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EKL: Obviously IBM is really putting m-learning into practice. But where do you think the view that it�s been over-hyped has come from?
CK: I think what happened, and thank goodness we fixed things, was that everyone in the marketplace was spinning out this term m-learning. And it�s cool, but people don�t buy m-learning. You can take advantage of its capabilities for a business application deployment for a sales force, field force, and so forth, but people don�t buy m-learning. It�s a capability.
We gave it almost too much focus and drew attention to it, but pretty quickly we learned to back off and weave it through our existing offerings as a differentiator for us and a competitive advantage for the customers. We found that we need to get in the middle of these discussions with an important triad�the line of business (LOB) executive, the CIO, and then the CLO�and be the catalyst.
The LOB exec is the person who is going to drive an m-learning deployment. Clearly no one would ever deploy a device just for learning. But the LOB executives certainly would because they�re trying to give a competitive advantage or be more efficient. I use the term enablement. The CLO can say, if you have connectivity out to our endpoints, think about what you can distribute in a profiled fashion.
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EKL: In 2000, you said we�re just on the cusp of achieving the potential of m-learning. Where are we now in 2005? To some people it may seem like not much progress had been made.
CQ: If we�re still on the cusp, that�s more due to the economic downturn over the past few years than a fundamental flaw in the logic. To be fair, there�s been a steady increase in the infrastructure (greater penetration of phones, increase in networks, and so forth), that makes it a more attractive and practical proposition now. I actually think we�re now past the cusp and on our way. After being on the stump for mobile learning for the last couple of years, we�re beginning to see some action: initial contracts, some experiments, and so forth.