L&D: Centralized or Decentralized?
I met recently with a corporate university that controls a good 90% of all the company's training activity and spend. I told the CLO he was in a terrific position to drive transformation in learning across the company, given that most such efforts are tortuous exercises in mediating the conflicting needs, expectations, and, frankly, politics of embedded training units across a decentralized corporation. One of the CLO's team said, "That's a great observation, I hadn't really thought about that. I guess we're lucky."
Decentralization affects key quality drivers as well, working against the ability to implement a unified strategy and approach to learning across the enterprise, and the ability horizontally to integrate learning with talent management on one hand and with knowledge management on the other.
I worked for a large HR BPO provider for a handful of years, and it was a rare case when the scope of the engagement included learning. Why? Because the task of aggregtating such a decentralized function is daunting, and despite its size (more than $100 million for many Fortune 1000 companies), L&D is still viewed as a sub-function to HR that, if not strategic, still carries few of the transactional elements of (for example) benefits enrollment or applicant processing.
A dominant corporate organization may lose sensitivity to the needs of the business, while a dominant business unit structure works against creating a shared enterprise agenda or approach for learning and talent management. Many companies are taking steps to establish a more rational, best-practice L&D operating model that includes the best features (and avoids the worst) of both decentralization and centralization -- to be discussed in a future post....
