Enduser centric approach.

Any investment that does not lead to a critical mass of take-up is a waste of money and worse loss of focus and even worse frequently leads to ice ages as organisations instead of learning from mistakes often ban further efforts for a long time.

Progress happens only when the next customer takes his e-step. Therefore it is of utmost importance to take a fanatic enduser centric approach - understand the context that customers are living in and how they change - what makes him move and what holds him back. Today, when there is less time for any one thing, a lot of value is put on economy of repetition: "Learn once - use everywhere." And naturally on making services extremely simple to understand and use.

A very useful approach to seeing customers in their context can be found in Oskar Korkman's Practice Design blog. Oskar: "My suggestion is that companies should service practices, instead of customers. This helps companies to bec0me less fragmented in the operations. Customers are very different, whereas practices can in many cases be universal.For instance, the practice of listening to music, is a practice that is served very well by Apple (Ipod and Itunes). The practice related to this is not specific for certain segments, but an universal practices that a big portion on the population in the western countries are more or less involved in. The notion of mass practices gives an opportunity for mass products.

New ways of doing things will happen faster when the social web is deployed for informal learning. Teemu Arinas blog includes a landmark presentation on this. Juha-Matti Arola has published a lot of useful material on e-learning in his blog.