Social Learning & The LMS – Are You In or Out?

By Gordon Johnson, VP Marketing, Expertus

On TV’s Project Runway, supermodel Heidi Klum makes the choice obvious. Fashion designs are either “in” or they’re “out.” But in the world of corporate learning, the lines between formal and informal learning are increasingly blurred – along with the roles that learning management systems and social tools play in that mix.

Gordon Johnson, VP Marketing, Expertus

Recently, at a popular Twitter chat session known as #HRTechChat, host Brent Skinner posed several important questions:

Is social media really the new LMS? Or is that an exaggeration? Where does social media fit in here?

I replied with what I think is the best answer for today’s environment:

If social technology has a place in learning technology, it’s in the learning delivery tool, not the LMS.

In the heat of a Twitter chat stream, comments often can be overlooked.  But this prompted a brief spirited exchange. After the chat dust settled, Brent reflected further on my point, and offered his own interpretation in an HROToday / TalentManagementTech.com blog recap: “Sometimes, Social Media Isn’t Even Cool.”

Among other observations, Brent noted this:

” … It’s not very cool at all to expect social media to be the learning management system itself. An LMS needs order and structure, of which social media offers little … Guerilla learning might be a clever idea … but formal training still happens within the framework of structured environments. Only afterward does the informal, on-the-job, trial-and-error training begin (perhaps bolstered by social media).”

Now I’d like unpack that idea a bit more, myself:

Although it’s essential to integrate learning technology with an LMS, the greatest value comes from integrating it into a training program and the program’s learning delivery tool.

A Slice of Social Learning Life
Here’s an example. If you’re like me, you’ve probably participated in a traditional instructor-led course where you’ve met fellow students that share common challenges. Did it spark a useful exchange of ideas, tips and techniques that were mutually beneficial? At the end of the class, did you swap email messages and intend to follow up, but never really took advantage of the opportunity to continue the dialogue?

Well, what if the connection never dropped? What if you could seamlessly integrate that kind of rich, relevant social learning experience as the logical next-phase of the learning program? What if your interactions from that training class kept building over time – providing additional opportunities to reinforce learning, knowledge and competence?

That’s where the deep value lies in the marriage of social tools and learning technology. The LMS will still perform its function in the background – but now with socially adept technology that extends the life of a program, participants benefit from enhanced, continuous learning support.

Continuous Learning in the Real World
To us, continuous learning is more than a concept. It’s the foundation of a next-generation LMS we call ExpertusONE. And it’s transforming the way some of the world’s most innovative companies engage, educate and empower their workforce, customers and partners.

For example, at one of the world’s largest software companies, ExpertusONE facilitated fast, cost-efficient delivery of product training & ongoing learning support – before and after a major global rollout. To read more about this implementation and the impact it made on our customer’s organization, download the case brief (PDF format).

With cloud computing as a foundation, it can be surprisingly quick and easy to apply this concept in an enterprise setting. So, hopefully soon, the vast majority of corporate training programs will be supported by technology that enables dynamic, continuous learning.

---

Note from Gordon: To learn more about the ExpertusONE dynamic learning platform works, visit our website. Or to see it in action, contact us for a personalized consultation and demo.

Related Note: For information about #HRTechChat (typically on Wednesdays at 4pm ET/1pm PT) follow host Brent Skinner on Twitter @BrentSkinner, or visit his HROToday blog.

Moving Up – Taking Learning to the Cloud

How to Align Training, Technology and Collaboration with Business Goals

By Ramesh Ramani, Founder and CEO, Expertus

Ramesh Ramani, CEO, Expertus

Today, due to tightened budgets and diminishing returns, your senior leadership is likely challenged to demonstrate the value of training and related learning investments. They’re being asked to directly correlate specific workforce, partner and customer learning initiatives with desired strategic business outcomes.

Until a few years ago, technology and process constraints made this task incredibly difficult – if not outright impossible. However, today it’s possible to map learning relevance with business success – even in a world of changing demographics, preferences and generational styles.

The lines between training and learning are blurring. And cloud technology solutions are a perfect foundation for a strong, seamless bond across formal learning management and informal, collaborative, social knowledge-sharing activities.

