e e learning

the trend over the past four or five years has been for the training profession to refer to itself as the learning profession.  While I agree in many ways with this trend (see training vs. learning), i do believe that sometimes we get a bit too myopic in your view of the work of workplace learning. As i argued in my post on Learning Circuits Blog, We’re #3, we’re #3!, training is often not the most effective learning function in an organization.  This is particularly true in the realm of customer education.

There are a number of functional groups in every organization that are involved in customer education. to keep things somewhat simple, I identify six groups in the customer education ecosystem – product development, marketing, sales, account management, training, and customer support.  ideally each of these groups has direct contact with an organization’s customers.  They each learn something from the customer and they each – for better or for worse – provide the customer with new information.

a great deal of effort has been made in most organizations to gather up the information gathered from customers. in best case situations it’s aggregated and funneled back to product development. few organizations have had success at aligning the information presented to the customer by the various groups. even fewer have an understanding that linking this content drives customer education around the use of the organization’s product in the customer’s particular business.

the relay method

Traditionally, an effort is made to hand-off product information from group to group as if there were a relay race involved. if the handoff goes well, some information about the product and/or the customer is passed along to the next group. usually with a spin on the information by the group passing it on.

often, the "hand-off is missed." leaving the receiving group scrambling to get the information they need. they may go back up the chain to a previous group who invariably get annoyed because they thought they were done with this particular product or customer.  or they go back to the customer who gets annoyed and wonders if there is anyone with any intelligence working for the company.

even when all of the hand-offs are performed well, the result can often be like the children’s game telephone. with each successive group putting their own spin on the information based upon their interaction with customers disconnects start showing up by the dozen.  "i can’t tell you why they built the product that way." "you know, that doesn’t make sense." "let me teach you a work around that. it’s a bit of a pain, but it will work."  "no, this class doesn’t cover what the sales rep told you." etc. etc.

About the only thing the customer is learning is how to work the call center automated phone tree and what they want to ask your competitors when the decide to drop your product.

circle the wagons

to alleviate the problems created by the relay method of communications, organizations have taken to a "circle the wagons" approach in which email inboxes overflow as everyone is expected to keep everyone else "in the loop" by sharing anything and
everything they know.  each group is then responsible for understanding the whole picture by piecing together all those emails and the accompanying attachments. the cob web of information is overwhelming and everyone defaults back to the same solution as used when the relay method failed. No one really knows what the customer is being told by the other groups and the customer again goes wanting.

customer education ecosystem

with the onset of web 2.0 technologies, it’s not only possible to get everyone in the organization not only singing from the same page, but it’s a reality that you can get everyone writing the same page. whether using a wiki to gather information from across
the organization and then collaboratively mold it into a unified message leveraging content and information for multiple purposes, or a customer relationship management system to track every contact with a customer regardless of what functional group, and/or a document management system to handle version control and create a unified look and feel, technology now enables everyone to have product, customer and market information on-demand.

This enables a consistent message that can be crafted to move the customer along a learning curve from initial contact, through basic usage, to power usage. once a customer is fully aware of the workings of a product and/or services available to them, they can then begin to drive real value for their organization with your products/services.

Tags: customer education, product development, marketing, sales, account management, training, customer support, customer education ecosystem

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the april big question on learning circuits blog is about content vendors and how to help them solve their problems in an ever more competitive marketplace, providing more customized content, which costs more but sells at lower and lower prices.

around about 100 years ago, there were manufacturers who specialized in one thing – buggy whips. fashion accessories of the second half of the 19th century, buggy whips served a major function in transportation of the time. need to go a bit faster? crack! off you go. sudden stop needed? crack! you stop on a dime. the onset of the 20th century saw gas pedals and brakes replacing the need to get horsepower by cracking your whip. unfortunately the buggy whip makers saw themselves as buggy whip makers, not transportation accelerators and decelerators. as the demand for buggy whips died, so did the buggy whip makers.

flash back to the present and there is a strong parallel when we look at learning content vendors. clearly a new paradigm of how learners learn and how they access the content they need is well on it’s way to being cemented in place. i left college textbook publishing after 14 very successful years of publishing and promoting course based textbooks. i left and joined carol vallone and barb ross at universal learning technology (which upon merger became webct) because i just didn’t see the established publishers making the radical shift that is being demanded by today’s marketplace.

i have no interest in bailing out or bucking up content vendors who refuse to listen to what the marketplace is demanding. so part of me agrees with tom haskins’ leave a clean corpse post. if you aren’t changing to meet the market, you might as well send out your finest outfit to the dry cleaners and prepare for the day when people will ask, why did they have to pass now.

wendy wickham voices the feeling of many learning professionals in what i need now. this is not a whining varuka salt, i-want-it now plea, but rather an understanding that learning and development at the speed of business is a “solve today’s problem today” proposition versus a plan for tomorrow environment. perhaps we have forgotten that the rapid elearning movement wasn’t created to eliminate vendors and instructional designers. rapid elearning’s impetus came from the realization that we were taking 12 months to develop a training course for a product with a 9 month development cycle.

