On the military — there is an interesting site http://www.invism.com — that shows how they are using cultural, immersive, video training that is visual, emotive, visceral. There are essentailly role plays that train the troops on how to interact with Iraqi people in the war zone — how to ascertain a threat. Contrast that with the other approach of video data collection — it may be overkill — but I think we need both approaches.

Thanks for the comments Sam!

Getting back to my point, this book about Analytics could be seen by some in the L&D field to support their thought that L&D is moving more and more to the consultancy side of the continuum in which larger commercial firms with proven methodology will evenutally prevail against the academic business school providers who provide a more theoretical or in some cases customized approach to the client’s problems. What’s interesting to consider in this debate is that sometimes companies consciously choose the customized approach because they don’t want the consultant’s approach which often forces the problem into Framework X, Y or Z.

Analytics can get you only so far. I thought it was interesting also to read last week about all the video footage that our military is gathering from unmanned airborne vehicles above Afghanistan. It seems they are barely keeping up with processing everything they are getting as it comes in and they now have a great deal of video footage that they could review again to make better links between the data they have already but they don’t have the resources to do so. They are drowning in data.

A Mac/Windows program to look at in this regard is Optimism (http://www.findingoptimism.com/)

I didn’t know you’d started a new blog! Found a reference to this post on LinkedIn.