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I see that HMV has announced it is struggling. And in some respects I'm not surprised.
Because when I look at their vast high street stores in an age when everyone seems to be downloading music on line, and buying their DVDs and computer games through the likes of Amazon and iTunes, I wonder how they can sustain that 'bricks and mortar' aspect of their conventional business model.
This trend of our high street retailers finding it tough could be a theme in 2011 and beyond.
But it is not just high street retailers that will suffer at the might of the online traders. The fleet industry also needs to keep an eye on who is doing what online.
As an example, this year I believe will be a wake-up year for the driver training industry. And unless a more progressive approach is adopted, regrettably we could see some companies disappear from our sector too.
Because over the last two decades fleet driver training has changed.
In the 1990s the 'sheep dip' approach was used, and it was not uncommon for an employer to put all their drivers on the same defensive driving course.
The last decade saw companies using online risk assessments to determine who required on road training or an e-learning course. At first it was frowned upon, but now its the norm. You very rarely see a major tender these days that does not specify the requirement for online assessment and e-learning.
So what will be the trend for this decade? Personally I believe driver monitoring will next be used to determine training requirements.
What do I mean, when I say 'driver monitoring'?
E-Training World recently launched it's service called, "Telematics ROI".
We use our team of qualified risk managers and some clever software to monitor drivers daily, using the data to tailor individual driver training programmes.
Moving forwards, I see this is an important new approach. Because my expectation is that almost all assessment, training and driver monitoring will become web-based with very little physical intervention at all. Particularly when we see greater advancements in the extraction of in-vehicle data which is streamed into our fleet and risk management systems which means drivers and their vehicles are churning data out from their journeys into software which can interpret it.
So as we enter this new decade, I predict that the traditional driver training company will either change its business model to provide more online solutions or sadly they will disappear. Later in this decade, I also think we will see the merging together of driver risk management and fleet risk management.
I like to think that E-Training World is spearheading the change. We will certainly be ready that's for sure.
But how many businesses won't move quickly enough and will become fading memories in the new fleet sector landscape? I'd say the phrase, 'keep up or disappear' has never been so important.
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