The document discusses how access to information through digital technologies has increased dramatically but has not necessarily led to knowledge and improved decision-making. It argues that information must be transformed into knowledge through a "shift of mind" for it to impact behavior. The company eFront aims to help organizations more effectively transform information into useful knowledge by developing affordable and easy-to-use learning technologies. This could help democratize learning by making such tools accessible to small and medium-sized businesses.

1. From Information to Knowledge and the democratization
of learning
By Dimitris G.E.Tsigos
http://www.linkedin.com/in/tsigos
Athens, Greece – April 29th 2012
A changing world!
We live in a changing world. We live in the era of the ‘Information
Revolution’. For the first time in history billions of people around the globe
have access to tons of information digitally stored in what we already call “the
cloud”. One could reasonably expect unprecedented growth and prosperity for
the global economy!
So, what about the global financial crisis? What about recession and poverty
in the most developed economies of the planet, the US and the EU? What
went wrong?
Metanoia: The Fifth Discipline
A good explanation can be found at the amazing book “The Fifth Discipline:
The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization” by MIT’s Peter M. Senge
where the Greek word “Metanoia” is introduced to describe the “shift of mind”
happening when a piece of information becomes to knowledge. What Senge
describes is something that most of us have actually experienced – we know
that a ‘bad habit’ may harm us; however having this information does not
stop us from doing it. The “shift of mind” has not yet happened – the
information has not yet become “knowledge” – and often we don’t quit the
bad habit before it has harmed us. Over-borrowing in the developed nations
in the first decade of the 21st Century represents an amazing example of how
bad it can get when you have the information but you don’t have the
knowledge.
eFront e-Learning
http://www.efrontlearning.net
http://twitter.com/efrontlearning | http://www.facebook.com/efront
http://www.slideshare.net/efrontlearning

2. What about businesses and learning technology?
We at eFrontLearning aim to provide solutions that help turn information to
knowledge – not only at the individual level but also at the workgroup level,
which is even more ambitious. Since the very beginning (2003) we have been
pursuing Tacit Knowledge in small- and medium-sized organizations. We try
to make this informal knowledge searchable and transferable. We try to
actually turn meta-information (that it “John is the person who knows how to
deal with this situation“) to really useful information (that is “when this event
happened in the past, John successfully faced it in that specific way“). It may
sound simple, however it actually is a revolution in terms of organizational
management and efficiency!
Why a “Revolution”?
For a very simple reason – small- and medium-sized organizations do not
have the resources necessary to turn this tacit knowledge to Explicit
Knowledge. They simply do not have the time and budget to do so. They
need a lean, real-time approach to grab tacit knowledge and make it
accessible to the team. This way organizations are able avoid having the
same mistakes repeated over and over again. Why does this happen?
Because the information was there but it was never transferred into
“knowledge”, it never changed the team’s behavior. With modern,
personalized, lean learning technologies for workgroups this can be achieved!
But what does this have to do with the democratization of learning?
The answer is very simple and obvious – learning technologies have been
around for almost two decades, however it has been a luxury product, both in
terms of capital expenditure and in terms of operational expenses. The total
cost of ownership for a complete, state-of-the-art eLearning solution has been
so high that only large corporations could afford it. Because of this situation,
hundreds of thousands of companies around the globe have been excluded
from the ability to turn information readily available on the Web into really
useful knowledge. Because of this situation, the vast majority of businesses
cannot really take advantage of the ‘Information Revolution’. This is where
eFront comes in and disrupts the market – making a huge step towards the
democratization of learning technologies, and so the actual democratization of
learning.
The need for efficient, lean, accessible and easy-to-use learning technologies
has never been higher. We at the eFront team bet that this need will grow
over the next year at a fast pace. There is a plethora of arguments to support
this:
eFront e-Learning
http://www.efrontlearning.net
http://twitter.com/efrontlearning | http://www.facebook.com/efront
http://www.slideshare.net/efrontlearning

3. The economy is changing, getting more and more knowledge intensive
Employee turn-over, meaning the frequency that employees change jobs,
increases at a high pace
Because of the economic crisis resources are lacking
Because of globalization, competition gets more intensive
Multimedia content, which used to represent a significant part of an eLearning
project TCO, now is gradually turning to a commodity
So, what is the eFront vision for democratizing learning?
The eFront team envisions every single business having the right to access
quality, affordable, easy-to-use, lean learning technology tools that offer
support in taking advantage of the information revolution and actually
increasing its organizational knowledge both from a qualitative and
quantitative perspective.
We aim to materialize all of this in developing value-for-money, cloud-based,
mobile-enabled technology solutions targeting the huge market of small- and
medium-sized organizations around the globe. No matter if your business is
based in a global metropolis like NYC, London, Sydney, Ontario, or Moscow,
or a rural village in Montana, Andalusia or Toscana, you can very simply
access a technology platform from your browser, tablet or smartphone and
experience “metanoia”, shift of mind for you and your team while taking
advantage of the tons of information out there, turning that information into
useful knowledge for sustaining and developing your business!
About the Author:
Dimitris G.E. Tsigos is the President of YES - European Confederation of Young
Entrepreneurs, the Founder of the Hellenic Start-up Association and the Founder
& CEO of Virtual Trip, a Start-up Accelerator & Seed Fund in the ICT sector.
Dimitris established the first successful IT start-up in Greece, Virtual Trip Ltd
[www.vtrip.net] at the Science & Technology Park of Crete in September 2000
and later spawn-out more than 10 IT start-ups including amazing success
stories like eFront e-Learning [www.efrontlearning.net], SOLO Gateway
[www.sologateway.com] and AbZorba Games [www.abzorbagames.com]. In November 2009
Dimitris globally first introduction of the ‘Entrepreneurial Ecosystem’ concept
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrepreneurial_ecosystem]as group of non-competing start-ups
achieving economies of scales without losing flexibility and strong entrepreneurial drive. He is
an active citizen, a passionate serial entrepreneur and always struggling to create must-have,
really useful technology solutions for the economy and the society.
About the Company:
The idea for eFront was first grabbed in 2001 by it's co-founders, Dimitris Tsigos and
Athanasios Papagelis, two technology entrepreneurs in Greece, in an effort to exploit the fast
eFront e-Learning
http://www.efrontlearning.net
http://twitter.com/efrontlearning | http://www.facebook.com/efront
http://www.slideshare.net/efrontlearning

4. growing on-line learning market. After a 20K pre-seed financing raised by an EU program, the
eFront prototype was developed in 2002 and Epignosis Ltd was incorporated in 2003. The
team successfully completed a handful of demanding e-Learning projects from 2004 and in
2006 while closing a first investment round and becoming member of the Virtual Trip
Entrepreneurial Ecosystem. Also in 2006 eFront was certified by ADL as SCORM compliant
and in 2007 the open-source edition was published. This development, together with the
launch of eFront V3, a completely new platform in terms of technology enhanced with a
multitude of enterprise tools and functionality, boosted eFront to raising international
visibility. An international VAR Partner Network was first created in 2008 which dynamically
expanded in 2009 and 2010. Epignosis, aiming to disrupt the learning technology market is
launching 'TalentLMS' in 2012, a revolutionary, cloud-based, mobile-enabled solution
targeted to small- and medium-sized organizations, responding to the need for learning
efficiency and effective knowledge sharing of our era.
eFront e-Learning
http://www.efrontlearning.net
http://twitter.com/efrontlearning | http://www.facebook.com/efront
http://www.slideshare.net/efrontlearning