Shall I compare thee to a new release?
Thou art more fickle and more volatile
Rough launch doth shake the chances to increase
Renewals and subscriptions for a while.

Sometime too fast the features do update
And oft’ its relevance too soon doth stale
And obsolescence looms as training’s fate
Lest tips and updates users do regale;

But thy eternal function shall not fade
Nor lose possession of discrete design
Nor shall whole new courseware need be made
When business model and training do align.

So long as learning portals are available
So long can user learning be attainable.

Ok, I’ll start right off by saying, learning organizations in general stink at marketing. Marketing (also including communication and change management) is a key component for success of all learning organizations. Many a learning leader has been taken down not by a great plan, wise ideas, or passion about helping people better themselves but by missing out on the marketing aspects of execution. Chances are you really don’t know how to do this or have tried and not done so well. Certainly this has to fit within the bounds (usually) of the corporate culture (is there a central marketing function, is there a branding police, etc). You may have tried and potentially thought you succeeded, but the reality is that you are likely delusional, ha. (read Seth Godin, he’ll convince you that even most market’eers don’t know much about marketing in the 21st century!)

The sad truth is that no one ever teaches learning folks about marketing, and typically the true market’eers in the organization are busy trying to hit metrics and product launches and stuff like that. Why does the training group need marketing? Ah, but we do my friends, we most certainly do. If more Ed Tech programs required a course in Marketing 101 (fine, call it Change Management and Communication 101), we’d all probably be in better shape – our programs would run smooth, grow faster, have greater adoption and customer satisfaction.
If you are successful enough at the strategic planning (my blog post here), you will find yourself in need of a marketing launch plan to support whatever it is you are trying to accomplish. In the fabled words, if you build it, they will come (actually a misquote, original was “if you build it, he will come”, Field of Dreams, 1989) doesn’t work. You need to have a comprehensive marketing and communication plan that includes roles, milestones, deliverables, dependencies and risks. This needs to be tracked as any project, with regular project meetings (weekly) and status (red, yellow, green works fine in an excel spreadsheet).

As applicable, there could be a whole separate branding exercise that fits in here too, but I don’t have the space or wisdom to share here, suffice to say, if you are branding a product/program, be consistent – get the Creative team involved and let them do their thing.

If you don’t have a template for this, ask your favorite Market’eer for one they use for their product launches. Even if you are launching a ‘program’, you’ll likely get a starting point that you can leverage and build from there. There are plenty of Marketing 101 resources on the web <here and here>, and I’d encourage you to spend some time looking over the processes and ideas that come along with those to drive adoption of your programs, giving you better opportunity to continue to develop further programs going forward.

This kind of idea must have a competitive angle to have even a chance for success. (check out "Tales of the Marketing Wars via Forbes)

The competition we speak of here (from a learning org perspective) is most typically, time. How are you going to convince your audience (employees, customers, partners, or heaven help you, sales) that their time is worthy of your new shiny object?

This should of course, fall back to your strategic planning cycle to allow you to articulate the features, advantages and/or benefits of your program. The case that you built to sell the program to the executive team in the first place now needs different language and supporting structures to convert your audience into ‘customers’. Those same executives also need to be coaches and champions of the program. If they cared enough to approve it, they should stand behind it, physically, verbally, and with gusto.

Every trainer knows about radio station WIIFM, or what’s in it for me. Market’eers know it too. We know that we can’t make the sale unless our prospect is sufficiently motivated for a personal payoff. It’s human nature, and you will just have to get used to it.

Some tricks are to use events to let people know about your program, having contests, rewards programs, and shout-outs (Sally just won for posting her 10th answer on the community!).

To summarize – marketing your product/project/program has four key elements:
- Sell the program (strategic planning, executive level sponsorship)
- Build the marketing launch plan (project planning, branding as necessary)
- Communicate effectively to your audience and customers WIIFM (contests, rewards programs, shout-outs)
- Measure results, get feedback, continuously improve your messaging (and as needed, the program itself)

Have you done any interesting marketing for your learning program? Let us know!

