I spent half of Monday talking to the always charming Stacey Harris, a lead analyst for Brandon Hall Group; I spent yesterday at the Masie Center’s New Directions in Learning event in New York and today at SkillSoft’s Perspectives event in Florida.

Quite a bit of running around. All good. Stacey has more ideas in a morning than most people come up with in a year. Elliott is always on form and somehow able to speak in a series of full, coherent paragraphs for hours on end without notes or prompts of any kind. Brilliant.

The most interesting session today was a healthcare workshop presented by a couple of Wellpoint executives about ICD-10, the new medical classification standard, new for this country at least. Very well presented and lots of food for thought. My biggest take-away was that in the next year or two the US healthcare and healthcare related insurance industries will need to train or retrain hundreds of thousands, maybe low millions, of mostly non-medical people in various topics including anatomy and physiology for the October 2014 start date for ICD-10.

ICD codes are the seemingly random alpha-numeric headings for diagnoses and procedures on medical forms of different kinds. Under the current coding system, ICD-9, there are about 18,000 codes. In the new system there will be more than 140,000. Under ICD-9 there is one default code for sewing up an artery, “Suture of Artery.” Under ICD-10 there are some 194 codes for suturing an artery, each new code carrying quite a bit more detail than before.

While this may all sound like insider baseball and not of great interest to the rest of us, it’s actually a sea change for the industry with lots of implications for winners and losers going forward. It’s also a large education challenge. How do you, in a timely and cost effective way, train a “coder” who may have no medical or general science background on fairly sophisticated human anatomy and physiology topics? How do you train a couple of generations of doctors, nurses and other healthcare providers to add a great deal more specificity to their patient notes going forward? Can you get competing payer and provider services to cooperate on any of these initiatives at all? Will the mistakes and biases of improperly or lazily coded medical files result in actuarial decisions on reimbursement standards that will remove cover for some types of suffering and overpay for others? Will there be legal minefields created around mismatches between ICD-10 standards and law?

The questions go on and on.

This is a quiet but massive reset of the American healthcare industry, all caused by a global agreement on taxonomy nobody outside of healthcare has thought about or even heard of. The American Medical Association seems to be against it. The related training and change management requirements are challenging (and very large). And before today I knew nothing about this.

We’ll see what the second half of the week brings.

Josh Bersin, one of the best non-financial analysts covering the world of talent and HR solutions today, recently posted a blog piece that ended with a shout out to Moneyball, the Michael Lewis book (and now Brad Pitt movie) about The Oakland A’s.

For the two or three people in the world who don’t already know this story, the A’s manager Billy Beane hired a young statistician from Yale, a hitherto uncommon hiring choice in the world of Major League Baseball.

In an effort to create a winning team on a limited budget, the two men ditched the talent scout model for sourcing players and instead adopted serious statistical modeling, the equivalent of price arbitrage analysis in the world of finance.

And win they did. The idea worked better than anyone dreamed. Now, all 30 Major League Baseball teams employ statisticians and use some variety of The Oakland A’s original methodology to recruit and manage talent.

Alas, success often carries the seeds of its own failure. The wide adoption of The Oakland A’s methods means the A’s no longer enjoy the strategic competitive advantage that being first at bat once gave them.

But the A’s, like every other team in the league, cannot walk away. Statistical modeling is now the new normal. Every team needs to do it just to keep up. Competitive advantage has now become a long, hard slog of finding incremental improvements in the model.

Since the book came out, I’ve been saying that talent management in the HR world will be going on a journey a lot like The Oakland A’s’ in Moneyball — experiments with statistical analysis, business intelligence and predictive analytics driving early mover adoption whose success will then be noticed and copied by the mainstream. At some point the balance tips, the use of talent management systems becomes the new normal and everybody needs to keep running faster just to keep up.

If this adoption model holds, the talent management industry may well grow from its current $3 billion a year value into something bigger, perhaps quite a bit bigger. Thus Oracle’s acquisition of Taleo and SAP’s acquisition of SuccessFactors.

This is not about traditional HR. It’s about a brand new major market. Industry practitioners (and vendors) need to start thinking bigger. Imagine for instance if you could create what techies call a “denormalized data cube” from your own personnel performance data and pair it with Linked in profiles to recruit exactly the kinds of people statistically validated to be the most likely to succeed in your organization.

