Meta trend: In 2002, enterprise e-learning initiatives will remain fragmented, with management prioritizing best-of-breed learning management systems (LMSes).

By 2003, the e-learning market will adopt an "ecosystem" model incorporating real-time, asynchronous, and content management capabilities. Through 2005, e-learning services will increasingly be delivered as embedded components within enterprise portals, applications, and collaboration systems.

Organizational agility increasingly is dependent on how well participants within business processes assimilate new rules, roles, and knowledge within the context of strategic strategies (e.g., CRM) and line-of-business objectives. Leading-edge companies are applying e-learning initiatives as an integral educational foundation of a transformational framework that achieves organizational dexterity and sustains employee innovation. The increasing competency requirements for customer-facing employees have created an e-learning market segment geared specifically toward improving the quality of customer interactions.

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While e-learning will also become integral to community-building strategies that leverage peer-to-peer information exchange, economic factors (e.g., declining economic conditions resulting in increased scrutiny of CRM investments for ROI) have begun to taper the enterprise e-learning market. As a result, there is a trend toward aligning e-learning with specific business initiatives as companies look to demonstrate e-learning's value in-context with business processes. During 2002-03, e-learning projects will be driven by strategic programs (e.g., CRM, ERP) as organizations recognize the necessity of continual training for their sales force, service agents, HR specialists, and manufacturing laborers, all of whom are the low-hanging fruit for e-learning ROI.

We believe that, by 2004-05, a trend reversal will occur due to technology maturity and changing economic factors, triggering a return to supporting knowledge workers via an enterprise learning infrastructure. By 2006, both ERP and CRM application vendors will integrate learning services directly into the business processes their technologies automate, resulting in ubiquitous, contextual e-learning.

Currently, the following four vendor segments are moving to address the needs of employee-focused CRM and knowledge management (e-learning) initiatives:

• CRM-specific content tool vendors (Knowledge Impact, Brainshark, Presenter) have emerged, aiding in the rapid creation and deployment of business-process-specific content.
• Customer interaction center (CIC)-specific vendors (e.g., Witness Systems, Comverse, Knowlagent) are integrating collaborative learning and skill management into their performance support frameworks.
• To remain competitive, traditional CRM/ERP vendors (e.g., Siebel, PeopleSoft, Oracle, E.piphany) have been adding collaborative and training administrative functionality to their products to keep pace with the market and enable product-specific training for customers.
• Learning management system (LMS) platform vendors (e.g., Docent, SmartForce, Click2learn) have begun to offer CRM tools and course libraries focused on sales, marketing, and call center agents.

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