It's essential.

Most on-the-job while-working learning about

- current events,
- what-to-do in such-and-such a situation,
- effective and clear communication (both off and online)
- who to talk to about an issue or problem,
- feedback from customers,
- and so on

increasingly takes place in socially-connected networks, via social tools such as in-house "twitter" (microstreaming), wikis, Skype if you're allowed to talk to outsiders whilst at work (weird that you can use the phone for that but often not Skype, huh ?) and other internal fora for conversation and exchange.

I am assuming here that there's near-ubiquity in the provision of registration, tracking, measurement, aggregation of data for performance analysis purposes.

Isn't a stand-alone (somewhat or much-detached & centralized) LMS looking like a moated fortress ? Shouldn't the central focus of any future "LMS" be executing its excellence as a warehouse for the delivery of bits on-demand ( courses and learning objects etc.). to the network. Shouldn't increasingly the LMS serve the network both through the individual and increasingly, informal and / or impromptu groups (see services such as Zorap.com). Shouldn't any LMS be seeking to open itself to the ecosystem and just become one specific part of it, instead of defining a closed domain of mostly-structured formal learning ?

Isn't the network the future of learning ?