Ara Ohanian, founder, CEO, and president of Vuepoint, says companies need to understand that E-learning is not simply an HR tool to bring employees up to speed, but a means to boost revenue by creating a smarter sales force. "Companies spend up to 10 times as much to support new products and services as they do to support traditional training," he says. "E-learning can play a huge role in new product rollouts. If you can use sophisticated Web content to quickly get thousands of salespeople well versed on how to position your products against a competitor's, the impact is tremendous."
E-learning analysts and corporate practitioners are unanimous in saying that E-learning is in its infancy. But they also agree that it should be viewed as a new strategic opportunity, not merely an extension into cyberspace of current approaches to training and education. It may, in fact, rejuvenate "knowledge management" by providing a badly needed focal point around which those fuzzy concepts can adhere. "The term 'knowledge management' may be passé," says Doug Johnson, CFO of E-learning company Thinq Learning Solutions Inc., "but the concept is still valid: we are in a knowledge economy, and E-learning is emerging as a way to respond to that reality."
Room with a Viewer
A technology known as Web conferencing is often at the heart of Web-based E-learning programs, but it can facilitate almost any kind of online interaction. Even before September 11, Web conferencing was identified by IT analysts as a fast-growing market segment; after 9/11, its usage reached a new plateau, and the stock prices of the publicly traded companies in the sector rose by an average of 30 percent.
Web conferencing provides a virtual workspace in which almost any number of people can meet; communicate via text, voice, and, increasingly, video; share documents and other presentations; vote (in a virtual shareholder meeting, say); and do almost anything else they might do in person. Companies such as WebEx Communications, PlaceWare, Raindance Communications, IBM/Lotus, and many more offer a range of software and services. Cheap bandwidth and technological advances affecting how voice and video traffic are handled over the Internet have made the meetings much more "high touch," according to IDC analyst Robert Mahowald. Some applications emphasize interactivity, while others simply provide a way for participants to view presentations from the comfort of their offices. The large number of vendors fighting in the space has driven prices down and features up; last month WebEx announced that its newest technology platform can now support PowerPoint presentations, 3D CAD drawings, access via wireless devices, streaming media, and the sharing of multiple documents and presentations.
"Travel and expense budgets have been dropping for some time," Mahowald says, "while IT budgets should rise substantially in the third quarter." Since Web conferencing exists at the nexus of those two trends, he says, it will fare well throughout 2002. "As vendors add features that address everything from project management to E-learning," he says, "Web conferencing will become commonplace." --S.L.
Software
Brain Gain
"What a waste it is to lose one's mind," Dan Quayle once famously intoned. He meant to say, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste," and in botching the quote actually proved his point. But could he have communicated his idea more effectively?
A small software firm called Mindjet LLC says yes. Minds should not be wasted, Mindjet argues, particularly in the workplace, where many companies' fortunes depend on the ideas and insights of their employees. Yet anyone who has ever endured the mind-numbing tedium of the corporate "brainstorming" session knows that eliciting, evaluating, and acting on those brainstorms is something few companies do well. Mindjet says its MindManager family of products can capture and organize all those insights, and the data that surrounds them, and present it all in a way that's superior to the whiteboard scrawls and legal-pad doodles that are often the sole legacy of corporate spit-balling.
Based on research into how the brain creates ideas and processes information, MindManager software produces "business maps," visual representations of--well, almost anything: ideas, process flow data, organizational structures, marketing plans. It can facilitate presentations and Web-based conferences, store unstructured data in a series of nested maps, and, thanks to a new version released last month, play a larger role in project management. One fan, Dr. Maxwell Anderson, vice president and dental director for dental benefits firm Washington Dental Service, says he uses MindManager to manage an entire company--a for-profit subsidiary known as C3 Scientific Corp.
"I create a master map that then links to submaps for legal, planning, and every other function," he says. The result is a repository of corporate data, everything from the business plan to stock certificates, that resides in a cluster of nested maps.
More often the software is used for specific planning and presentation functions. At Consolidated Edison in New York, management and union members collaborate on a project known as PITT, or Process Innovation Through Teams, an ongoing effort to improve service delivery. Union members, many of whom have little or no experience in presenting their ideas before large groups, use MindManager to capture their ideas and present them to other PITT participants. Robert Donohue, senior vice president for electric operations at the utility, says that the software facilitates the describing of a problem, the activities that must be taken into account to solve it, the proposed solutions, the cost, and the potential cost-benefit. "MindManager makes it easy for people to grasp the issue," he says, "because it depicts how various components are linked together and interact. And you don't have to overwhelm people with extensive notes."
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