Often Scan meetings pose more questions than answers. However, answering these questions is critical to the innovative process that companies need to stay abreast of developments and remain competitive. Competent employees have become the lifeblood of most companies. Yet competence is a moving target, perpetually in need of updates and retooling to keep pace with fast-moving business environments. Networking technology and greater availability of quality content allow companies to adopt learner-centric approaches, link learning closely to people's daily tasks, incorporate video and audio components that attract learners' attention and improve their retention, foster learning communities in which people share information, and streamline many work processes by making information available for reuse.
Wild cards are ideas and events well off the current trend lines in the business environment.
Information Access Programs that allow dramatically new ways of locating, accessing, and distributing content are cropping up on the Internet. But the implications for the world at large are also significant. These programs represent the emergence of new distributed and decentralized models for searching for and accessing data of all kinds. Pointera can enable Web users to search personal-computer hard disks as well as Web sites. The next stage followed in the mid- to late twentieth century, with computerized records, electronic funds transfer, credit cards, and automatic teller machines.