was messy. I think the market conditions are different now, but even so, it’s not an easy move. For now, we’ve created a new tagline for ourselves, the Knowledge Platform, which I like. But we’re still solidly in the LMS market as well. Would love to hear any other thoughts on how to manage the transition given the current state of the market.