Spending on training doesn't matter anymore?

This article in CLO magazine says the amount of money spent on training doesn't matter anymore. Nick van Dam, global chief learning officer at Deloitte, divides e-learning adopters into four stages: clappers, experimenters, developers, and leaders. He says that clappers use spending as the only metric, experimenters and developers use it as one of several metrics, and leaders don't use spending as a metric at all to measure the value proposition of learning. Van Dam offers a helpful chart showing characteristics of each stage, including proportions of classroom training to e-learning, which might be a useful tool for benchmarking.