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Thinkin’ big, startin’ small
'Start Small, Think Big, Scale Fast' is a phrase I've heard a few times from our Chairman, Tom Kraack. What happens when a company has already become big? Years of processes, teams upon teams, re-org upon re-org. Can they still start small, think big innovative thoughts, and then take that to scale?
A lot of those big (generally successful) enterprises of our day have built huge learning organizations to deliver training without evolving to understand how to really deliver the critical knowledge and skills to support the business...I mean, those bits are probably in there...somewhere...probably... The problem is that they are simply not nimble enough to meet the challenges they now face. They may be mired in the sludge but it doesn't have to be that way.
The answer lies in redefining strategy, building content standards, infectious change management, and innovating to meet the changes occurring across the high tech landscape.
Cloud companies live in constant beta. They have more shallow but more frequent sprints from release to release (3 or 4/year, or heck, maybe even 3 or 4/month!). From a business perspective, they get to recognize revenue in a better, more stable way (subscription, building fat deferred revenue accounts). The downside being, it's easy to drop your vendor and move on. Sure these folks speak of this thing called training, but it is spoken with the desire to move the business needle.
Dashboards are built around customer adoption and retention, probability of renewals, net new customers, but also customer penetration. Learning departments need to know how to affect these dials. Why the business speak? Because you need to know how your company makes money, profit, and metrics that drive the business.
In cloud companies, the pace of development is built upon a sense of urgency coupled with the passion and willingness to step out of comfort zones, and the light of innovation burns bright.
And guess what? Their training development moves at the speed of light. As with their product development - the processes, standards and templated designs they've built allow them to be nimble, quick to market, and have measurable impact - the concept of leverage is huge. They consider their customers from the start, not every single potential one, but the customers that will drive the adoption and success of their product to cross the chasm to great heights.
They also leverage the crowd, be it end users, partners, or internal folks to fill in a lot of the gaps with crowdsourced or user generated content (UGC). The very nature of this approach allows the team to really focus on specific workflows and learning paths to success, in alignment with a community management approach to pick up the slack.
They might focus on the features and functions that are important to initial adoption of the product, but the end goal is to provide workflow support to drive widespread adoption of a deeper level of features in the product. This in turn delivers that old term 'stickiness', which translates into the nirvana that is customer satisfaction resulting in higher retention and renewals, and evangelism.
These upstarts are picking apart the big guys by their nimbleness and time to market. The 'Four Horseman' of the internet are in trouble, along with every other industry (banks, financials, energy, retail, etc) that are in the sights of this new generation. To survive and thrive in the coming years, they will need to focus on:
- strategy (aligning with the business)
- content standards
- solution frameworks
- agile process development
- measurement and business analytics (via reports and dashboards that are communication vehicles upward and outward)
- social learning and crowdsourcing
This is no time to perfect the irrelevant. The companies that win will standardize in a methodical but nimble way, and be aligned to business goals that albeit may be correlative, will be actionable success metrics.