That would be powerful. It’s just one example of the kinds of possibilities about to become commonplace.

In January we exhibited and attended Learning Technologies 2012 at Olympia Hall in London. In the context of this event, we gave a popular presentation on the future of LMS. Here is a link to the slides from this presentation: LMS: Evolution or Extinction.

In Your Call Is Not Important To Us Farhad Manjoo of Slate bemoans the lack of anything approaching even tolerably good customer service from Gmail.

He’s moaning about the free-to-users, advertiser supported Gmail service, not the paid services businesses and government agencies sign up for.

It got me thinking. Sometimes free means a bargain. Sometimes not. I would argue that the affordances of Gmail so far outweigh the possibility of poor customer service that even with no customer service at all, it’s still a good thing.

However, my expectations are fairly low when I sign up for free services. And the old saw holds — You get what you pay for . . .

When we, as high-technology vendors, refer to innovation, we usually have product innovations in mind. This means that we often overlook the amazing process innovations that our users perform day-in and day-out using our products and solutions in their lines of business. This month, in our yearly Next Steps user conferences in Chicago, London and Bangkok, we asked our customers to tell us what interesting (= unconventional = innovative) ways they use our Learning Management System (LMS). We were looking for use cases that we wouldn’t normally anticipate for an LMS, use cases that fall outside the realms of the L&D department, use cases that span functions across the enterprise.

Needless to say we were amazed! Here are some of the cases that came up.

1. An airline is using our LMS for Dangerous Goods Handling (DGH) compliance training. When an employee fails to complete the required training on time, the LMS revokes security clearance so that the employee is automatically locked out of the airport’s goods handling areas and a manager is notified for further action.
2. An insurance provider used our LMS to co-ordinate swine flue vaccinations for all their employees. The company created a class called “Flu Vaccination” that was available on certain dates & places, and they were able to successfully track the vaccinations of over 7,000 employees in just two weekends.
3. An electrical equipment distributor is using our LMS to manage temporary employee transfers between their different locations. They do that by using the course enrollment policy workflow to initiate a transfer request, communicate the reason of the transfer to the respective manager, and notify transfer approvals to the HR & Finance departments.
4. A financial services provider is using our LMS to co-ordinate their regular Investor Relations events by creating courses for the different sessions, assigning investor-related materials to these courses, and tracking registrations to these courses for all the required stakeholders.
5. A religious organization is using our LMS to perform yearly HR audits by comparing user profile data in the LMS (from a required IT security course that takes place once a year) to HR employee records.
6. An automotive parts provider is using our LMS o manage their franchise network, certify franchisees, collect franchise fees, and perform equipment audits.
7. An airline is using our LMS for disaster volunteer coordination by matching people to different volunteering activities and assigning relevant workflows to take action when disaster strikes.
8. A software company is using our LMS to manage their internal ISO 14001 environmental policy certification.
9. A housing association is using our LMS to develop a series of Human Trafficking Awareness e-learning modules aimed at different audiences in order to educate and raise awareness of human trafficking among authorities, communities, and the general public.

To all our users … “Thank you!”

Last week I attended mLearnCon 2011 in San Jose, CA.  mLearnCon is a growing and dynamic event by the eLearning Guild that’s focused on Mobile Learning with a mixed audience of technologists, educators, analysts, corporate L&D professionals, training & courseware providers, and technology vendors (typically for authoring tools, mobile delivery platforms, LCMSs, and LMSs).  This year some really good points came up that reinforce what we have learned the hard way via our own (and our clients’) experiences in implementing mobile learning.  I felt it might be worth recapping here.

