@Dawn – yes indeed, saw your post and remarked “Bingo!”. Nice work. Thanks for the great piece – well written.

Thanks for confirming my doubts about standalone LMS.

SharePoint (particularly 2010) as well as many other solid collaboration systems just as Jive, Saba (if it includes Saba Social), Blogtronix, Liferay, SocialText, BrainPark, MindTouch, amongst a few others … can provide this view into the organization, and with customization and other existing (or future) pieces federating into the platform.

SharePoint 2010 in particular has a real leg up on the new entrants in my opinion.

SharePoint itself is deployed in 55% of organizations (http://www.netjmc.net/intranet-trends/global-intranet-trends-2009-report-jmc.html) and to me, it’s just easier to start with something you know and then to build off of it.

SharePoint 2010 has really closed the gap between E1.0 and E2.0, and I personally can no longer look at the platform as merely a document management system. It is much more than that, and once a company sorts out how to federate their LMS into the SharePoint 2010 (or similar) collaboration system, it will create that seamless window into the org for all things knowledge, learning, collaboration, etc.

I believe we need to move from ROI to ROP … return on performance. Rather than stating a company had 500,000+ formal training enrolments, and trying to sort out some ridiculous Kirkpatrick clone level 5 metric … we need to simply ask ourselves how formal, informal and social learning (along with other knowledge and interaction pieces) play a part in the Return of Performance of an organization and individuals.

Eg. the organization’s metrics could and should be but not limited to retention, attraction, time on support calls, time to gain new clients, engagement scores, company awards, etc etc etc.

Eg. the individual’s metrics could and should be but not limited to personal engagement, size of colleague network, time to perform in new role/new task/new ask/new project, time to access answers, contributions back to the ecosystem, etc.

We need to establish new metrics for both the company and the individual, and they have to be based on performance, not on the antiquated link of investment to training events.

Here’s my take on things for you – grain of salt feedback.

I’m not suggesting that the LMS is dead, rather, the stand-alone LMS is a relic. Whether you’re in a private or public organization (and I’ve worked in both scenarios) we need to start first with a ‘collaboration’ system rather than a ‘learning’ system, and build out from there.

I truly believe the LMS needs to become part of the collaboration system, because our societal norm is that ‘you go to training’.

The stand-alone LMS does nothing to help with erasing this falsehood, thus, if we were to federate the LMS into the collaboration system, you would have both in the same place, and formal, informal and social learning could reside in the same ‘end-user’ system/application.

The reporting (and thus BI) would be built into the collaboration system because it will have the capability to report on formal aspects (like registrations, scores, etc.), informal aspects (like video/webinar uploads, coaching/mentoring instances, etc.) and social aspects (like colleague network numbers, comments, posts, etc.)

How would you address this need in a collaborative platform?

True – if you are clinging to the LMS, then SCORM Cloud (and the theory) does make sense.

I do have a premonition though, and that is the formal eLearning course is going to become extinct and that short bursts of knowledge (learning nuggets) will be the standard when delivered over the web. This is because users will want a short blast, then discussion, then opinion, then application, then evaluation, then another short blast, repeat the process.

Sitting through anything longer than 30 minutes of one-way content will no longer cut it. But, there’s probably still a market for SCORM Cloud and the LMS because not everyone thinks like me yet.