1. Everybody in the ecosystem needs an LMS. Nope. I was recently at a conference where one of the world's largest consumer goods companies said (I paraphrase), "We don't need no stinkin' LMS". They launched e-learning, tracked compliance, got product information out to their ecosystem, and dealt with all sorts of training needs without an LMS and a server farm. Lots of companies I speak with are changing their thoughts about their need for an LMS. They all agreed both that they need technology-enabled learning (I work with a lot of tech companies, so there is a bit of a selection bias here), and that they all need scalable learning solutions. Yet learning technology, learning portals, and learning tools are no longer synonymous with "Learning Management System" (see my previous post- "A learning portal is not an LMS").
   
   
2. Rapid e-learning means it's easy and I don't need instructional design. Wrong - sort of. It's a matter of perspective. Rapid e-learning rapidly exposes two things to the learner:
   
   • Is this just a PowerPoint presentation converted to flash with a voice-over? or...
   • Is this course actually giving me knowledge I can use?
   My colleague and friend, Jon Lloyd, wrote this great piece about rapid e-learning that really breaks it down. I have led large organizations making global changes toward rapid e-learning, and I learned that
   
   1. I needed a template and standard that everyone my team was required to use
   2. I needed to have instructional design embedded in that template
   3. An absence of editorial review exposes itself pretty quickly
   Rapid e-learning, well planned, can be fast and responsive, but it's not easy, and you better have instructional design baked into everything you do from the moment you start even thinking about it.
   
   
3. VILT is less valuable than ILT. Kill me if I ever hear this gross generalization again. It's like saying "all trucks are less valuable than all cars". To do what? For what purpose? There are certainly times where getting into a classroom is the optimum experience. Yet in this rapidly changing, short attention span theater world, delivering timely information quickly to people is often far more valuable and actionable than the optimum learning experience. We work with a ton of SaaS companies, who deliver at least one major release of each of their products every quarter, and yet building a decent Instructor-Led Training (ILT) course take 3-6 months. Process that through on the space-time continuum: by the time you're done creating the ILT you're already out-of-date. ILT is awesome for processes, hands-on work, role-playing and group exercises, however Virtual ILT (VILT) is great for speed, imparting actionable information, being nimble in response to immediate need, and decreasing the time people spend away from what their real job is.
   
   
4. I need a reusable learning object strategy. Flip that one on its ear. What I need to have completely understood is my rate of content obsolescence. How fast does my content go out of date? I certainly need reusable templates, processes, approaches, graphics, animations, course models, and VILT and ILT delivery standards. I, however, have found in my almost fifteen years of leading both large enterprise training organizations and training lines of business that I rarely actually reuse content. Code? Sure. Structures and models? All the time. But in this environment of rapid change, I have chosen to forget about reusing content and focus instead on scale and simplicity everywhere else. Focusing on scale and simplicity is, in short, just more valuable: it's more important, more fiscally prudent, and, frankly, easier.
   

What other myths are out there? Our entire industry, and the entire approach to determining need and delivering knowledge to the enterprise, is completely transforming at this very moment. The new normal is that everything changes all the time. Bring it.

• Step 1: Steal Underpants
• Step 2: ????????
• Step 3: Profit

Strategic Planning

In my experience, training groups are rarely involved in the overall business and strategic discussions happening at the executive level. Sure, many large companies have CLO roles, or top learning executives that get a ‘seat at the table’ and contribute to those discussions. How many are in the driver seat though, building global initiatives from the epicenter of the learning team, rather taking direction from other groups (engineering, marketing, sales) and executing to support their plan?

In fact, I’ve seen very few learning organizations that actually have the opportunity to be proactive in nature, creating a full-fledged annual business plan (hey, that would actually be in front of the budgeting process right?) to support corporate goals as well as their own vision.

Too often the planning process goes something like this:

This makes you the bug, not the windshield. This sort of direction causes you to always be following... catching up... trying to get your head above water....it doesn't have to be that way.

Learning departments are in the midst of great change. eLearning, virtual classrooms and remote labs have nothing on what is happening right now in front of our eyes, changing the very nature of our profession with lasting effects. Strategic planning brings you out of the turbulent vortex.

As this pattern emerges, I think you will see a greater bifurcation of the locations of training departments, with more moving out of HR functions and into departments that have titles such as Customer Success or Client Advocacy, both of which are probably under the umbrella of Sales. Will HR still hold onto internal training and development? I’m really doubtful of that. Even those completely internally focused (and why would you actually ever want that?) organizations will be shifted towards providing management and support (as opposed to content generation and instruction) for knowledge platforms, social learning, informal learning and communities to drive the professional (and sometimes personal) development of their organization.

