Workflow Institute

Workflow 2.0

2005-10-20T19:39:00.000-07:00

SQL Designer

A full end-to-end "thinkflow" from visual representation to machine code using standardized tools and conventions. This is a step toward wyswyg data structures only now we can also imagine applying the wiki way to data structures and let end-users edit the data structures collaboratively, in real time.

2005-08-29T19:32:00.000-07:00

Volume 44 Number 8 September 2005

In Her Own Words: Gloria Gery on Performance

by Tony O'Driscoll and Jay Cross

Fortunate are we who have been inspired by a true visionary. Gloria Gery profoundly shaped the beliefs and work practice us both. As Gloria moves on to developing schools in Nepal and tending failure-to-thrive babies in Romania, we want to acknowledge her work and share her a few of her insights.

Gloria has a knack for diving into a complicated performance issues only to point out what should have been obvious to the rest of us with concise, provocative, and often humorous language. Whenever we heard Gloria speak over the years, we've taken notes, and those notes are the source of the quotations that follow.

Our First Exposure

Tony: I ran across Gloria's book, Electronic Performance Support Systems in early 1994. The first fifty-one pages obliterated all of my paradigms regarding the role of training in organizations. My synapses were rewired and my mental model of learning and performance was forever altered. Throughout my career, Gloria's insights on performance-centered design and electronic support have continued to be invaluable. Had I not been exposed to her insights, I would not have had as much success in helping organizations perform more effectively.

Jay: The first time I heard Gloria's name was a dozen years ago when my company's chairman showed me a copy of Electronic Performance Support Systems and announced that EPSS spelled the death of the training industry as we knew it. Of course, that didn't happen. The ideas were right but ahead of their time. Now, at long last, technology is catching up with Gloria's vision. Her concept of intrinsic EPSS was the forerunner of Workflow Learning, and I was delighted when Gloria accepted our nomination to become the first fellow of the Workflow Institute. The first time I heard Gloria speak, seven years ago, she provided the mantra of my efforts, "Training will either be strategic or it will be marginalized."

Now it's time to hear from Gloria, in her own words. Our comments are italicized, the rest is pure Gloria.Systems Design, Training and Performance Support

In her early days at Aetna, Gloria saw workers struggling with arcane, data-centric mainframe systems. The default solution to their frustration was training and documentation. Training Band-Aids designed to camouflage poor interface design. Ironically, the training often cost a lot more than designing the application for performance in the first place.

Most of our existing systems were designed to function in a paradigm of scarcity where each organization unit developed process and applications based on its own history. This parochial approach to work system design has yielded an increasingly disjointed and unintuitive work context for the employee.

Most of our training is compensatory for bad system design and help desks are the balloon payment on poor system design. If we have to teach people how to use a system, it wasn't designed right in the first place. Why do we have training that teaches useless jargon? Why should we have to live with error messages like 'File sharing illegal error?' Look at the evolution of a program like TurboTax. Simplify, simplify.

Learning must be reconceived to influence the primary purpose of organization: to perform effectively and efficiently. We must give up the idea that competence must exist within the person and expand our view that whenever possible it should be built into the situation. What workers need to do their jobs – information, rules, and knowledge – is often spread all over the place. Good design puts these things within easy reach and shows how to use them to optimize performance.

The emergence of a new discipline such as electronic performance support often starts when a few people are frustrated with the mismatch between their needs and traditional approaches to filling them. The purpose of performance support is to help people do what they need to get done, we need to provide whatever is necessary to generate performance and learning at the moment of need.

We don't need new technology, we just need new thinking. We must fuse learning and doing to enable immediate performance with minimal external support.

On Getting to the Performance Zone

One of Gloria's key concepts is the performance zone.

The performance zone is the metaphorical area in which things come together. It is the place where people get it, where the right things happen, where the employee's response exactly matches the requirements of the situation.

In any learning experience, there is always that moment where you 'get it.' How do we accelerate people's arrival at that moment? There are two contexts for doing this: in courses, or while working. Courses lack authenticity as they are separated from the work context. In too many organizations, users are bouncing between multiple systems to get one task done. How can we configure the interface layer to structure the processes and provide in-context learning because THAT is the teachable moment we are always looking for?

The goal of performance-centered design is to institutionalize best practice on an ongoing basis, all of the time, by the least capable of performers: to enable people who don't know what they are doing to function it as if they did.

First Know the Work

About 80 percent of what people learn to perform effectively happens on the job and yet we continue to dismiss it as informal learning.

People don't deal in subjects, they deal in work. The unifying schema or context for performance-centered design is work.

We must learn to look at the reality of people trying to get through the day. We must reflect deeply on the way work presents itself to the user and build our systems on the metaphors that are connected to the work context itself. The context is the workflow, and the content is what the user needs to perform work within that context.

Today our analytical approaches yield a sterilized view of work, not a real one. We have to understand the work that people do. Most of all, we have to be able to sit in the learner's chair, to find out how the work comes at them. We need to understand what really goes on.

We need to put the real truth into our training. Courses are necessary but not sufficient. We must have a strategy. Architecture is a part of it. Courses are a part of it. But we must understand people, how they learn, how they collaborate, how inquiry teaches, how we learn from observing models.

Performance Support focuses on work itself while training focuses on the learning required to do the work. Integrating resources in the workplace is inevitable, and the need is urgent. Filtering resources so people get the tools and resources they need while actively working is the goal. Work process and roles are the primary filters. The mechanisms vary: portals, performance-centered workflow interfaces, enterprise applications, integration projects, etc, but what's important is that performer be able to name that tune in one note, to perform in exemplary fashion.

The common thread for the learning and performance support communities is this: How do we get people what they need at the moment of need, and what form should it be in?

Learning's New Role in Enabling Performance

As learning and performance come together to address the pressing issues of the enterprise, we must challenge our conventional wisdom about how we ply our trade.