1. What is mLearning? It might sound surprising that there is no clear commonly agreed upon definition of Mobile Learning.  Does it include learning on laptops or not?  Does it imply Internet connectivity?  Does it apply if the experience is not mobile per se?  Does it have to involve some level of collaboration among learners?  Personally, I am not surprised there is no single definition for all.  Because what is becoming clear is that Mobile Learning really means different things to different people (depending on objectives, needs, scope, constraints, resources, and more).Now, as a side note, if you ask me about what definition I feel closer to, I will choose something that approaches mobility from the learner’s point of view and not from a technological perspective; for example the definition in the MOBIlearn Guidelines report that considers mobile learning “… any sort of learning that happens when the learner is not at a fixed, predetermined location, or learning that happens when the learner takes advantage of the learning opportunities offered by mobile technology.”
2. mLearning is not eLearning on a smartphone. Ok, everyone seems to agree that if you take eLearning and squeeze it to fit the dimensions and resolution of a mobile device is probably not the way to go. And we know enough now to avoid the early eLearning mistakes. Yes?  Right, so why are most conversations focusing on how to make Powerpoint flash content run on iPad?  Is this even the right approach?  On the other hand, what about all this eLearning content that has (finally & successfully) been developed?  Can we port it to mobile?  Should we? According to an excellent study by Bryan Chapman, the average cost of creating an hour of interactive eLearning is $18,500 which can rise to $50,000 with more advanced interactivity. So, how do you justify the ROI moving to mobile learning while protecting this eLearning investment? I think there is a real business challenge here.
3. It’s the learner, stupid. Maybe it’s just me, but I am seeing that most conversation revolve around devices and platforms instead of the learner.  With mobile, we have an opportunity to design technologies and solutions that put the learner in the center of the learning experience.  An experience that includes content, activities, and people, along with the ability to access and administer all these in an intuitive, if not seamless, way.  The simplest way to do this is by meeting the learners where they are, whenever they need it, and with whatever approach is most effective for the particular situation.  We also have the know-how to do all that while addressing key business drivers like supporting an increasingly mobile workforce, improving on-the-job performance, increasing the impact of corporate L&D programs, and developing a new generation of talent.
4. mLearning is an evolution, not a revolution. This is what our clients have really taught us.  You need to think big about mobile, but start small.  Take an objective, a program, a specific group mobile and work hard to make sure the undertaking is successful.  It’s always worth listening to your own audience to see what their needs and particular situations are, and hence what makes sense to go mobile.  And always link mobile learning to your overall learning and talent strategy, because that’s where the value lies.
5. There is no silver bullet in mLearning. No matter what vendors say, there is no single solution for all.  We are dealing with such a diverse ecosystem of technologies and business situations that we need to be thinking along the lines of multiple solution approaches.  And, I would suggest let’s not take innovation out of the way we think about mLearning.  I think there are great things to achieve in front of us, so let’s not make the mistakes of the past.

We have announced three Next Steps conference locations for 2011 — all in September. The first in Chicago; the second in London and the third in Bangkok. Please come.

At Next Steps you can network with your peers from different industries, share your best practices, provide your input into our new products, or just listen to how the latest developments in our enterprise knowledge, learning, assessment, compliance, and talent solutions can free up your people to do what they do best.

This year we will be offering a completely new NetDimensions Product Workshop on the second day led by our technical consultants and featuring two tracks with a total of eight different hands-on sessions. We invite you to enroll in this unique knowledge-packed training program to gain practical NetDimensions product insights that you can immediately apply in your own environments.

Come to the NetDimensions user conferences and let’s take the next steps together.

A tag cloud example of the power of visual representation (see below — click the image once or twice to make it full-size).

Or you can explore the original posting here.

Admittedly, even a list of lists is still subject to curation bias. However, the authors make a point of providing method and target disclosure. This is a great example of what can be done (efficiently) to give people serious, actionable information.

What could you do with this idea at your company? Think a Top 20 list for customer service strategies or a Top 10 list for sales with click-throughs going to explanations and war stories.

There is a brilliant instructional design lesson here.

There is a lovely post at TNW (The Next Web) on how open resource initiatives are putting first-rate academic teaching online for free.

You can find it here.

It got me thinking — it would be easy to incorporate some of this free material in corporate courseware and offer it via LMS catalogues. We have a publishing technology we call The Courseware Manager in our LMS which allows users to easily mix and match content inside a SCORM wrapper. It would be child’s play to bundle some of the open academic resources with company specific content and testing.

It’s an interesting idea. I wonder how many companies are doing things like this.

Fantastic series of pieces on how to think about and present data.

Terms like infographics and data animation don’t begin to explain the power of all of this new capability.

Find it here.