As talent management practices grow, more emphasis needs to be placed on programs to onboarding people in a dynamic learning environment based on their role, level, knowledge of market and industry, etc in order to minimize the actual ramp time and maximize productivity and engagement in their new organization. This is easily extended to partners, vendors and customers in various ways, thus removing any need to have direct ties to HR.

Strangely, one of the key perspectives missing from most strategic planning discussions is the user. The customer experience should be paramount (customer = internal, customer, partner, vendor). Happy customers are loyal ones - they drive customer satisfaction, product adoption, and better marketing reach than you can ever imagine. Your learning programs should strive to build the same kind of loyalty. Best-selling authors and recording superstars build a rabid fan base that look for new ‘product’ to consume. Your learning releases can build a rabid fan base too!

Strategic planning is about delivering the best solution for your customer within a reasonable budget and timeline, integrating innovative approaches, via a well thought plan. Build the ideal business plan to best serve their needs, whether it includes blended learning, customer success portals, communities of practice, feedback mechanisms to drive continuous improvement, and even defining new roles and responsibilities within your organization. Craft the budget and resources with a keen eye towards scope creep (avoiding, yes, that sounds great, we could also just …). Take baby steps and use your tools to help align the organization: build an Excel worksheet or Gantt chart to show milestones, risks, dependencies and delivery dates. Clearly demonstrate that you are not being ‘wagged’.

For a decidely unconventional way of looking at planning, read this blog from Seth Godin, or listen to him discuss it here.

As new projects come up throughout the year (and they invariably will, in force), you will be able to make objective decisions on how to support the new initiatives and the consequences and impact as it deviates from your plan. Having flexibility is good, being inflexible is career limiting at best.

Innovation and the Learning team

How much time and effort are you allowing team members to work on innovative projects that might have absolutely no relation to current needs and plans? 3M for the longest time (since the 1950's) has mandated that employees spend 15% of their time on projects of their own choosing and design.

"Our company has, indeed, stumbled onto some of its new products. But never forget that you can only stumble if you're moving." Richard P. Carlton, Former CEO, 3M Corporation, 1950

Google has followed in a similar light and encourages up to 20% for the engineering resources, which have contributed to many successes and even more failures. The point being, you can win if you don’t try. Failure IS an option, and it is encouraged and celebrated as a means to ongoing learning and success.

That certainly doesn’t mean that all the Google engineers are kicking back on Friday’s playing foosball and thinking about the next Google Reader or one of their green initiatives. Nor does it mean that Monday is for chillaxin’ because of that super World Cup party on Sunday that they can hardly remember. No, Googlers work hard and no one is punching a clock or measuring whether everyone lived up to their 20% this week.

Both Google and 3M understand that this ‘allowance’ is just a key part of their overall corporate culture. Although 3M is more hierarchical and Google so anti-that, the respective cultures foster innovation knowing that in order to stay ahead of the game, they need to spend quality time thinking about the next new thing. Clearly, hitting a few singles, doubles and an occasional homer is good for the bottom line.

Hmmm, okay so what the heck does this have to do with our learning organization?

Well, how is it any different? At my previous company, I instituted a similar policy (targeting a reasonable 10-15%, even 'forcing' it into MBOs on one occasion) for our global education team that created several wins (innovative remote labs for partners, technical training for our SEs via RSS and iTunes feeds for their iPhones/iTouch) and a lot of things that never made it past the drawing board but nonetheless stimulated the team into conversation, discussion and engagement for new ideas that would position us as innovators and thought leaders within the company, yes, the quintessential 'knowledge managers'.

Not to say that it was a perfect match. The culture that I wanted to create in the group did not align with the overall corporate culture based on monthly sprints throughout the organization, which in the end, kept everyone stretched at 80hr weeks leaving little time to foster creativity and an attitude of innovation.

This cultural attitude for innovation does align with VMG’s concepts around learning portals and social learning to generate conversations, connect like minds, and bring together passionate people and killer ideas, all of which is supported by a long term vision of competitive differentiation...because that next brainstorm session or napkin doodling might just be the next Post-It or Google Earth.

How do you innovate at your work? I'd love to hear about it. Send me a note at jon@velocitymg.com.

