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E-Learning as a Strategic Corporate Asset
By Jack B. Rochester
In today's Internet-driven business climate, there is nothing so important as
an educated, well-trained employee. We have come to realize, as Arie DeGeus,
former executive vice president of Royal Dutch/Shell, says, "A company's success
no longer depends on its ability to raise investment capital, but on the ability
of its people to learn together and to produce new ideas." Ideas are the raw
capital of today's enterprise. Idea aggregation creates knowledge, which builds
the corporate mind. The knowledge wealth of the corporate mind leads to
innovation, which produces the products or services needed to stay competitive.
None of this can occur without intellectually stimulated, continuously educated
people.
Yesterday's worker was trained to perform a repetitive task; work today is
far more complex, often requiring the development of a wide range of skills
?many of which change on a more or less continuous basis. For example,
knowledge- workers are expected to be able to multitask in a highly
technological environment while maintaining an overall understanding of the
business process or goal. The cost of developing the requisite skills is great,
often running into hundreds of thousands of dollars; thus, no employer wants to
lose an educated employee to a competitor.
E- learning has assumed a front-and- center role in enterprise-wide skills
development. E-learning is a suite of technologies used for a variety of skills
development initiatives such as recruitment, retention, optimal staffing and
career planning. Perhaps most important, e-learning technology helps integrate
skills development and education into the organizational fabric, applying and
deploying it at just the right time, in just the right amount, to precisely
those workers who require it. Ideally, it does so by capturing digital learning
assets and storing them in an object-oriented repository where they can be
reused and deployed up and down the value chain. In doing so, e-learning
technology partners with two other technologies, knowledge management and
enterprise portals, to create an extraordinarily powerful corporate asset.
What is E-Learning?
E-learning has its roots in traditional training and education
which, based as they are on industrial era precepts, simply cannot meet the
needs of today's information and Internet era enterprises. When we think of
training, we generally think of developing the individual's abilities to
perform specific tasks. To paraphrase an old Chinese proverb: Give me a fish,
and I eat for a meal. Military training is an example of training at its
finest.
When we think of education, we generally think of a teacher, a
classroom and a text. Instruction in ideas, concepts, points of view and
illustrative examples conveys information that is intended, at least, to instill
the ability to learn and, at best, to create a modicum of knowledge.
When we discuss e- learning, we are really talking about skills
development: Teach me to fish, and I eat for a lifetime. E-learning embraces
various delivery methods including instructor-led learning, classroom learning,
distance education, self- paced learning and on-the-job learning. Bear in mind
that the key differentiating factor is that e-learning injects just
enough (JE) learning, just in time (JIT), to just the right learner.
Otherwise, e- learning includes all the same components as conventional training
or education: the content, pedagogy or instructional design, a delivery method,
and testing and assessment. A straightforward example of e-learning is teaching
a new employee how to perform a specific task, such as how to configure
information views in a desktop mini-application in the enterprise resource
planning (ERP) system.
What is Enterprise E- Learning?
Enterprise e-learning is emerging as the corporate response to the
shortcomings of public education, as well as to the learning gaps endemic in
traditional enterprise training. Enterprise e-learning takes complete
responsibility and ownership for training and educating people who must work
together to accomplish business objectives, both within and without the
organization. Enterprise e-learning does not turn its back on traditional
training and educational methods; rather, it extracts what is best about them
and synthesizes them with cutting-edge technologies to create a new learning
paradigm based on the premise that any knowledge worker associated with the
value chain, whether a professional, manager, employee, business partner,
supplier or customer, at some time has a need to acquire understanding or
knowledge about the ways in which your firm does business. This often involves a
learning process that, in its simplest form, translates into routine business
procedures. In more complex situations, it means learning how to perform a
detailed procedure or a new reporting function. More often than not, it isn't
necessary to send an employee to a three-day, off-site training seminar to learn
every nuance of the application. Indeed, the more common scenario is incremental
skills development on an as-needed basis.
In enterprise e- learning, means of acquiring the learning necessary
to understand that particular information must be available to people on an
anywhere, anytime basis. The means of delivering that learning must be
ubiquitous and multifaceted so that learners can study and comprehend it on
their own terms. However, it doesn't stop there. The information or knowledge
the learner acquires can be captured and stored for reuse by others, rather than
remaining trapped in the learner's head. Put another way, static information is
transformed into dynamic knowledge.