Overcoming Our Challenges

Traditionally, organizations have grappled with 2 dimensions of the learning challenge:

• Technology limitations that inhibit support of seemingly simple business goals – for example, the concept of distributing the right information, to the right people, at the right time.
• Alignment of learning activities with business goals - a more challenging issue, because, among other things, learning programs aren’t the only factor that influence business performance.

What’s more, in today’s flat world, growth-oriented businesses more frequently depend on an extended-enterprise network to generate global product and services sales. But traditional remote training is not scalable enough to keep pace with today’s fast-changing business needs.

Developing the Solution

This is why learning in the cloud can be a game-changer for your organization. It instantly delivers content to a global audience. It fosters enterprise-wide collaboration. And it helps you link learning with performance – which ultimately drives innovation and achieves your targeted business goals.

Tip #1: Reduce Response Time by Embracing Agility

With a cloud-based learning platform, your company can be more responsive to fluid business conditions – dynamically and painlessly scaling resources, content and access up or down without burdening your internal IT organization and infrastructure.

A cloud-based learning solution can also be enabled to detect workload changes and automatically provision appropriate resources for your various user communities. This helps your business react more swiftly to competitive threats; drive simultaneous worldwide product roll-outs; and pursue more new opportunities, while containing costs and managing risks.

Tip #2: Drive Productivity with a Content Distribution Network

When augmented with other technologies, such as a Content Distribution Network, a cloud-based learning platform becomes a powerful tool to make appropriate localized content simultaneously available across many geographies – a level of optimization and efficiency that was previously impractical.

Now employees from across your organization can fully leverage learning tools, knowledge sharing, research, resources, within a seamless, real-time, unified ecosystem. They can also leverage the best practices and lessons-learned from your organization’s top performers. The result? Users will know more, be more productive and can work collectively to drive innovation – a key to sustainable competitive advantage.

Tip #3: Improve Learning Adoption with Prescriptive Content

Advanced data delivery is another cloud computing characteristic that promotes learner adoption. Because cloud learning makes prescriptive information and other resources available to each user precisely when needed, learners can better manage their time, and are likely to be more satisfied with the learning experience, overall.

Tip #4: Accelerate Innovation with Advanced Analytics and Reporting

Cloud-based learning solutions also facilitate new, powerful business analytics and reporting tools that can help your company gauge effectiveness and adjust it accordingly – by location or by business function. For example, the success of product launch support in one country can be retooled for another location – and this can be implemented very quickly without additional planning cycles.

Services such as these enable your company to target specific learning needs and objectives with minimal investment and risk. Viable applications include:

• Product/service roll-outs – Dramatically shorten rollout cycles by delivering comprehensive training, education and knowledge transfer virtually, on a global scale.
• New hire training – Provide on-boarding and ongoing mentoring programs virtually, to dramatically time-to-proficiency and enhance employee engagement.
• Business impact meetings – Bring key managers and experts together to accomplish targeted business objectives – through collaborative brainstorming and problem solving sessions.

---

Conclusion

For some, cloud computing is still a nebulous concept for many to grasp. But it’s becoming a hot topic in boardrooms around the world – and for good reason. It’s already transformed many aspects of information technology. But it’s much more than a concept. Cloud-based platforms like the ExpertusONE dynamic LMS are playing a pivotal role in transforming corporate learning, workforce development and performance management.

Note from Ramesh: How will cloud learning and talent management impact your business? For more ideas, read my complete article, as featured in CLO Magazine. Visit the Expertus website. Or  email questions and comments to me at rameshr@expertus.com.

Building a Better Certification Program

A Roadmap for Improving Business Partner Loyalty,  Mind Share and Revenue

By Mohana Radhakrishnan, VP Client Services, Expertus

Mohana Radhakrishnan, VP Client Services, Expertus

Do you struggle to keep your partners engaged?
Are you challenged with providing global channel support?
Do you know which resellers are the most productive – and why?

In today’s tough economic landscape, channel partner sales reps face more pressure and obstacles than ever. There’s no doubt that they’re motivated to drive sales. The question is… are they motivated to drive your product or service sales?

Reseller certification programs still provide value to organizations. But, thanks to new technologies, they can easily be reconfigured and re-energized to keep your partners more supported, engaged and productive than ever before!