We conceive of learning as an event in which we fill people up in advance with enough information to survive on the job. Instead we must emphasize learning as an outcome of performance, not a precondition to it, and we must strive to limit the amount of learning as a precondition to doing.

To do so will require that we act not on what we know, but on what is known. We must avoid defining the performance problem too narrowly to tackle what we already know how to do. We should focus on how we design a job for day one performance, not how we leverage technology to automate training

In our pursuit of solutions we have assumed that our future should be an extension of our past. What's wrong with this scenario is that we are applying radically different technological alternatives to old frameworks without reexamining their underlying assumptions and structures.

If the effort to learn is greater than the time available at the moment of need, you will lose the employee. Instead of making an effort to learn, they will make it up.

We need to leverage technology to enable new learning structures, not automate training.

We should not default to prior mental models, but instead give up on the viability of the old point of view. The goal of establishing day one performance is not hard to do it is hard to get done. It will live or die on the political issues within the organization.

Workflow Learning

Many people have equated EPSS with Workflow Learning. While they are certainly kin, they are not twins.

How the context has changed… is changing… will either render us irrelevant or make us more critical. How can we proceed to have more leverage in what we do? Workflow is one way for us to better integrate what we do with people's lives. The computer-mediated context IS the workflow context. People are willing to accept less at the moment of need if it is focused and relevant.

One of the questions I hear is, 'How is Workflow Based learning different from performance support?' Well, this is performance support on steroids – magnified, with a much higher impact. The workflow is the context, the magic filter through which we will be able to filter content, against which we have to compare default tactics. There will always be instructor-led training, but there will be far less of it than the workplace learning resources.

Here's a definition: Workflow is a sequence of activities that a person has to do to achieve defined desirable goals and results specific to the condition. Deliverables, solutions, decisions… Filters are needed to screen out the irrelevant and bring to the fore the things that are relevant. The workflow is the best default filter for all data. A fusion of learning and doing is on the way

JAY: A little while ago, I blogged that humankind is awakening to the realization that everything's connected. The point of learning is to prosper within our chosen communities, to optimize the quality of one's connections to one's networks. However, many people have failed to change the default settings their personal firewalls came with, even though their factory-installed settings haven't been upgraded since 1 million B.C.

Gloria thoughtfully replied, "Almost worse than the default settings that are millions of years old are the cultural, political, ethnic and religious settings we were given in our early lives. They, of course, reflect the biases of prior generations and, in my experience, no longer fit in a globalized world. They limit us from more than learning. Rather, they limit us as people interacting as humans with other people. Our networks must go way beyond the filters that sift out important other people -- or have us judge them by trivial attributes."

TONY: As we were chatting at the Workflow Symposium, Gloria commented she really believed that new technologies such as second generation portals and business process modeling finally provided us with the ability to enable the integrated performance at the workflow layer as she had had originally envisioned it more than 15 years ago.

Thanks to technology, the promise of Gloria's performance centered vision moves ever closer to becoming reality. But the change management issues are where performance-centered design will live or die. My own goal is work tirelessly on these issues to make Gloria Gery's performance-centered vision the status-quo in creating workware for the On-Demand Enterprise.

We sincerely hope that Gloria inspires you as she has us.

To sponsor a child in Romania, contact Global Volunteers at http://www.globalvolunteers.org/1main/romania/children/romania_children.htm

Great Wave off San Francisco

2005-08-12T19:48:00.000-07:00

This painting appears on the wall at the garage under Japantown. Coincidentally, Gary Dickelman will soon be touring Japan and India proselytizing workflow software.

Workflow Learning Day at Geo. Mason University

2005-08-05T15:47:00.000-07:00

Want a peak at the future? Here's my presentation at George Mason University a couple of months back (34 minutes). I'm the opening act for lots of interesting speakers. A panel session with Ben Watson, Harvey Singh, Duane Degler, Gary Dickelman, and IBM's Michael Littlejohn discusses what comes next. (46 minutes).

Michael Littlejohn discusses the future of learning. (57 minutes). Gary Dickelman and Harvey Singh show examples of workflow learning (58 minutes). Ben Watson, Duane Degler, and I factor collaboration and meaning into the workflow equation (52 minutes).

Godfrey Parkin was in the audience and had this to say on his blog, Parkin's Lot:

I have just spent a couple of days at a small highly-focused symposium titled “Innovations in E-learning.” It was put together by the US Naval Education and Training Command and the Defense Acquisition University (DAU), who have among the best and brightest training minds that the American taxpayer’s money can buy. They are not short of budget, manpower, or technology, and they get to mess with lots of experimental stuff. I decided to participate because the future of learning matters to me, and because a couple of my virtual colleagues were pretty much dominating the presentations in one stream.

For several years now, Training Departments have been transfixed by the evolving internet in the same way that dinosaurs were probably awe-struck by the approaching comet. So what does the future hold? I’m happy to report that learning will thrive, but trainers will have to merge back into operational roles. Oh, and Training Departments are dead, at least as we know them. As are Learning Management Systems and any other relics of centralized distribution of learning. Learning that is informal, collaborative, contextual, real-time, and peer-generated, will be the mode of tomorrow.

I recommend reading all of Godfrey's post, including the numerous comments from others.

New Workflow learning paper

2005-07-13T00:33:00.000-07:00

Workflow and web services is a new paper by Scott Wilson at CETIS. The paper does a great job of describing the state-of-the-art and assessing the requirements for workflow in education. The strictly defined Web Services of yesterday have morphed into more flexible lower-case web services. Wilson seems to feel that workflow learning, especially with multiple feeds, is quite primitive in the workplace and holds no interest for academic institutions. One thing I don't understand is Scott's statement that one of the criticisms of workflow learning is that discrete training activities create problems of transitioning experiences successfully from learning to actual tasks (the “forgetting problem”). Compared to what? Merging work and learning largely does away with the forgetting problem.

Old wine in new bottles?

