I just tweeted about the post http://www.internettime.com/2012/05/the-new-workplace/ from @jaycross. I work at one of the world's largest international financial organizations, and we collect an astounding amount of metrics. We are highly regulated, frequently audited, and have a significant amount of formal training in place to meet all the requirements and reporting needs.

Yet, despite all this, we are seeing 95/5 - measured. Even with the amount of training we do, and significantly limited social/web2.0 tools, we still see this ratio
measured. And that's what we can measure- I have no doubt there are informal coaching, on the floor discussions, and peer support that go unmeasured.

I've been a proponent of "the Pareto rule" for a long time. Seems many organizations attempt to boil the ocean instead of focusing on the most critical 20% that make the difference. This attempt to "cover all bases" is a poor investment.

Now that I have seen actual measures of 95/5 in many metrics around the organization, it is clear that the leverage points for impact are actually much more concentrated than the standard Pareto ratios. For example, 5% of our hundreds of reports provide 95% of the value to the organization- imagine the inefficiencies in maintaining the 95% that provide marginal value. With over 67K learning assets in our LMS, a mere fraction are even used (less than 5%), yet our informal tools get significantly more traffic. No big push to get these arranged, we just needed to provide a forum for our employees to be able to connect to ask questions and get answers.

Even in a highly structured and regulated industry with tons of formal training assets, we see the informal support needs outpace them by a tremendous factor. That's where the real work- and the real learning happens.