The E-Learning Revolution - technology transforming training

Training & Development, Dec, 2000 by Patricia A. Galagan

Jeff Schwartz, a partner at PriceWaterhouseCoopers and global leader of e-learning services, confirms that such strategic initiatives are his unit's fastest-growing business area. "We're seeing more major supply-chain projects and lots of e-business projects, especially around building e-marketplaces. Increasingly, the foundations of those learning programs are e-learning based." At PWC, such projects are labeled "extended enterprise solutions."

Although solutions is an overused buzzword, it does convey one important characteristic of such programs: They address real business issues and do what training programs of the past have often failed to achieve, which is to help deliver value that a CEO can appreciate--such as new customers, additional business channels, or rapid product rollouts. In corporate-speak, they are known as value plays.

By contrast, says Schwartz, "Corporate learning focuses on efficiency and effectiveness in implementing learning. There's no question that in helping to administer learning and develop and deliver content, e-learning is a huge efficiency and a very effective way to go. But it's a cost-based argument."

The status boost for e-learning, says Schwartz, stems in part from the explosion during the 1990s of such company-wide processes as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer resource management (CRM). "Companies are now in the second and third generation of those projects, and they're looking for e-learning platforms to support ongoing training for them."

For one such company, PricewaterhouseCoopers, is helping piece together a learning platform to support an ERP overhaul that includes the installation of SAP (an ERP package), 12 (a supply chain package), and Siebel (a CRM package). The e-learning platform is a combination of KP2000, a learning management system from KnowledgePlanet.com, and Knowledge Warehouse, which is SAP's content management system. A learning portal, created with Knowledge Warehouse, is hosted on KnowledgePlanet's learning management system.

"This is a good example of a company-wide strategic initiative that's leading a major learning effort," says Schwartz. "We expect to see a lot more of that."

Strangers in a strange land

What do a former junk bond king, a real estate tycoon, and a Wayne Huzenga wannabe have in common? They're all major stakeholders in new companies that have entered the training market in the past five years. And they are just the tip of the iceberg. A flood of entrepreneurs and their management teams are emigrating from formerly hot market niches in the industrial economy to superheated niches in the knowledge economy.

In the United States, the education enterprise, from cradle to gray hair, is the second largest segment of the economy after health care. The education market is estimated by the investment firm W.R. Hambrecht Company to total $772 billion.

Hardly anything is more telling of the new face of the learning market than a visit to a corporate training industry trade show. The Levittown-like booths of five years ago--a table, a chair, some brochures, and a guy in a nice blue suit--have disappeared from expo floors. In their place are towering constructions that feature espresso bars, leather sofas, second stories, and enough electronics to dim the lights of Las Vegas. They're staffed by Gen Xers in khakis and company-monogrammed Polo shirts. With hastily acquired training lingo and sales skills honed at other dot.coms, these men and women are reaping the generous commissions that come with the sale of "enterprise-wide, end-to-end solutions." Front and center are companies that wouldn't have exhibited at a training show a few years ago--IBM, Intel, Oracle--and other companies that have changed their names so often you need a skip tracer to figure out who they really are.