2005-06-20T09:14:00.000-07:00

Gary Dickelman was the only speaker to appear both days at the Innovations in eLearning Symposium earlier this month. Gary's a fellow of the Workflow Institute; he's also an adjunct faculty member of George Mason University. His latest newsletter from EPSScentral begins with the answer to a perennial question here at the Institute.

"Workflow Learning: Old Wine, New Bottle?" This question was posed to me by a faculty colleague at the Innovations in eLearning Symposium 2005 on June 7th - an event sponsored by George Mason University (GMU) in partnership with the Defense Acquisition University (DAU) and the Naval Education and Training Command (NETC). "No," I replied. "Workflow Learning is not just repackaged EPSS." On the other hand, if the common understanding of EPSS were performance-centered systems and tools then the answer would have been "yes."

Workflow Learning, as articulated by Jay Cross and documented by the Workflow Institute, is what many of us have referred to for years as process-centric performance support (or simply process support). If workflow represents a current of tasks and activities and interrelationships, then Workflow Learning is how we are enabled when dropped like a cork into the flow that represents our work. We are carried along to receive the data, information, knowledge, tools and context such that tasks are inevitably completed. From another perspective, the things we need to make us smart (competent and productive) come to us at the time of need - whether artifacts or collaboration or handoffs.

So why do we need a new phrase like "Workflow Learning" if the concept is a well understood instance of performance-centered design? Because what has become commonplace "EPSS" is only slightly warmed-over eLearning. If the business or organizational problem at hand is a performance gap, then a learning solution will likely not close it. Yet we continually see learning solutions relabeled "EPSS." Wrong, wrong, wrong.

I am intrigued by the extent to which the phrase Workflow Learning resonates with most people as an instantiation of our notion of process support. "EPSS on steroids?" I guess so. So much so that the Workflow Institute is alive with activity, including inquiries, workshops, assessment, certification programs and more. The best and the brightest who are tackling problems from service oriented architecture to the semantic web are finding themselves at the Workflow Institute participating in panel discussions, writing articles, applying these principles to their work, arguing and conducting research. It has been a long time since a performance-centered idea has generated so much activity from such a bright and eclectic crowd. Great stuff!

P.S. Last time we checked, Moet & Chandon was still putting vintage Dom Perignon champagne in new bottles before inserting the corks.

See EPSScentral for more.

Looking back at the Symposium at GMU

2005-06-17T07:52:00.000-07:00

While we await MP3 recordings from the Innovations in eLearning Symposium, you might be interested in Godfrey Parkin's summary on his blog:

Learning innovations
I have just spent a couple of days at a small highly-focused symposium titled "Innovations in E-learning." It was put together by the US Naval Education and Training Command and the Defence Acquisition University (DAU), who have among the best and brightest training minds that the American taxpayers' money can buy. They are not short of budget, manpower, or technology, and they get to mess with lots of experimental stuff. I decided to participate because the future of learning matters to me, and because a couple of my virtual colleagues were pretty much dominating the presentations in one stream.

For several years now, Training Departments have been transfixed by the evolving internet in the same way that dinosaurs were probably awe-struck by the approaching comet. So what does the future hold? I'm happy to report that learning will thrive, but trainers will have to merge back into operational roles. Oh, and Training Departments are dead, at least as we know them. As are Learning Management Systems and any other relics of centralized distribution of learning. Learning that is informal, collaborative, contextual, real-time, and peer-generated, will be the mode of tomorrow.

It seems counter-intuitive that military types whose culture is defined by command and control hierarchies would advocate devolution of learning to the swab on the deck-plates or the grunt in the foxhole, but that was the gist of what was being said. Admittedly, it was not being said by the JAG look-alikes or their entourages, but by the civilian gurus who write their white papers for them. And devolution of learning does not necessarily mean relinquishing control – in fact there are some very scary big-brother systems being deployed that (allegedly) will tell anyone with access pretty much what any individual sailor anywhere in the world had for breakfast last Tuesday and, to five decimal places, what his or her competency rating is on any given skill. It is hard to reconcile what they are saying with what they are doing, until you realize that, because these systems are so vast, they take a long time to build and deploy. So at any point in time the military are rolling out systems and policies that have long since been abandoned for something new – which may not see the light of day for a decade.

I was mainly interested in hearing what folks like Jay Cross, Clark Aldrich, Harvey Singh and Ben Watson had to say about workflow learning, collaboration, and simulations. However, in amongst their sessions was a real eye-opener from a VP at IBM. IBM used to be a blue-suit red-tie operation as monolithic as a bank, but it has been doing a lot of shape-shifting in recent years. These days any organization that is unwilling or unable to do that is unlikely to be around very long. It's Darwinian – those who can adapt most readily are most likely to survive in times of rapid change. IBM's consulting wing, adrenalised a couple of years ago by their acquisition of Price-Waterhouse Coopers consulting, is doing what big consulting firms rarely do – they are advocating unique solutions that they don't already have parked in a truck around the corner.

More

Beware of Imitations

2005-06-12T22:28:00.000-07:00

It's both exasperating and fun to watch clueless vendors misappropriate the term Workflow Learning. A case in point: ICUS, an "international elearning consultancy" headquartered in Hong Kong. ICUS offers a free seminar entitled Workflow Learning - The Key to System Implementation Success.

One of ICUS's selling points: "Find out what is Prairie Dogging and how has it become the accepted social norm for workflow learning." Ha, ha, ha, ha. Sam Adkins described prairie dogging as a head popping up over the wall of a cubicle to ask a question. This is a worst practice. Half the time, the prairie dogger gets no answer. When an answer is provided, it's often wrong. The workflow solution involves identifying expertise and facilitating collaboration.

