Learning Services

Have you ever had a pile of papers on your desk or bit of a mess in a room that you continue to walk by?  After having it camouflage itself mysteriously into the background, you finally decide it is time to clean that mess up.  Hours pass and things are filed or thrown away and finally, its cleaned up ….only to have it appear again days, weeks or months later.

Now – think about how many times you or your company has had to do this with regard to learning or talent development. Every time we turn around, the way we support and develop our people has turned itself into large unmanaged piles around the company or an absolute mess located in one place. Why and how does this happen? - For the same reasons that the piles and messes happen around your house or office– talent development and learning  is typically given a lower priority than the other things you have going on.

Psssst…. in the meantime, how much are you really spending with those piles and messes?! We all know budgets get cut and learning typically goes first, but people spend the money anyway and hide them in budgets as “other”.  I found over $2M of “other” within one year at one particular client.

SO LETS CLEAN UP!!! …For good this time. Make it a routine (perhaps we can think of it as the 9th Habit) to include learning and talent development as part of what needs to be managed as part of our projects, initiatives and if needed, daily lives. After all, how can you have a high performing or innovative team if they don’t know what they are doing?

Here are some quick wins to think about to get things started:
1. Vendor / Content Rationalization & Management: (You did it with your supply chain – guess what, it works in learning too!) Put a stop gap on money being spent where it doesn’t need to be…think green – reuse/repurpose the content that you have. Align it to the performance needs and competencies assigned with your workforce. The value that can be quickly realized includes:
• Volume of Courses Reduced
• Spend Managed
• Repeatable Processes Introduced
• Sustainable Control Plans Introduced
2. Technology Roadmap: How many spreadsheets are being used to manage talent development and learning? Have your performance management plans worked? Is there an integrated strategy to Talent Management that you and your company are thinking about (Workforce Planning & Management/ Learning / Performance Management / Compensation & Benefits / Employee Services)?
Addressing any of these areas now, can begin to place you in more effective and efficient times including financially.

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Be it, calling a teacher in Bangalore by a seventh grader student from Down Town Chicago for her Mathematics lessons or of disseminating globally competitive knowledge and corporate lessons to the budding future CEOs. We now have more knowledge, more learning resources, more availability, more competition, more local needs, more global participation and increasingly lesser cost and time. Learning has now broken all the physical, psychological, scientific, language and demographic barriers. Today, anyone from anywhere can learn anything using the advancements in technology and using people centered democratic Web-2.0 thought process.

Web-2.0 fits brilliantly in open modes of learning. Hence, I’ll limit this post only to Models which have a democratic flavor of Web-2.0 and can be used in Corporate Networks. Web-2.0 simply put is architecture of user participation where content is easily searchable and individual holds responsibility for the content they provide.

Key focus of adopting Web-2.0 in the Corporate World is to allow integration of different modes of learning. The user (resource) shall be able to search and find the content relevant to him at any point of time at any geographical location. Integration of Corporate Knowledge allows removing redundancy of information or lack of it and makes it readily available to all. This content can then be rated by the peer group. Hence ensuring that end user readily finds the useful content. According to Stephen Regis, from Manufacturing Consulting arm of Infosys, one such solution to Learning Services is by linking all content within the system with appropriate contexts, which can then be directed to the context of the user. This can either be determined automatically based on user usage habit of the system or allowing them to choose context manually. This will help guided content to reach appropriate people.

The increasing use of RIA (Rich Internet Applications) and multimedia over the web is possible with growth in technology. Speed of networks help to learn real-time using online podcasts, live web-casts, shared white-spaces and other state of the art 3-D workspaces. The principles of Learning-2.0 like Srinivas mentions will surely help productivity and growth.

Corporate World is governed by an eternal principle – to share knowledge on need to know basis. This can be done by enforcing rights only to specific group for a specific content. This will ensure guided content and hence improving security aspects too. The security of the content and IP for every creation by the user shall be owned strictly. In recent times Blogs have found users in biggest of the C-suit of people. Blogging over past several years have helped in showcasing the POV of the owner. A lot of knowledge can share hands collaboratively using them, which can be used as a platform to share important tips or processes.

Small workspaces can be created for users only within a team. This’ll reduce the number of mails and anyone can be tracked across demography or helped easily by other team members. These workspaces can be based on virtual reality or otherwise. Such workspaces can be rolled out organization wide if content contained in them is not client specific or proprietary.

Author Profile:
Rahul Breh is with the SharePoint and RIA Center of Excellence at Manufacturing Unit of Infosys. He was part of the Project WELCOM (World Electronic Community) for World Economic Forum which won the First Prize, PRIMA Award at Infosys for Technological Excellence (Q3 – 2008-2009). He is a web-2.0 enthusiast. Recently one of his research papers titled – ‘Increasingly Democratic and Changing Business Models’ featured in SETLabs Briefings Journal Issue – ‘Powering Business with Web-2.0 Technologies’.

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