Consider these 3 ways that enterprise 2.0 learning innovation can engage partners more deeply:

Tip #1 – Add Dynamic Learning Paths

Web 2.0 technologies like dynamic learning paths and role-based course management make governing your partner learning tracks and curriculum much easier for both users and training administrators:

For Users:

• Only see and search relevant learning content via a personalized view.
• Quickly see next steps needed and current certification timeline.
• Save time and learn more with prescriptive content/course assignment.
• Alerted when new product or service details are available.

For Partner Training Administrators:

• No more rebuilding content lists and curriculum definitions.
• Simplifies curriculum content updates; just tag and publish.
• Zero enrollment headaches – certification paths/curricula are automatically assigned.
• Push new content globally and know when it’s received.

Tip #2 – Simplify Partner Reporting and Data Access

Can you see which partners are training, how often and when? Do you know which regions are leveraging your learning programs and assets?

Did you answer “No?” Then it’s time to simplify your reporting process. A next-gen reporting system provides quick and easy access to real-time stats of all your channel training activities:

• View completions and scores on-demand.
• See current status.
• Receive up-to-date channel, regional and individual-level insights.

Tip #3 – Integrate Your Learning and Certification Systems

Are partners frustrated with the time it takes for your certification status updates? Do you struggle with gathering this data? Are your certification programs aligned with your curricula?

There are new, dynamic learning platforms like ExpertusONE that seamlessly integrate all of your learning assets and programs with your partner management systems. This means you actually get real-time data sync and alignment.

To learn more about how a strong channel education strategy and learning technology can work together to drive partner engagement, we invite you to watch a special “on-demand” webcast, EMC’s head of partner productivity: “How to Build a World-Class Partner Certification Program.”

---

Conclusion

With real-time, end-to-end synchronization, all of your systems are automatically updated, as needed. In other words, the most recent data is available simultaneously, across your entire program network, when a partner completes a new certification level, when you modify training program content, or when other changes occur.

This frees you to focus on building partner relationships, rather than focusing on verifying information that supports those relationships.

Note from Mohana: Would you like to discuss how your organization can apply any of these partner certification tips? I’m happy to help. Please contact me at mohanar@expertus.com.

Learning Portals – The Build vs. Buy Dilemma

Why You Should Proceed With Caution When Planning Your Next Portal

By Kathleen Waid, Senior Director, Client Services, Expertus

Kathleen Waid, Senior Director, Client Services, Expertus

Recently, the chief learning officer of a major U.S. software company made one seemingly small tactical error that morphed into a horror story of massive proportions – for him and his company.

The terror began in one of those meetings with way too many attendees: the CLO, his learning executives, a few business line managers, some of the IT team and a vendor. All wanted to build a learning portal, which would (hopefully) solve the company’s biggest problem – a “shockingly unknowledgeable sales force.”

But 2 years and almost 1 million dollars later, their learning portal still hasn’t seen the light of day – and probably never will.

How did this happen?

• The CLO and his IT team became deeply distracted by competing priorities…
• This created chronic cost-overruns and development delays…
• As a result, other mission-critical learning projects fell by the wayside.

In fact, the effectiveness of the company’s learning organization sank to a 10-year low! Which is why the CLO was eventually let go, and left wondering why his IT team (the people who recommended this custom-build “solution”) were left unfazed.

Is This Your Reality?

Yes, this real-life example is extreme. But you’d be surprised at how common this scenario is. Of course, the CLO doesn’t always get fired and the portal doesn’t always fail. But in too many instances, the decision to build a learning portal internally has come back to haunt almost everyone involved.

So What’s the Temptation?

It seems obvious that building a learning portal from scratch is an unnecessary endeavor – a poor allocation of risk and resources, and generally a bad idea. Why, then, does it keep happening? What’s the temptation?

The “Gotchas”

The crux of the problem is the word “portal.” Often IT teams are able to successfully build corporate or business-unit portals with off-the-shelf solutions. However, getting a learning portal to interface with your existing LMS and other enterprise applications requires a much more sophisticated understanding of your underlying LMS technology, business rules and corporate learning drivers.

Here are a few tips that will help you avoid common “gotchas” that often derail custom learning portal projects.  So, how should you proceed?

Tip #1: Choose an Established Technology

There’s a significant learning curve in picking the technology that’s best for your custom learning portal and will stand the test of time. Many companies invest in standard IT portal technology, which may be out-of-date by project end.

In other cases, the selected technology simply doesn’t work well (i.e. exposing the data elements of a legacy LMS system) – or it doesn’t add any processing (“mini-application” intelligence) to the portal information – or it’s hard to work with, so the portal is cumbersome to build.