1. Shrinking margins to grow revenue is not a sustainable business model: as customer base, customer size, and deal size expand, so does customer need and the subsequent demand on services teams. In response, SaaS companies must both operationalize and offload services or find themselves scrambling to maintain customer satisfaction, which often equates to throwing people at problems and eating the costs.
   
   Learning portals can minimize the need for under-priced or comped services, thus maintaining margins in the face of high growth and revenue spikes; by providing both structure and self help, they offer a resource to help services teams as well as customers be more successful.
   



2. Scaling the organization does not equal growing the organization: Scaling the organization means replicating your success exponentially; growing it just means making it bigger.
   
   Learning portals allow you to scale: providing the same (or better) level of service with the same (or fewer) number of people. The majority of what people need to know to be successful emerges on the job and in the moment, not in the classroom. Portals provide always on access to valuable content and training without the sunk costs required to administer courses and staff an at-the-ready bevy of trainers.
   



3. SaaS is not always as easy as it looks: SaaS apps may be fast to deploy, but they’re not always fast to take hold. Best of breed point solutions sometimes favor features over form, resulting in applications that are robust but not necessarily easy to use or optimize.
   
   Learning portals help drive adoption by getting people over the learning curve and into the value-added functionality. Improved adoption results in improved subscription renewals and upsell opportunities.
   



4. Knowledge needs to be as current as the app, and keeping up is costly. When you have a quarterly release schedule (or even more frequent), it’s tough to keep training and content current.
   
   Learning portals simplify content development and maintenance by tapping into a much broader base of potential content authors (the users themselves) along with providing flexible tools for an approval process, as well as for identifying content that needs refreshing.
   



5. Technology training isn’t enough: customers often need industry insight and best practices support as well.
   
   Learning portals offer a venue for showcasing thought leadership in the form of insights, best practices, and emergent ideas. Thought leadership leads to leads, and loyalty, and long term revenue.
   



6. The best experts and evangelists are not internal: clients want to hear from others who look like them and who have solved similar problems as theirs.
   
   Learning portals let people access testimonials and support from their peers. Content sharing and discussion forums allow clients to connect with people and tap into insights beyond your organization or theirs.
   
   
   
7. Innovation needs an outlet: Preferably one that captures both institutional knowledge and emergent ideas and makes them searchable and measurable.
   
   Learning portals are gold mines for innovation: discrete, tracked, and tagged content and input from across your client base that can be sorted, aggregated, rated, and reviewed.
   
   
   
8. Technology revenue offers more consistent margins than services revenue. Fully-burdened staff with bumpy utilization rates subject to the caprices of demand (and delayed revenue recognition) can wreck havoc with a profit and loss statement.
   
   Learning portals offer stable tech costs, predictable tech income, and allow for a streamlined training services org allowing for improved forecasting.
   



9. Annuity-based revenue is nothing to sneeze at: regular and reliable income streams, especially if training had not previously been monetized (or well-monetized) converts training from a cost of business to a line of business.
   
   Learning portals can be monetized as a subscription offering that is both ratable and an easy-to-sell incremental cost to a SaaS subscription.

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.

What does this mean? Many portions of our industry would say that the concepts of an LMS and a learning portal (or knowledge center, or learning center, or learning site... insert name here) are synonymous. Yet, I would posit, that there are fundamental differences, that such concepts are both independent and often complementary, and that the basis of need for one or the other comes from an entirely separate set of requirements.

An LMS is built with administration, scheduling, and tracking in mind. Whether that LMS be SaaS, client-server, or homebrew spreadsheet jockeying, the primary metaphor of an LMS is to understand who did what when, who can do what when, and whether everybody did the stuff they were supposed to do. Think compliance, think tracking, think completion as the result. This is not a bash - this is a description of the fundamental design metaphor for the LMS sector. Compliance tracking is important stuff to the business world. Many LMS companies have done great work to extend the LMS capability to successfully bolt on a web portal-like front end, however I would suggest that this LMS-driven web front end is (necessarily) more of a user-facing manifestation of the LMS than a web-based learning environment designed, built, and performing specifically with the user's needs, requirements, and experience in mind.

A learning portal is quite different (even if tracking of content and user activity is measured and aggregated under the hood by an integrated LMS). In many cases, such as customer learning, casual learning environments, or short, somewhat disposable knowledge portals pegged to a specific implementation, the best LMS may in fact be Google Analytics, or the results data may in fact be tracked in a Salesforce.com dashboard (for comparison to and within other customer data).