This evening I came upon Tactics, purportedly an independent consulting outfit that is wholly Australian owned. Tactics partnered with ICUS in 2001. The partnership extends to copying ICUS's mistakes. Someone at Tactics is not so hot with the space bar, e.g.:

what is Prairie Dogging and how has it become the acceptedsocial norm for workflow learning
how to use technology and procedure based, role (or task)methodologies to formalise this informal learning environment
a practical demonstration of the Smart@ss technology forcreating, distributing monitoring and administrating informal learning

formalise the informal? administrating? And did they really name their software smartass?

We'll soon post mp3 recordings of the recent Symposium at George Mason University.

Innovations in eLearning Symposium

2005-06-07T19:57:00.000-07:00

You missed a full, fun day on the latest thinking on Workflow Learning from Gary Dickelman, Harvey Singh, Michael Littlejohn, Duane Degler, Ben Watson, and Jay Cross at the Innovations in eLearning Symposium at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia today. Transcripts are on the way. In the meantime, here's what Gloria & Bob Gery are up to in Romania.

A Workflow Learning Pattern Language

2005-06-03T00:26:00.000-07:00

Here's a preview of my presentation for the Innovations in eLearning Symposium this coming Tuesday in Fairfax, Virginia. This is 34 minutes of a top-of-trees view of workflow learning, a new presentation from the ground up.

If you attend the conference (there are a few empty seats remaining), you'll hear half a dozen industry experts flesh out the pattern language with live examples.

We're devoting Wednesday to hands-on demonstrations to small groups.

Web 2.0

2005-05-30T08:49:00.000-07:00

Tim O'Reilly has a great track record catching trends early on. He thinks Web 2.0 inevitable. Join this free Yi-Tan Consortium conference call for an update.

From Jerry Michalski:

Thanks to the work of many organizations, the Net is turning into a platform, not just a place through which we send email and request Web pages. Loosely coupled applications now know how to communicate over the Net, helping companies build flexible solutions from (relatively) interchangeable parts. It's a big architectural step forward, prompting us
to ask:

o What does SOA mean for the IT business? Who wins, who loses?
o What kinds of applications lend themselves to SOA now? Not?
o Where is this trend headed?

Wiki and chat-related things at www.yi-tan.com, including a link to a real-time IRC chat during the call.

Well, you missed it. However, you can listen to the recording on the wiki site.

Workflow Learning Pattern Language

2005-05-28T01:58:00.000-07:00

Prepping a brand new presentation for the DAU conference June 7-8 in Northern Virginia, I began preparing a Pattern Language for workflow learning. It won't be out of the oven for a few days, but if you're curious about Christopher Alexander, the father of all pattern languages, take a look at my visit to his house.

Web Services -- No Slam Dunk

2005-05-21T10:21:00.000-07:00

Confronting the Reality of Web Services

From the May 16 edition of Working Knowledge, Web services have made huge strides, but two hurdles remain, one technical, the other organizational, says HBS professor Andrew P. McAfee. "It is in fact getting easier to integrate applications, but it's never going to be easy."

The technical problem is that any two applications are virtually guaranteed to contain dissimilar data and execute dissimilar business processes. There is no magic bullet in the Web services toolkit that does this automatically or quickly.

The organizational challenge comes as all stakeholders get together and hammer out common definitions.

What's the bottom line, professor?

All the parties I talked to felt that productivity had increased, but they talked about the work more as capability development than benefits realization. They were learning how to "speak Web services," and were confident that they would have many opportunities to use their new language skills.

Reading articles like this rattle my cage. I believe in a web services future, but it's tough to argue with the fact that probably half of all ERP implementations and three-quarters of CRM installs fail to deliver the goods. Enterprise software will never run like clockwork, but can it be the Rosetta Stone of network commerce?

Integrate Process-Model Support and Enterprise LMS

2005-05-08T20:24:00.000-07:00

We live in an era of evolution and connections. In this thought piece, Workflow Institute Fellow Gary Dickelman highlights the synergy of workflow toolsets and enterprise Learning Management Systems. It’s not either/or; it’s both/and. Gary is founder and CEO of EPSScentral LLC in Annandale, Virginia.

Jay Cross, Managing Director
Workflow Institute

Integrating a process model-driven toolset into the content development arsenal of an LMS or LCMS provides manifold benefits.

Continued

The World Is (Indeed) Flat!

2005-04-27T08:13:00.000-07:00

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Thomas Friedman (From Beirut to Jerusalem, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, Longitudes and Attitudes) published his fourth nonfiction work last week, "The World Is Flat." The impetus for the title is this: In 1492 Columbus set sail on a westerly route to find India. As we know, he missed...but returned with the conviction that the world is round. In 2004 Tom Friedman set out for India (Bangalore, to be precise) and arrived safely via an airline. He returned with the conviction that the world is once again flat. (Aside - I loved the first chapter where Friedman describes Bangalore and the Infosys campus in Electronic City on the outskirts. I spent five years off-and-0n in Bangalore, visited Infosys and saw many of the things that Friedman so accurately describes. But I digress...)

Why is the world flat? In part, because of our connectedness via technology and how it is applied, in particular to business. (By this time it should be clear why Friedman leads off with Bangalore, the so-called Silicon Valley of India.) He delineates "The Ten Forces That Flattened The World." Number 3 is "Work Flow Software." His notion is rather broad but clearly includes what we have been touting as Workflow Learning. So if a journalist stands up and takes notice of the workflow concept as driving force and world equalizer ("flattener"), we are indeed compelled to carry the notion forward. Or at least to Bangalore.

Namaste -Gary

Living Networks

2005-04-16T15:59:00.000-07:00

The current issue of Professional Marketing carries an article by our friend Ross Dawson on The Future of Knowledge Management that identifies five key frames that will leverage the value of knowledge in the densely connected, emergent global economy. I'm in the midst of researching my book on Informal Learning. And I've come up independently with the same five factors! This also got me thinking about the overlap of informal learning and workflow learning.