E- Learning and Knowledge Management
The ability to rapidly impart contextually rich information throughout the
extended enterprise is no longer considered a competitive advantage. Indeed, it
is what the enterprise must ante up just to lay claim to being a viable player
in the chaotic game of 21st century commerce. Most companies find
themselves wallowing in a morass of info- glut: information that is
unclassified, unfiltered and inefficiently organized. Therefore, it is taking
the next step ?from information acquisition to knowledge management ?that
distinguishes real business viability. This is where the greatest payback from
e-learning technology can be found: in accelerating the transfer rate of
critical knowledge to specific constituents up and down the value chain.
E- learning fits into knowledge management by providing multiple inputs to
the knowledge management system, informing it with the results of many more
minds and processes. The knowledge management system (KMS) can be enlightened
with information from specific learning events, as well as with vast amounts of
information concerning the value chain and business processes within it. By
informing the KMS in so many ways at so many levels, we are in effect creating
and continually enhancing the corporate knowledge repository ?the corporate
mind, if you will.
E-learning can proffer the tools to critically dissect, organize and
repurpose learning knowledge so that it can serve more than one audience. It
does so by interfacing with the KMS, building knowledge objects from both
structured and unstructured learning and making it available on a JIT, JE basis.
A number of e- learning vendors recognize this and are integrating knowledge
management functionality into their solutions.
(Click
for full sized version)
Figure 1: Enterprise e-learning, when augmented
with knowledge management, informs the value chain in profound ways unimagined
by other systems or technologies.
E-Learning and the Bidirectional Portal
Facing both internally and externally, bidirectional portals provide the
means with which to maximize innovation and distribute knowledge acquired
through e-learning. The idea of a bidirectional portal is new but holds the
promise of becoming indelibly woven into the value chain, linking the demand
chain with the supply chain, in effect turning them into a continual
knowledge-feedback loop. If your information technology (IT) organization has
already deployed internal or external portals, only a small step is required to
create the bidirectional portal.
A well-configured bidirectional portal provides a platform for acquiring
tacit knowledge from the e-learning loops, followed by executing knowledge chain
activities and gathering and building unique core competencies from the lessons
learned. That is followed by creating internal and external e-learning links to
the bidirectional portal. The first might be specific to an external
relationship with a business partner or to an internal group. All business
processes and links in the knowledge chain ought to be strategic, with an
e-learning component built in so that they can be made intelligent as well.
Taking our previous enterprise resource portal example a step further, the
knowledge worker creates a shortcut or improved procedure in the procurement
process. Rather than explaining it to others verbally or in an e-mail, the
individual uses a simple online tool that turns the procedure into a macro and a
knowledge object that pops up whenever someone else invokes the task. That
knowledge object can, in turn, be linked to its antecedents in production, where
it becomes an enhanced methodology and a distinct competitive advantage.
In order to take full advantage of the bidirectional portal, the first step
is to deploy components that knowledge workers can use to refine and add value
to it. They will create more knowledge, more affiliation and more feedback loops
in and around the enterprise business processes. In short, make the
e-learning-enabled bidirectional portal self-propagating. Over time, we expect
to see integrated e-learning as an essential portal component.
Personal E-Learning Portals
Since portal technology was introduced, we have seen its incredible
transformation from a marketing gimmick for the "me" generation to a
substantially evolved primary point of contact for most business communications
and transactions. At the same time that personalization is maturing, the portal
is also becoming much more multifunctional and pervasive. Indeed, some software
vendors are building personal portals for the student, instructor and manager
directly into their e- learning solutions.
Personal portals can be configured to establish a workspace integrating the
most relevant sources of information with a network of connections into the
knowledge management system. When this is accomplished with the addition of
e-learning, the personal portal becomes the intelligent personal portal.
There is great value in having all e-learning resources available from a
single point of access. Intelligent personal portals learn about our work
habits, preferences and roles to provide a personalized experience of the
business environment. They are also adaptive and self- learning, so they
constantly update themselves through the knowledge base. The intelligent
personal portal is not just for employees; it also provides a personalized,
single-point-of-access environment from which each external channel partner or
the direct sales force can more effectively perform key day- to-day tasks such
as promotion management, lead management, request for proposal (RFP) response
and new business development. The result is a collaborative commerce environment
always sensitized to its workers, customers and partners ?and the differences
among each. In short, imagine learning- directed, knowledge-disseminating
systems that actually know you.
E-Learning Systems: The Market
E-learning systems are usually comprised of tools for authoring and content
management, instructional delivery methods, a database linkage component and
administrative tools (often called a learning management system, or LMS).
E-learning solutions are found in many different flavors such as:
- Homegrown, using a mix of tools and utilities.
- Off-the-shelf components cobbled together by IT.
