There are many eLearning providers to choose from. In an on-going set of FAQs, your decision-making process should include:
Q - Will the course be identical to your company's look and feel?
A - That depends on you. If you go with a boilerplate from the development application, there is some leeway in adding logos or changing color. However,
Continue reading "Choosing an eLearning Provider - Part 2" »
Business cycles across economies and industries are recurring, posing newer challenges along each turn for every organization. While every organization strives to achieve and sustain success in its core business processes (more the better), the ‘enabling’ (non-core) business processes sometimes tend to lag behind the organization’s overall growth trajectory. While many organizations have emerged as leaders and visionaries in their core business by doctoring this problem of ‘enabling processes lagging behind’ and giving due diligence to the relevant enabling processes (e.g., learning & development, talent management, the entire human capital management realm) and empowering their most important assets (read people!), there are other who are yet to take the leap. Staying ahead of the curve and ensuring the growth of enabling processes goes hand-in-hand with the growth of the core business are the real challenges, and that’s what makes the differentiating strategic moves of an organization towards its business objectives so pivotal!
Continue reading "Proactive management of L&D / enabling processes" »
An earlier blog post spoke to the Need to Measure the cost of Training and that very few companies can accurately calculate the total training spend across an organization given the federated nature of global training functions. One of the areas of large spend for training functions is with sourcing training content suppliers to meet various learning needs (Sales, Leadership Development, Project Management, Soft Skills etc.)
Continue reading "Need for Learning Supplier Rationalization" »
Whenever I get involved with a client's learning or HR organization, I ask, early on, how much the company spends on learning. Ten years ago, one in ten could answer that question; today, it may be two in ten, or, at best, three in ten.
I remember an engagement with a global investment bank when we were brought in to help the director of learning quantify how much they were spending. The head of learning thought it was $100 million; the CFO believed it was half a billion.
The director of learning was a lot closer (the figure turned out to be $150 million), but that’s not the point. If no one can tell me how much you’re spending on learning, who’s reporting those figures to ASTD, Bersin, Saratoga, Hackett, and the others? It’s sort of a Zen question.
Typical of the emerging hybrid delivery model for L&D is a global financial services firm that created a project to explore which learning services were best delivered at the business unit level and which were best shared across the enterprise – and the organizational changes that were required to achieve this.
At this historically decentralized firm, both training staff and line managers believed that a great strength of training was its decentralization, its “closeness to the business.” At the same time, they found that such an embedded structure, without enterprise level vision, strategy, or planning, resulted in unacceptable duplication of effort, redundancy, and, therefore, cost inefficiency. They discovered innovative best practices existing in the business units, but no mechanism or structure to ensure that they were shared or leveraged across the company. They found virtually no enterprise level programs, services, or strategy to drive a unified employment brand or talent management approach that would help them meet their goal of becoming one of the “100 Best Companies to Work For.” As a result, they designed a new operating model with four key elements.
There is economic slow down across the world. Large global banks today are trying to cut down on costs by outsourcing heavily to India. This has resulted into having multiple vendors doing multiple contracts within a Line of business. A typical strategy adopted by these institutes is to have few global vendors, few local vendors and keep them competing with each other. This way they get the best of both worlds, highly reliable and predictable output from the global vendors and niche technology skills from the local vendors. The challenge however begins when the majority of application knowledge which resided within the bank resides with multiple vendors in pockets. Numerous contracts with various vendors also result in different operating levels and therefore conflicting priorities.
Continue reading "Challenges - are they really challenging?" »
Starting any new service in Infosys is like setting up a start up except for the fact that you don’t have to look around for investment! But it comes with many other challenges in terms of the pre-set norms that you need to abide by within Infosys.
To start with, how do you get things done in a system which is tuned only to the standard ADM services that we have been offering for the past 25+ years? How do you work around the system to manage new financial models, new roles that you need and the quality systems that take care of only defects delivered per lines of code? We don’t get the support that we need since we are not even 100 people and we are not generating revenue- but we need all the support to start generating revenue!