The big five are:

Social network analysis, to show how thing really work -- in the shadow organization.
Collaboration, to connect individuals, teams, and groups.
Relevance, using collaborative filtering and profiling techniques to pinpoint what we need from the vast sea of information. Think in-house Amazon.
Workflow Learning, because it "integrates access to every type of learning-whether it is information, elearning modules, or human experts-into the everyday flow of work, so these are available as and when they are needed."
Knowledge-based relationships, because rich exchange of knowledge builds trust and loyalty. No more quickies.

Prime Time for Real Time

2005-04-11T13:09:00.000-07:00

Intelligent Enterprise has a great article by our friend Peter Fingar entitled Prime Time for Real Time.

Executives are buzzing about the notion of the real-time enterprise. It's not the latest "killer application," but a management strategy that calls for squeezing time and associated costs out of processes, transforming how companies operate and even the very businesses they're in.

General Electric, JetBlue, Virgin Group, Progressive Insurance and others are harnessing the universal, real-time connectivity of the Internet for business process innovation. While the concept of time-based competition isn't new, the ability to execute on this management ideal with computer-assisted process support is.

This is workflow learning gospel. Keep kicking the slack out of the enterprise and eventually you're working in real time.

Innovations in eLearning Symposium

2005-03-26T00:27:00.000-08:00

George Mason University (GMU) in partnership with the Defense Acquisition University (DAU) and the Naval Education and Training Command (NETC) is hosting a symposium on June 7-8, 2005 at the Fairfax, VA campus.

This event is ideal for: managers, learning officers, instructional and/or curriculum designers, learning consultants, instructors, researchers and training and development professionals from small to large size businesses, vocational schools, community colleges, colleges and universities, and government agencies and associations.

The symposium will cover the latest trends in e-Learning, knowledge management and workflow learning. Keynote speakers and presentations from experts in the field of e-Learning will share the cognitive tools, technology and best practices for the effective design, delivery and implementation of e-learning.

At the conference you'll find...

World-class speakers - You can look forward to our Keynote speakers Vice Admiral J. Kevin Moran, United States Navy, commander, Naval Education and Training Command. Dr. Etienne Wenger speaking on Learning in Communities: a Journey of the Self. And moi.
With more than 30 general sessions (five of them on workflow learning) to choose from, you're sure to find solutions to your e-Learning challenges.

Exhibits of the latest products and services.

You’ll enjoy Networking opportunities with your colleagues during breaks, lunches and at our opening night reception

Web Registration for this two day event is $150.00 prior to May 27, 2005 which includes parking, breaks, lunches and a reception on opening night. Fee is $175.00 at the conference site after May 27, 2005. (This is a steal.)

See the event website, program, and registration.

If you're in the DC area, please join us.

The Transformation of IT

2005-03-25T21:52:00.000-08:00

by Jay Cross

Web services and services-oriented architecture are utterly geeky terms for describing the most important advance in computing since the byte. Finally, computing is going to serve business instead of enslaving it.

How will this sea change in IT come about? By using the same principles that fuelled the titanic growth of the Internet: interoperability built on simple, common standards; flexibility; faster cycle times; decentralized control; incremental development; repurposing of content; the promise of wealth; and the collaboration of countless true believers.

Consider three aspects of the new computing environment: software agents, process management, and rich clients. In an agent-based environment, you don't hard-code everything, because that's too brittle an architecture to adapt to change. Instead, you package capabilities (sales, simulation modules, FAQ-bits, whatever) as independent software "agents," pitch them into the virtual stew of your business, and let them collaborate to create value-added transactions. Just as the Web has no weaver, these programs have no programmer. You set them in motion and let them do the work.

All purposeful business activity can be divvied up into processes. Payroll is a process. So are closing deals, sending out invoices, indoctrinating new hires, or converting tank cars of corn syrup into soft drinks. The new IT environment enables users to control things at the process level. Terry Semel of Yahoo! suggests that in the services-oriented architecture of the future, the user becomes the programmer.

This is how it works. Assume I'm a business analyst. On my screen I have a schematic of, say, my company's credit approval process. I see an opportunity to streamline how we process inquiries from South America. I redraw that portion of the schematic. Bingo! The process management system automatically triggers changes in the underlying code.

The upshot: Business units will control their processes instead of IT. No more garble as requirements are translated into IT-speak and back.

Another aspect of future computing, rich-client technology, will provide an individualized interface to each worker: What's important, when you need it, on the device in your pocket, aware of your situation, cognizant of your background. In place of some hard-coded algorithm from management, your screen is a real-time collage of what software agents deem important to you based on who you are, where you are, what you know, and what you're trying to do. Personalization? Don't worry about it; rich-client software makes it part of the operating system.

Posted by Jay Cross at February 14, 2005 08:52 PM

Workflow Symposium

2005-03-25T21:48:00.000-08:00

When you're on the web, an event ain't over until it's over, even if the fat lady has already sung.

Altus Learning Systems hosts recordings of the Workflow Learning Symposium for us on the web.

To-date, nearly one hundred times as many people have looked at the Symposium breakout sessions on lline as attended them in person!

On Demand, In the Soup, and On the Path to Glory

2005-03-25T21:44:00.000-08:00

by Jay Cross

Forbes magazine (March 14, 2005) throws cold water on IBM's On Demand computing strategy and grid computing in general, quoting a hardware-hawking competitor that "The utility computing model is bull. Hardly anybody is buying that way."

Forbes reports that IBM CEO Sam Palmisano is now pushing "business process transformation," and continues...

In addition to that, there is a market called "business process outsourcing." Instead of simply running computers, IBM hopes to operate entire parts of a company's business, such as personnel or accounting. Last year at a meeting with Wall Street analysts, Palmisano touted this kind of outsourcing as a $500 billion market of which IBM dreamt of someday getting 10%.

Is IBM smoking something? We think not. Sam is merely ahead of his time.

When every business is getting exponentially quicker and more connected, who's to say we should evaluate future potential by the conventional calendar?

Permit me to describe the inevitable convergence of some very powerful forces from the perspective of the Workflow Institute.