A modern learning portal is a one-stop resource to the user: I can ask a question, get access to experts and a knowledge base, see the latest stuff (courses, lessons, notes, articles, snipits, youtube videos, etc.) from the latest release, interact with both other users, my company, and/or my vendor(s) via Yammer, and just know that I can get the stuff I need to my job- without searching, digging through a wiki, or going through twenty registration steps just to watch a two-minute how-to video. The concepts of 'registration' and formal vs. informal learning both begin to break down. The learning portal is a 'curated,' aggregated, and unique destination where I can go to kick off my training, and then know I can continue to go there to get what I need to know in some simple manner, for as long as I need to go there or as long as applicable to what me and my company are doing (around this initiative, implementation, effort, etc.). These are not one-stop shops for everything I need to know about everything my company does- think of these as a combination of a specific learning path (and its specific content), a facebook page, a subject-specific twitter feed, and searchable, categorized, and curated wiki/repository of information, knowledge, and the latest and greatest stuff. Think context over content, and user over administrator.

A learning portal is, in fact, a lot less than an LMS, quite different from an LMS, and all about the user experience. Usability, speed, context, ranking, and relevance are far more important than a doctrinal approach to learning standards, ID, reusability, and 'artistry in courseware.' A learning portal and an LMS can have no integration (I just spoke to a Fortune 100 company that has never needed an LMS- and they successfully deliver compliance e-learning across the globe...), can be highly integrated, and/or can even act as the opposite sides of the same coin for one another. However a learning portal is all about the ride, while an LMS is all about the right engine and tuning. The goal is to deliver the best ride to the right destination, with the right power train (and no more) to get you there.

In this post I’ll just give an intro to the types of players (the circles). Note that these categories represent roles as opposed to company types. Some companies will only fit one of these roles, but in this fast-moving, emerging space many companies play multiple roles. (I’ll tackle the flow of knowledge (the arrows) in a later post.)

Cloud Infrastructure Providers

Furthest upstream are the infrastructure and platform providers, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google, Salesforce.com’s Force.com and upcoming VMforce platforms as well as several smaller Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) companies.

IaaS companies provide raw computing power, storage, and network bandwidth available in the shared public cloud or as a “private cloud”. PaaS companies build on that to provide software development platforms (e.g. Force.com) and ready-to-go building blocks of functionality (e.g. Amazon Payments) that make it easy to build SaaS applications.

SaaS Application Providers

Where IaaS and PaaS is all about the building blocks, Software as a Service (SaaS) providers deliver the complete applications that let corporate and consumer customers do real work (or play in some cases).

There are some big players that everyone knows, like Salesforce.com in CRM or Google Apps (and now Microsoft) providing office productivity tools. But there are also hundreds of smaller providers creating more focused applications for a particular niche. For example, our client Spigit provides collaboration tools to help companies manage innovation and our client Convio helps non-profits to manage their fundraising efforts.

Sales and Implementation Partners

The Cloud/SaaS world is VERY big on partnering. These are companies that are founded on the concept of focusing on a small set of core competencies and getting others to fill in the gaps.

At the top end, Google Apps is selling implementations of 50,000 users, but providing no implementation services. That’s right: none. They stay focused on their core competency of building the Google Apps to be the best it can be and rely 100% on partners to provide the services around that platform.

At the low end, even small $10 million per year SaaS companies rely heavily on partners, both for capacity and competency. On the capacity side many of these companies are growing very rapidly (and often irregularly) and partners can help increase capacity and even out the bumps.

Training is a great example on the competency-driven side. SaaS companies know that they need to train their customers, but realize that they don’t have much expertise in how to do so. They don’t have a training department and explicitly don’t want one. (Our partner Appirio regularly talks about never owning a server. Why would they want to own a training department??) They’re thrilled to partner with us and leverage our core competency.
They’re thrilled to partner with us and just have the problem go away.

End Customers

Finally there are the end customers using the SaaS applications. (Actually that’s not always final, since in some cases the application facilitates interaction between the customer and their customers.)

I’ll save diving into the needs of these folks for another post, but as a preview will just point out that there’s a lot of arrows coming into that circle.