Driving Higher Ed Institutions to an Enterprise Approach: "For many institutions, linear expansion of e-learning—adding a program, a person, or a larger server to an existing model—cannot scale to meet current needs or future demands. Moving e-learning to an enterprise level requires institutions to re-think the way they currently support technology-enhanced instruction."
Comment: First, it's important to note that the author is the COO of WebCT (an LMS vendor). Second, certain systems need to be enterprise - systems that have a set, established manner of doing things...and that require a set/established output. Accounting, registration, customer management - these domains are black and white - and lend themselves readily to enterprise implementation.
Learning is different. Learning is by nature multi-faceted and chaotic. Organizations that now lock into enterprise-level systems will be able to do an excellent job of delivering courses. They won't, however, be positioning themselves well for informal learning, performance support, or knowledge management. The concept is simple: one tool can't do it all without losing functionality. The more feature-rich an individual tool becomes, the more it loses its usefulness to the average user. Connected specialization, modularization, decentralization - those are learning foundations capable of adjusting to varied information climate changes.