SMART SYSTEMS. Business software is becoming sentient; it knows what’s going on. Networks are linking to networks like topsy. As long as every new node adds disproportionate value, the grid will continue to expand like kudzu. As if the existence of the internet were not enough, organizations are linking customers, suppliers, partners, and workers. Businesses are forging deeper links to one another. Sensors inform the net of physical conditions. We're approaching an information singularity, the point when membership in the net becomes so valuable that joining will be irresistible and the resulting wealth inestimable.

BUSINESS PHILOSOPHY. To maximize shareholder value, invest in core and outsource everything else. Sort of. That's what you'd do in a world without friction. I'd hire a yard guy to mow my lawn so I could do something more productive. But I haven't done that. I'd have to drive down the hill to pick up a migrant, negotiate his pay for the job, monitor his work, and, if I planned to seek elective office, pay a nanny tax or something. Outsourcing business functions sounds great until you face the transfer costs. But IT is poised to make those costs go away.

INTERNET OPERATING SYSTEM. All commercial software development is informed by the example of the internet. Adopt simple standards, be open, make connections, simplify, let it flow. Think virtual. Java runs on a virtual machine; the internet operates in a cloud. The adoption of internet principles and standards is called Service-Oriented Architecture. (I know, stupid name.) Instead of Client-Server Architecture, where one computer's in control and another is doing its bidding, SOA is democratic, and interactions among software agents control the show. SOA is flexible and robust, more like a school of minnows than a whale. Having a hive mind but separate bodies enables the minnows/agents to reconfigure themselves, something we call....

LOOSE COUPLING. The minnows of business are processes. In an old-style organization, the processes were all glued together. (Legacy stickiness is why every business isn't outsourcing whole hog already). A set of standards called Web Services makes it possible to pull business processes apart and reconnect them with a universal socket and plug. Mind you, this is all in software; it's virtual. The result is an organization that resembles a Tinkertoy set. You can take off a piece and replace it with another. Maybe you decide to remove your payroll department and replace it with ADP. Why not? You're not in the payroll business. Thanks to loose coupling, ADP's payroll is now wired into your systems. From a reporting standpoint, you can't tell the difference.

BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT. All the virtual stuff in the world isn't going to make a dent unless it's connected to the real world, and that's where we get to the concept of business process. This is a field of limitless acronyms, so I'll try to describe it by analogy instead of TLAs. Imagine you are seated in front of a triple-size touch-screen monitor upon which is displayed a map of the processes in your organization. You zoom in on, say, credit approval. The color alerts you to a chokepoint. You see a way to route around the problem by jumping to an outside credit bureau during peak times. You run a quick what-if scenario and find out the change will save $5,600 a year. Here's the magic: you change the process on screen -- and the underlying code changes simultaneously. Hold your applause, but in that instant, business units wrest the power to improve processes from the clutches of the IT.

These five things, all in prototype now, spray organizational WD-40 on the couplings of business processes and make Sam Palmisano's dream of frictionless business process transformation come true. Business executives can optimize workflow by swapping functions in and out. They'll be able to model the benefit of doing so in advance. Bots will work through the night optimizing business structure. This is the ticket of entry to the next higher level: reconfiguring the business to exploit new opportunities.

But I get ahead of myself. What about the people? How are they supposed to adapt to this world? I go to work at the fish store and by the end of the day it has morphed into an upscale market research firm. Maybe not, but you get the idea -- keeping up with change will be one hell of a challenge. Within a few years, the amount of information in the world will be doubling every week! Enter workflow learning technologies.

RICH CLIENTS. No, not Warren Buffet and the Sultan of Brunei. We're talking portals. The intelligent front-end. Instead of a static jump page (Yahoo or your intranet, for example), a rich client portal is a dynamic, smart connection to people, news, processes, alarms, learning, and more. Rather than worry about locating experts, monitoring the work I'm responsible for, accomplishing routine tasks, and everything else, it's all there when I need it. Remember Apple’s vision for the Knowledge Navigator? A Rich Client is the Knowledge Navigator grown up. This sort of technology will be built into the IT woodwork. That frees up my thinking to ponder…

WORKFLOW LEARNING. Training is a lousy way to cover over design flaws. The first performance support tools were developed in lieu of training, to simplify the task rather than train people in something needlessly hard to do. It was a great concept; unfortunately it was ahead of its time for realization. Take the principles of performance support, real-time workflow monitoring through a rich client, connections with all the people/process/tools one needs, and voilà: workflow learning -- learning that finally returns to where it belongs, embedded in the work itself.

When the work process moves on, the related learning hooks accompany it. Work and learning, bound together as tightly as protons in the nucleus of an atom. Some of us have been waiting for this moment for a long time.

Granted, this is enough to make your head spin. My friend Wayne Hodgins likes to live five years in the future. I try to live in the present, but I find that my optimism has me putting things in the "real" category a couple of years before they arrive. I have no doubt that what I'm describing will be commonplace in the near future.

But why, one wonders, has Sam Palmisano bought in to this? He's going to have to show revenues. Soon. His On Demand vision requires businesses made of interchangeable parts with people who can adapt to jarring change. I can dream it, but he must deliver. Why now?

TIME, TIME, TIME. The answer is time. The time is right. The pace of business is ever faster. There's no going back. Yesterday's differentiating advantages of shortening time-to-market or being lowest cost producer don't count for much when everything's cheap and can be delivered by FedEx tomorrow.

Organizations that cannot morph at the speed of change are toast. Sam Palmisano has the only game in town that's working on all the pieces of the puzzle. Can he make it? Business is never just a day at the beach. If not IBM, who? If not now, when? Thank goodness someone is looking ahead more than one quarter.