for years the content vendors had enough sway to make us learn and teach the way they felt we should. but it is no longer “buyer beware.” it’s vendor beware. if you don’t want to provide what the customer truly wants, someone else will. a classic example is the explosion is the number of cut-rate basic functionality lms’s that have hit the market. in the past few years to compete against blackboard, desire2learn, and moodle.

that said, i agree with claudia escribano in thinking about big questions and valerie bock in formal learning: it’s not dead yet! that there is a valid place for content and content vendors in the learningsphere. high quality content that is priced appropriately has always been welcomed and appreciated. such content is focused on customer/learner needs and provides an extension of what can be provided by other instructional means (ilt, online discussions, one-on-one tutoring, etc.).

i’m a believer that good facilitators and good content serve as accelerators to the learning process. providing best practices, case studies, compendia of relevant facts and resources, guides to prerequisite information to support subsequent content, access to experts in specific fields, are just some of the possible types of content that can be used by facilitator and learners alike to advance learning at a pace that is faster that what an individual could do if they sought out content to learn on their own.

certainly, content vendors are struggling with the change the face today. that’s to be expected. it’s also likely that some of them won’t make it through the change. but that’s natural too. those who understand what their customers want, are willing to drop their previous conceptions regarding what content development is, and embrace new types and forms of content will survive and, likely, earn the types of profits they yearn for today. for those who are whining about not making enough profits or trying to convince us that we should change our approach to learning are just sitting being the steering wheel trying to figure out how to use their buggy whip to get this contraption moving.

technorati Tags: content-vendors, do-it-yourself-learning, instructor-lead-training, content-vendors, rapid-elearning

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in a webinar by jeffrey mann from gartner sponsored by interwise, mann discussed how to better integrate collaboration tools into the corporate culture. one thing that drew my attention was his frequent use of the phrase “embed collaboration into the workflow.”

my reaction that this seems to be such an odd statement because collaboration is already a part of business processes – either formally or informally. now i’m not clueless, so i get that mann was likely talking about embedding collaboration tools into the business process. although he didn’t talk much about systems integration. the problem that concerns me is that my immediate reaction was to be dismissive of the rest of his message. “if this guy doesn’t know collaboration is a part of normal business processes, then what worth does everything else he have to say have for me.”

malcolm gladwell tells us in blink that i’m not alone in making snap value judgments like this. why do i bring it up here? because in our profession we constantly talk about embedding learning into the workflow. i’m confident that our using this particular phrasing is working to undermine our credibility with the people we are most seeking to impress.

learning is already a part of the workflow. employees are constantly looking for new resources and new ways to do things. good managers know it’s their job to help employees understand their job and how the organization works. customers are patient with new trainees. executives plan out organizational change initiatives to help the company learn how to compete better.

language is a huge part of how we present ourselves and how others perceive us. talking of “embedding learning into the workflow” likely makes us look clueless to our colleagues. how many of our colleague are tuning out our message because of what we are saying?

technorati Tags: collaboration, communication, professionalism, workflow-learning, informal-learning

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in my efforts to push the envelop on improving our professional image, I’ve been calling out gross instances of the type of work that makes us look bad to our peers and superiors thus harming our reputations and calling into question our professionalism. 

this example is from the report on training administration and operations just published by expertus and trainingoutsourcing.com.  you can get a free copy of the report if you are a member of trainingoutsourcing.com.  membership is free.

take a look at this graphic and think about how you would write or talk about the data set that it represents.

now you might say something like a majority of programs estimate that their percentage spend on administration and operations is under 20%.   or 8% have cost control problems.  right?  Here’s what the survey’s report says about this data:

Survey Highlights

• Results show that administrative expenses are high in most organizations:  7.6% of respondents said their companies spent more than 50% of their training budgets on administration and operations; 10.2% spent between 36 and 50%; and 29.3% spent 20 to 35%.

what!!!!!  what about the other 53% of the respondents.  47% does not constitute "most" of the respondents.  what’s the break down of the 53% of organizations who are below 20%.  for all we know, cost could be running under 10% for half the respondents.  but then again, that wouldn’t be good for an organization who is in existence to promote the efficiencies that outsourcing can bring to an organization.

this ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, is a particularly mangled attempt to skew the presentation of the data to make it look more favorable to one’s own position, no matter what the data actually says.  usually skewing the data will be seen by your audience and will undercut your credibility on this and future topics. 

if you do research in hopes of supporting your position, but end up with data that harms your position you might be able to pretend that there was no research was done or that some how the study was compromised.  but the best thing to do in the long run is to study what you have found and change your position accordingly.   you might lose the current battle, but you will earn a level of respect that will pay dividends well into the future.