Additionally, all of the instructor/ mentor/ navigator notes about how to manage and enhance learning experiences, syntheses of excellent questions and answers from past courses, assessment and evaluation, and other learning support materials will need to be made available to support e-learning.

• Acquisition and e-procurement. e-Procurement is about more than on-line purchasing. Supplier enablement and strategic purchasing will enable enterprises to reduce costs and enhance the quality of the purchasing experience. In the process they will yield a handsome ROI and VOI on their investment in e-procurement.
• Other e-business applications. e-Business is about using technology to transform how enterprises conduct their business. Tomorrow’s e-learning experiences will need to be supported by transformed and fused versions of today’s academic support and administrative processes.
• Partnerships and relationships with suppliers/ vendors/ partners. Tomorrow’s relationships between colleges applications and universities and technology companies will be broader than today’s. Leading-edge technology providers like SCT are evolving into solution providers specializing in “blended” enterprise application solutions that combine services and infrastructures, in-house and outsourced solutions, and legacy and new systems.

Iconographic enterprises and leading-edge technology-based solution providers are developing these new competencies today. The discovery of these new capabilities is both evolutionary and “expeditionary” as well. Even when guided by a well-conceived vision of the new competencies needed to succeed, leaders are discovering unexpected nuances and facets through a process of expeditionary inquiry.

Enterprises will need to achieve a higher plane of individual and institutional capability in e-learning, knowledge management, faculty and staff development, collaboration, and the use of communities of practice. These competencies will be essential to attaining the value on investment possible through changing the institutional dynamics of productivity, collaboration, and innovation. This will be a substantial challenge for the human resources development capabilities of colleges and universities, but necessary to their success.

Enterprises are developing their new enterprise application solutions as expeditions, discovering how to combine process and information integration, business process reinvention, and staff development as an ongoing process of continuous improvement and revelation. The new “killer apps” will emerge from this process of expeditionary discovery.

Implement New Leadership Methods and Capabilities

Developing the next generation of enterprise application infrastructures and solutions will require different kinds of leadership, from the CEO to vice presidents and the CIO to line managers and process owners. Consider the following examples:

• CEOs will coordinate the articulation of enterprise strategy that will deploy new enterprise applications, infrastructures and solutions to position their enterprises for competitive advantage and providing new experiences for stakeholders.
• Several strategies are needed:
• Knowledge strategy articulates the centrality of knowledge to the enterprise’s mission, vision and competitive position. It presents the enterprise’s strategy for achieving knowledge-driven competitive advantage.

• Knowledge management strategy details the enterprise’s strategy for developing and using the infrastructure, processes and capacities necessary to maximize the stewardship and management of their knowledge assets.
• The fusion of academic and administrative applications will require broad collaboration on the development of most infrastructures and applications.
• CIOs and IT departments will experience especially dramatic changes. In the view of Hagel and Brown, IT departments will turn to outsourcing or co-sourcing relationships with external partners while leveraging distinctive internal capabilities. CIOs will need to substantially extend their skills as: 1) strategists and entrepreneurs, 2) knowledge brokers, 3) relationship managers, and 4) negotiators. Developing the enterprise application infrastructure will require new levels of partnership between the CIO and other campus executive officers.

In summary, VOI is a facile instrument for focusing an enterprise’s ICT resources on strategic enterprise objectives, especially as they pertain to
e-knowledge. VOI also focuses attention on the “social” elements of the enterprise’s knowledge ecosystem.