Reports

2005-03-25T18:15:00.000-08:00

Worthwhile Newsletters
Business Process Trends (Paul Harmon)

Workflow Learning Symposium Newsletter

ZapThink
Redmonk -- Putting Tech Strategy in Context
Outsell, Inc.
Loosely Coupled

About the Institute

2005-03-25T15:56:00.000-08:00

Mission

The Workflow Institute serves decision-makers at the intersection of business results, enterprise systems, and human performance. We promote the understanding and use of real-time learning in industry and government worldwide. We Identify new developments and interpret technology trends. Our backgrounds in instructional design, cognitive science, enterprise computing, and software architectures, coupled with our passion for helping people make the most of technology, have positioned us at the forefront of the Workflow Learning movement.

Our Logo

Inspired by Katsushika Hosukai's wonderful woodblock print, The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, one of his Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, 1823-29.

The great wave reflects our belief that Workflow Learning represents a sea change in the way people work, learn, and improve their lives.

Senior Staff

Jay Cross is Managing Director of the Workflow Institute. A thought leader in learning technology, Jay coined the terms “eLearning” and "workflow learning."

Jay is also CEO of Emergent Learning Forum, an 1,800-member think tank and advocacy organization. He is webmaster of the popular eLearning research site, www.internettime.com . He is a founding fellow of the Meta-Learning Lab. He is co-author (with Lance Dublin) of Implementing eLearning (ASTD, 2002) and co-author (with Wayne Hodgins) of the vision paper that kicked off the ASTD/National Governors Association Committee on Technology and Adult Learning. He writes a column, Effectiveness, for Chief Learning Officer magazine and has contributed numerous articles to Online Learning, eLearning, eLearn, Technology for Learning, LiNEzine, Learning Circuits, American Banker, Training and Development and other publications.

Previously, Jay developed the first business program for the University of Phoenix. Managed a software start-up. Sold mainframes to schools and banks. AB, Princeton University. MBA, Harvard Business School.

Gary J. Dickelman is a Fellow of the Workflow Institute. Gary leads our Performance-Centered Design practice. He applies knowledge management, human factors, learning technology, and business process engineering to creating systems that human beings can actually use. He specializes in creating industrial-strength performance-centered systems. Gary is the editor of EPSS Revisited (ISPI, 2003), a contributing author of Using Computers in Human Resources (Jossey-Bass, 1992) and The Instructional Technology Handbook (McGraw-Hill, 1993). He has authored numerous articles for industry periodicals. Gary is founder and CEO of EPSScentral LLC and serves on the faculties of George Mason University and Boise State University, teaching graduate-level courses on performance-centered design. Gary 's academic background includes mathematics, nuclear engineering and cognitive science. In his spare time he plays percussion, tuba, arranges and teaches music and writes for Drum Corps World.

Gloria Gery is the first Fellow of the Workflow Institute. Gloria invented the field of Electronic Performance Support. She was a champion of performance-centered design twenty years before its current popularity. She has taught our industry to "give up the idea that competence must exist within the person and expand our view that whenever possible it should be built into the situation." Gloria is a member of the HRD Hall of Fame and an ASTD Distinguished Contributor. This May, ASTD recognized her as a Legend for her deep influence on the field of learning and performance development.

Clark Quinn is a Fellow ot the Institute. He directs our User Experience programs. He brings a track record of innovative and successful solutions in learning, performance support, and community systems for industry, education, government, and not-for-profits. He has designed and developed web conferences and competitions, award-winning online learning content, learning games, intelligently adaptive systems, and mobile implementations. Previously he led research and development as Director of Cognitive Systems for Knowledge Universe Interactive Studio and held executive positions at Open Net and Access CMC, two Australian initiatives in Internet-based multimedia and education. Clark earned his doctorate in Cognitive Psychology from the University of California, San Diego, and is author of a forthcoming book on elearning simulation game design. Clark manages OtterSurf Laboratories and is a founding fellow of the Meta-Learning Lab.

Clients

Blog

2004-03-25T18:16:00.001-08:00

Enter your email address below to subscribe to Workflow Institute Blog.

powered by Bloglet

Blog Archives, Q1 2004 - Q1 2005

In case you missed it, this website is a blog.

Contact Us

2004-03-25T18:16:00.000-08:00

Send a message to Workflow Institute.

Workflow Institute
30 Poppy Lane
Berkeley, CA 94708
1.510.528.3105

Our Newsletters

2004-03-25T17:28:00.000-08:00

November 2004 | August 2004 | July 2004 | February 2004 | December 2003

Integrate Process-Model Support and Enterprise LMS

2004-02-20T20:18:00.000-08:00

by Gary J. Dickelman, May 2005

Integrating a process model-driven toolset into the content development arsenal of an LMS or LCMS provides manifold benefits.

A process model-driven (workflow) toolset based on business process capture improves business and human performance in the context of computer-mediated work. This is precisely what enables Workflow Learning. Such toolsets include a range of commercially available products, from low-end simulation generators (Macromedia Captivate, Global Knowledge’s Firefly, OnDemand Software’s Personal Navigator, Epiplex’s epiSimDoc module, Datango and others) to higher-end technologies that capture much more than is required for simulations. The latter provide capabilities for embedded coaching, business process tracking, business process improvement, process integration, stealth knowledge management and more. This range of tools includes RockeTools’ ActiveGuide, ThinkSmartPS’s 2Work!EPSS, Epiance’s BPI Suite, Above All Sofware, Beyond Software, WorkSoft’s Certify and more.

Three key advantages of including such tools in an LMS / LCMS are rapid simulation developers, new technologies that embrace business process improvement and generally expand the “Quality” toolset and those emerging tools that enable a range of knowledge management capabilities toward the semantic web. Details:

Clearly the most popular form of elearning for computer-mediated work is simulation. A tool that can rapidly capture end-user business processes and auto-generate animation, simulation and related documentation would provide clear benefits to any organization making an LMS investment.

· An LMS is useless absent content to manage. Rapid development tools are therefore a plus.

· Rapid development tools that are integrated directly into the LMS in terms of object type, segmentation, assembly, reuse (e.g. SCORM) provide further advantages in terms of reduced development and maintenance time and increasing the effectiveness of the learning experience.

