The 4 Cs of Extended Enterprise Learning and Performance

At VMG we spend a lot of time thinking about what drives enterprise learning and performance. Although each of our clients and partners has unique problems to solve, each solution we create contains some mix of the following four elements:

Let’s look at each of these, starting at the bottom.

Control

Corporate training has long been about control: You must complete this course. You must pass this certification. No, you may not see that particular content. We will track your activities to document our compliance.

In the extended enterprise, since you do not control the paychecks of your audience, you also have inherently less control of their activities. While control is still important in extended enterprise learning, it plays a smaller role and involves a lot more carrots and a lot less sticks.

Content

Corporate training has also been long concerned with content, traditionally in the form of courses, but more and more incorporating a much wider set of content types: blogs, microblogs, wikis, videos, games, etc. But even as the types of content have expanded, the sources of content have remained largely internal employees, big publishers, or a small number of vetted experts.

In the extended enterprise the source of content widens considerably to include partners and customers who can often be more expert than your own employees, particularly around niche topics.

Also, where the corporate world has minimal tolerance of “content for content’s sake”, the extended enterprise has none at all. Content only has value in terms of what it lets me accomplish. Now.

Collaboration

Marketing folks may want to build communities so that people feel good about their products, but here we’re talking about tools that let people collaborate to solve real productivity problems.

Collaboration is certainly a hot topic throughout the corporate learning world, but in the extended enterprise (where you have employees, partners, and customers all talking with one another) the complexity around managing access and authority grows exponentially.

Context

Providing context for the learner has become the most important element in a growing majority of learning and performance initiatives. Unfortunately, it’s also the one at which learning professionals usually do the worst job. I see examples every day of companies with LMSs and portals overflowing with content and learners who have no idea where to start.

In the internal corporate training world we approach this problem by doing things like aligning content to job roles and competency models. Maybe this is a good place to start when we control those job roles and hire to those competencies, but this gets shaky in the partner world and totally breaks down when we’re talking about customers.

Taxonomies, user generated tags, ratings, reviews, personalized recommendations: all of these things help, but few of these features appear in the systems currently used to manage learning. (Or, if they appear, it’s often in a bolted-on, check-the-box kind of implementation rather than truly integrated throughout the system.)

Providing this element of context needs to be a major focus for innovation in the learning and performance improvement world. There are some early consumer-focused Web 3.0 products that are starting to point the way. I’m pretty excited by how we can take those ideas and apply them to learning.

~ posted by John Hathaway on 25 May 10
   tagged as: collaboration, content, context, control, extended enterprise, innovation

 

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