To improve your odds for success, you should choose established technology that is proven to work seamlessly in a learning environment. It should be flexible, scalable, and have a future-proofed infrastructure, so that you won’t have to rebuild your portal in 2-3 years.

Tip #2: Set a Realistic Budget and Timeline

Internal stakeholders are inclined to think it’s cheaper to build a portal in-house – but that’s because it’s difficult (if not impossible) to truly understand a learning portal project’s scope and complexity.

Supporting the learning department is usually not a top priority for IT. So, they tend to be a bit detached from its many nuances. The learning department, and other business owners, usually learn this the hard way when they uncover hidden costs, and must personally make a massive time commitment to oversee the project, themselves.

Sponsors often find themselves over their heads as they become responsible for creating an effective user interface, and developing requirements that reflect the intricacies of an enterprise LMS (typically deployed to multiple audiences).

To avoid this outcome, you need to see a working portal prototype before you buy into the solution. This way, you’ll know exactly what to expect, and you can rest assured that it can be implemented and deployed within a reasonable timeframe.

Tip #3: Don’t Lose Sight of Your Core Competency – Learning

This is often the most overlooked, and possibly the most critical “gotcha.”

In a custom portal development project, business unit owners and learning executives don’t realize how much of THEIR time will be consumed and how steep the learning curve can be. So, unfortunately, while they go through the tedious process of figuring out how to design a learning portal, they often lose sight of their “day job” and what’s mission-critical.

---

Note from Kathleen: Would you like to read more? Download the full “BUILD vs BUY” whitepaper – including the 5 Learning Portal Gotchas and the 8 Benefits of a Buy Decision.

Or, if you’d like to discuss your learning portal needs and questions, contact me anytime by email at: kathleenw@expertus.com.

Global Product Training on a Shoestring

New Learning Strategies & Technology Make it Easy to Provide High-Quality Programs - Without All the Cost

By Mohana Radhakrishnan, Vice President, Client Services,  Expertus

Mohana Radhakrishnan, VP Client Services, Expertus

Recently we conducted a survey on global product training. Two key facts emerged:

1) Increasing budget constraints are a universal concern.

2) Nearly half of respondents allocate less than 10% of their annual training budgets to programs delivered outside of their home country.

In short - limited resources make it difficult to offer high-quality learning wherever it’s needed. And chances are, your organization faces these same challenges.

How can you ensure that excellent product training available across all geographies, while staying within existing budget parameters?

Tip #1 – Focus on Audience-Relevant Training

We advise clients to first identify product training that’s absolutely essential for global audiences. Then, establish priorities. Too many companies assume that all product training delivered within their home country should be available to all audiences around the world. The truth is, it’s more efficient and effective to offer limited, but highly relevant product training than it is to offer vast, but slightly irrelevant courses and content.

Tip #2 – Scrutinize Your Budget

It’s also important to carefully analyze how your training dollars are being spent. When we help clients conduct a budget analysis, we often discover that dollars are wasted on redundant courses, unnecessary travel and entertainment expenses and underutilized technology investments. Sometimes the dollars saved in these and other areas can offset new, more valuable investments – such as virtual classroom implementations – that actually help expand and improve global product training programs.

Tip #3 – Get Help

Our survey indicated that 83% of respondents now offer training globally. As companies expand their product training initiatives, new challenges arise that require innovative processes and unique approaches. An experienced, outside perspective can help identify key opportunities to improve efficiency. For example, Expertus recently helped Microsoft save about $1.7 million a year by augmenting classroom product training with bi-annual virtual programs, including live online meetings, on-demand webinar events, technical labs and social networking.

Tip #4 – Consider Technology Alternatives

Effective use of emerging technology can further help you stretch your global product training budget. In fact, our survey showed that companies rely on e-Learning for product training much more heavily in their home country than for audiences located elsewhere. And yet, e-learning, blended learning and virtual classrooms are typically less expensive and are more immediate alternatives to ILT. Furthermore, next generation LMSs (cloud-based platforms with integrated learning delivery, management and reporting – such as ExpertusONE) can greatly increase overall training efficiency.

Note from Mohana: For more information about the product training survey we conducted, or to talk about how your organization can make the most of its product training investment, contact me anytime at mohanark@expertus.com.