The March 2007 San Francisco Bay Tertulia welcomed Eilif Trondsen, Ph.D. from SRI Consulting Business Intelligence. It was our first virtual and collocated Tertulia. The meeting was shared using Bridgit conferencing software provided by SMART Technologies.
Eilif Trondsen is program director of two research programs at SRI Consulting (SRIC), a subsidiary of SRI International in Menlo Park, where Eilif has spent the last 20 years working on a variety of projects in international economics and trade, e-commerce and technology-enabled learning. SRIC's Learning on Demand program is in its early phase of developing insights into how technology will impact learning and training, focusing on the corporate environment.
Eilif’s talk, titled “Research Perspectives from SRI-BI on Recent and Future Trends in New Ways of Working,” was divided into three areas:
- A brief background on SRI International
- An overview of the SRI Consulting Business Intelligence Programs
- A close-up look into two programs: SCAN and LoD (learning on demand)/Virtual Worlds.
SRI-BI’s SCAN program offers a different perspective from the typical business intelligence system (watch, focus, study and act). The difference is a final step in the system: scan. The scan step involves searching continuously across diverse information sources for new types of potentially relevant information. The scanning process looks for articles that are off the trendline. Signs to look for include:
- Faint signals of change
- Discontinuities
- Inflection points
- Disruptive technologies
- Outliers
- Unconventional wisdom
Another focus of Eilif’s talk was the importance of the learning organization. Companies are moving away from formal training (Learning 1.0) to informal training (Learning 2.0). Training programs are moving towards making knowledge searchable. Content is no longer created solely by instructional designers. More learning takes place in online spaces and communities than in classrooms.
We have posted a summary of the discussion as well as Eilif's original slide presentation on the site.
Summary: http://www.newwow.net/members/node/388
Slides: http://www.newwow.net/members/node/387