- Integrated, with an emphasis on content management.
- Integrated, with an emphasis on administrative tools.
- Integrated, from content through administration.
- Integrated, delivered from a host or ASP ? which Delphi Group terms an LSP
(learning solution provider)
These systems, or solutions, are in a great deal of flux right now as the
market takes shape, morphs and sorts itself out. In addition, we are seeing LMSs
that provide a complete system with the exception of content, which these
vendors will help obtain from external sources or by configuring local content.
We are also seeing LMSs that offer to create content and instructional design.
This is healthy, because it means vendors are overlapping and cross-fertilizing
the market. Indeed, there are nearly 300 e- learning vendors. The Delphi Group
e-learning index of 11 e-learning vendors has returned six percent in the first
quarter of 2001, the only vendor segment we track that shows growth in the
current economy.
Not the Emperor's New Clothes
Unfortunately, the way that some organizations implement e-learning is little
more than training with a fancy new name. The result is often a disappointment:
software tools that attempt to automate existing training but add no value,
point solutions that cannot be reused or transferred to other e- learning
objectives, and poor or ineffective knowledge exchange between enterprise
information systems.
Producing the results DeGeus speaks of requires thoughtful management and a
way to channel knowledge and expertise back into the organization as corporate
knowledge. This means a highly granular integration of the e-learning system
with the knowledge management system, deployed in a personalized context through
portal technology that links the business with its business partners. The
marriage, properly consummated, results in the creation of learning objects that
propagate up and down the value chain, satisfying knowledge needs. This is no
small feat; however, as in most endeavors, hard work and great risk-taking are
required to produce profound rewards.
Markets Aren't Always So Smart
One way in which e- learning can have a profound impact on an
enterprise's ability to recognize new opportunities is to quickly rally
people around a new idea. Due to ever- decreasing life cycles, products
for today's market must be continuously reinvented. Market forces which
seem distressingly similar to Adam Smith's invisible hand are commonly
believed to drive business.
These purportedly blind, raging market forces present an enormous
challenge to organizations in the form of the need to continuously ramp up
human resources on the latest trend, technology or product. It is what
management expert Peter Drucker refers to as organized abandonment ?the
ability to literally cannibalize your greatest successes in order to
deliver the next successful product before your competitors. In truth,
sometimes the reality of the market prevails over what is seemingly a good
idea for a product or service; one is reminded of how e-commerce was going
to put brick- and-mortar retail out to pasture. Other times, an idea will
rush into the market like a tsunami, as did the Razor scooter, completely
baffling every industry and marketing prognosticator.
Enterprises that do not have a strong e-learning program in place
probably won't be able to practice organized abandonment. Lacking the
tools for and focus on continuous reinvention, they are likely to drive
everyone to extreme frustration as they constantly change the rules of the
game.
On the other hand, successful Internet age enterprises that have
incorporated e-learning into their strategies and business processes will
regard supply chain awareness in terms of core competencies, asking "What
did we learn?" as opposed to industrial age dinosaurs who still ask "What
do we make?" or "What did we sell?" For example, an architect's work may
be described abstractly as a series of tasks that translate human needs
into aesthetically pleasing and functionally responsive structures.
However, most people would describe an architect's work by accentuating a
specialty, saying, for example, that a residential architect designs ranch
houses or split-levels. But what happens to the architect if demand for
these types of homes declines or disappears? Clearly, someone or something
must quickly provide the shift in focus of the requisite skills needed to
morph the competencies into new products and services.
The comfort in this is that core competencies always outlive specific
products. Despite the volatility of markets, the Coca- Cola Company did
not go out of business because New Coke was a market dud. E- learning,
because it stresses continuity and incessant learning feedback loops,
helps imbue workers and organizations with confidence in their ability to
keep up with the market.
In many organizations, existing training systems and educational
institutions actually undermine opportunities for ideas and organized
abandonment. They are geared to react to, not initiate, change. One might
say they are not marketing-oriented. E-learning provides essential
infrastructure support systems for high-velocity innovators. It can be
especially valuable when it is deeply integrated into the marketing
business processes, extending to your business partners and customers
where it becomes a catalyst for innovation and an infinite generator of
new ideas. Thus, marketing itself becomes a student of e-learning
initiatives and gets smarter in the bargain.
Jack B. Rochester is a senior analyst with the Delphi Group, a
Boston-based provider of thought leadership at the intersection of business and
information technology for the Global 2000. He has observed and written about
applied information technology for 20 years and is currently keeping a close
watch on e-learning and knowledge management.