· A current trend is toward workflow-based, performance-centered assessment and learning. In other words, many knowledge worker tasks are workflow-based, so we must first establish taxonomies of business processes against which the organization can assess knowledge gaps. The LMS would then manage delivery of need-to-know interventions that are specific to individuals and, therefore, enable faster time-to-competency. These performance-centered design (PCD) tools, by their very nature, are workflow-centric and usually gap-analytic.

· Generally speaking, assessment is the weakest segment of the elearning development lifecycle (it is, at best, a lower-case E in the ADDIe process (analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation). Those tools that include remote capture would therefore provide an enormous benefit in terms of continuous assessment of learner populations and deployed solutions as well as a more efficient means of conducting formative evaluation during the elearning development cycle. Remote capture does not disturb workers as we capture and analyze.

· Other eLearning development tools that are part of an LMS suite could benefit greatly from process capture tools via an API or directly embedding them into the tool. This could server to reduce development and maintenance cycles.

· The extension of simulation-based learning interventions to contextualized, blended interventions (including coaches and other forms of performance support combined with simulations) provide further benefits to the LMS licensee.

The general trend is toward more performance-centered and workflow approaches to learning. Performance improvement expands the boundaries of investigation to find root causes of performance deficiencies that may be outside of the realm of learning gaps. A significant component of performance improvement is evaluating workers’ business processes and improving them through Quality methods, the most popular of which at the moment is Six Sigma. Unfortunately, the state-of-the-practice is mostly through face-to-face activities such as contextual interviews and observations that are extremely labor-intensive and expensive.

· On the other hand, such performance support tools embrace a technology-centered approach to performance improvement through business process improvement. The conventional Quality tools – check sheets, Pareto charts, Ishikawa diagrams, histograms and the like – are inherent in the various capture-based suites through, for example, remote capture and analysis features. The basic data that are collected via remote capture and the supplied queries and functions provide, at the most fundamental level, a Quality toolkit around business process improvement.

· Of great benefit to organizations that invest in an LMS would be to have a business process improvement suite as an integral component. The reason why there is a trend toward performance improvement in the learning sciences is because it is recognized that merely recording the volumes of so-called graduates of courseware via an LMS does nothing to measure how the organization is benefiting or improving. We might as well weigh all of the learners and record the total as a (worthless) measure of LMS effectiveness. On the other hand, measuring how well business processes are supported from a Quality perspective and correlating this with the frequency that learning interventions are created to close gaps and their effectiveness at closing them would add a powerful dimension to the LMS. Specifically, it would significantly enhance the return on investment and general business case around licensing and maintaining an LMS.

Another rapidly emerging trend is personalized or ontology-driven knowledge management. The Semantic Web is a vision articulated by many, most notably Tim Berners-Lee, the original architect of the Web. The machine-readable view of the semantic web is for automation, integration and reuse of information and knowledge across applications. It is also about intelligent agents manipulating and retrieving information to make it more relevant to the context and person who is searching and learning. Additional views of the semantic web include a means to apply web services toward making information actionable (i.e., turning it into knowledge) for the person solving a specific problem at a specific time and understanding that individual’s context.

· The accepted building blocks of the semantic web begin with XML and proceed in layers to include XML Schema, Resource Description Framework (RDF), RDF Schema, Ontology, Logic and Proof and finally Security and Trust.

· An LMS that supports SCORM or AICC is nothing more than an early step toward the semantic web, as these emerging models are nothing more than XML Schema for reuse in relation to learning.

· For an LMS (or LCMS) to be poised for the semantic web revolution, it must at the very least sit on a foundation of XML, XML Schema and support metadata that says “anything about anything” (i.e., RDF and RDF Schema).

· Such performance support tools are often built on such a foundation. They will not only complement that of an LMS or LCMS, but are poised to become the foundation that informs ontology.

· breakSo the benefit to an LMS licensee is huge for forward thinking organizations. The semantic web is about knowledge representation that considers the searcher/learner and what he or she knows and does not know, the context of the problems that inform learning - most notably business process - and a machine’s ability to manage the process and deliver what is needed at the time of need (to borrow an old phrase).

The three areas of benefits discussed above were couched in terms of the organization that licenses the LMS or LCMS. Clearly, the benefit to the LMS or LCMS vendor of including process capture-based performance support / workflow learning tools - as integral to its toolset with respect to simulation, learning evaluation, performance improvement and semantic web - are enormous. As the realities of current LMS and LCMS deficiencies continue to surface, they are more and more evolving toward commodities. That is probably why there is a flurry of activity around adding components like content development tools, human resources management features (e.g., performance management and career development). The problem is that none of these are really making a difference. Licensing is flat, there are fewer discriminators and, generally, the playing field is becoming quite level. I would argue that the three major benefits afforded by including a process model-driven performance-centered toolset in an LMS or LCMS suite could inform a tipping point, in the language of Malcolm Gladwell. Of course, if you share the mindset of the Workflow Institute, you’d have realized that in a blink of the eye.

Workflow Institute

Workflow 2.0

In Her Own Words: Gloria Gery on Performance

Great Wave off San Francisco

Workflow Learning Day at Geo. Mason University

New Workflow learning paper

Old wine in new bottles?

Looking back at the Symposium at GMU

Beware of Imitations

Innovations in eLearning Symposium

A Workflow Learning Pattern Language

Web 2.0

Workflow Learning Pattern Language

Web Services -- No Slam Dunk

Confronting the Reality of Web Services

Integrate Process-Model Support and Enterprise LMS

The World Is (Indeed) Flat!

Living Networks

Prime Time for Real Time

Innovations in eLearning Symposium

The Transformation of IT

Workflow Symposium

On Demand, In the Soup, and On the Path to Glory

Reports

Articles from Workflow Institute

Articles

Presentations by Workflow Institute