EPSScentral News

Welcome to the August-September 2004 edition of .infoREADER, and congratulations to the recipients of the 2004 PCD Awards! This year's winners are the Business Plan Developer created for the National Park Service by SI International, Inc., Rockville, MD, ActiveGuide®: Real time workflow and process support developed by Rocket Software, Inc, the 2Work!™ EPSS developed by ThinkSmart Performance Systems, and Epiplex™ Business Process Analyzer, with Remote Capture . developed by Epiance, Inc (see the Press section for details and contact information). These winners have raised the bar substantially in terms of providing tools for developing and managing intrinsic, embedded support, and solutions that result in clear, measurable improvement in business and human performance metrics. I am looking forward to presenting the awards at the VNU Training conference in San Francisco.

Over the past month I have spent a considerable amount of time in Tokyo, Japan, first presenting at a Business Process Improvement seminar and most recently at the Elearning World conference at the Tokyo Big Sight (28 - 30 July). Attendance at the latter was about 6000, with an Expo of about 75 vendors. Elearning Japan resembles the US about five years ago in many respects, with some unique twists that could propel it to maturity more rapidly than we experienced.

First, there is great buzz about the “Y2007 Problem” when a large knowledge gap is expected to rear its head between the aging Japanese baby boomers and the younger generation of knowledge workers. The concern is a lack of organizational memory. While a similar crisis is on the US horizon in 2010, the Japanese style of attending to details, duty and discipline is very likely to create a solid foundation for learning, knowledge and performance management. What has confounded the US, in my opinion, has been a failure to establish realistic protocol for cataloguing knowledge and managing it in an ecological sense rather than like conventional information processing. It takes little imagination to see how the legacies of Deming, Ishikawa and Taguchi in the amazing manufacturing sector of the Japanese economy will play out in learning and knowledge management.

Performance centeredness is emerging quickly with respect to competency of entry level engineers - who must be proficient in computer aided design and engineering - as well as financial knowledge workers, health care professionals and a variety of disciplines that fall under the shadow of various compliance requirements. Noteworthy is the recent formation of a PCD track within the Japanese Elearning Consortium, with the addition of PCD Awards to augment its annual Elearning Awards. EPSScentral will play a prominent role in the performance agenda. These are indeed exciting times in Japan!

Warm regards,

Gary Dickelman

President & CEO

EPSScentral LLC