What does ‘LMS’ mean today?

This is a follow-up to my recent blog Does the LMS have a future?. That blog – and this one – were stimulated by a trip to the Saba user conference where I had simulating conversations with Josh Bersin, Stacey Harris, Ian Baxter of Saba and Andy Wooler of Hitachi and others, leaving me plenty to think about. Much of the conversation there – and here – has boiled down to this one key question:

What does ‘LMS’ mean?

Yes, I know that the three letters literally stand for ‘Learning Management System’, but actually we all know that’s nonsense. You can’t create a system to manage learning. Learning happens inside people’s heads, and it’s a process that can be supported and stimulated, but not managed. As Mark Britz said in a Twitter exchange just after I posted part 1 of this double-entry blog:

RT @DonaldHTaylor: Does the LMS have a future? wp.me/p2n5B-kj / ppl are what learning is all abt. The risk is leaving to a system

He’s absolutely right – you can’t leave learning to a system, or rather you shouldn’t. Despite a projected 2013 global market value of $1.9bn, Learning Management Systems have only a middling reputation at best among L&D professionals. This is partly because when initially launched in the late 1990s they were not Learning Management Systems, but Training Administration Systems, and too often the training materials delivered over them were dull, ‘click next’ materials that were all about compliance, completion rates and not about learning.

That reputation has stuck. And although LMSs have grown in functionality, and materials in potential (although not always in the realisation of that potential), they have repeatedly been over-sold and under-implemented. In fact, as Andy Wooler, Academy Technology Manager at Hitachi Data Systems Academy, put it when we spoke:

“LMS too often stands for Litigation Mitigation Service.”

Andy, a long time user of a variety of LMSs, is no knocker of the systems. In fact, his work in the financial sector has lead him to believe that the ability to track whether people have undergone training to meet the requirements of Sarbanes Oxley and other regulations – the most basic function of an LMS – is itself essential. “Try running an insurance company without those reports and see how far you get,” he says.

But, says Andy, there are others things we naturally want to do beyond compliance. They usually involve making things (learning content, conversations, networks) available to people, along with a way of engaging with these things, and a database of some sort to support this activity. “A web server, an application and a database – you can call that bundle what you want,” says Andy, “but I’d call that a Learning Management System.”

It’s difficult not to agree. You’re in an enterprise, and you want to support widespread learning. You’re going to need systems to help you – co-ordinated, possibly integrated systems that help the social networking and micro blogging make sense of the videos and User Generated Content, as well as the high-quality training materials that you have produced yourself or outsourced, accessible to managers and including prompts and suggestions for stretch assignments as well as ways of managing coaching and mentoring.

As Andy says, you can give those systems any name you want. You can create them yourself or buy them off the shelf, but together they make up a modern LMS, the sort of system which many of today’s more advanced LMS vendors actually sell. Not a Training Management System, but something that actually supports learning when used properly.

In which case, if this is not a Training Management System, what should the letters LMS stand for?

I asked Andy this. What did he think the letters LMS stood for in this richer, more complex set of tools? He thought for a moment and replied “We provide the systems, and add some context. People use this to make sense of the issues they face and then do their work better.” He paused, then he came up with his definition.

“How about ‘Learning to Make Sense’?”

I think he’s right. We need technologies to support learning at work today. We can buy them packaged in a single, centralized system, or we can assemble them ourselves and integrate them as much or as little as we wish. They can be our learning management system, our personal learning environment, our knowledge network or whatever. Whatever we call these tools and systems, the key thing is what they do. Properly implemented, they help us make sense of the issues we face, and work a better as a result.

Does the LMS have a future?

Does the Learning Management System (LMS) have a future?

In a way, this is a non-question. As a commercial proposition, the LMS has never been more successful. Bersin by Deloitte predicts a 10% growth in LMS spending in 2013, with the global market reaching $1.9 billion this year. And Wall Street thinks it’s a hot market, too, with heated M&A activity over the past 12 months for often eye-watering sums: Oracle-Taleo ($1.9bn), SAP-SuccessFactors ($3.4bn), IBM-Kenexa ($1.3bn).

That’s right. Three acquisitions of single LMS providers totalling roughly three-and-a-half times the market’s total forecast global value. Clearly the money men reckon the future of the LMS is not merely secure, it’s golden bright.

In another, perhaps more fundamental way, however, the question is still unanswered.

The question is this: can the LMS survive in a world where workplace learning is about more than taking prescribed courses, a world where much learning comes via our interactions with others?

I have reflected on this since being a guest recently at the Saba Software annual user conference, People 2013. This event is also known as the Saba Global Summit but that headline name – People 2013 – is the key to this question of the future of the LMS. People are indeed what learning is all about. It’s only in the past few years that technology has been able to begin to catch up with this truth, thanks to the power of social networking over the internet.

Saba – one of the first players in the enterprise-wide LMS space, with 31m users, and still an independent, listed company – understands that systems can do a lot more than just push out compliance training. People 2013 was its opportunity to unveil a radical re-iteration of its platform: Saba PeopleCloud.

Clive Shepherd has already blogged about Saba PeopleCloud, examining whether it can meet the needs of modern enterprise learning that he laid out in The New Learning Architect. Does it support learning across his four contexts of the formal, non-formal, on-demand and experiential?

Clive’s assessment is positive, and from what I’ve seen of the LMS, I would agree that the move is absolutely right. With Saba PeopleCloud, Saba has produced a SaaS platform that can support the learning experience rather dictating it. It has – among other things – a genuine social focus and mobile delivery capability.

But I use that phrase “can support the learning experience rather dictating it” deliberately. The devil in any system is in its implementation. By this I don’t mean I think the technology suspect. I think Saba PeopleCloud can probably meet its claims in practice. The real question is how it will be put to use.

Like any LMS, Saba PeopleCloud can be used solely to deliver courses. There is nothing wrong with this, but if it is the only thing we do in L&D, then we are not doing ourselves or our organisations justice And – importantly – if we choose to use our learning systems in this way, it is not the fault of the systems. It is a choice we have made. And frankly, if we make this choice, then neither the LMS nor L&D has much of a future.

I explore this point further in a future post, when I consider what the three letters LMS mean to the L&D profession.

[Disclosure: Saba paid my expenses for attending the conference, but no fee. The company did not view this blog before posting, and did not ask to. Saba is a sponsor of the Learning and Skills Group, which I chair.]

Elliott Masie’s Learning Direction briefing in London

Understanding the big picture – having of view of what’s going on beyond your immediate area of work – is always important in any profession.

Right now, for L&D, it’s crucial.

Things are shifting. Whether it’s hotter technology, weaker budgets or the changing expectations of both learners and managers, nothing is as it used to be. Caught up in the middle of this change, it’s difficult to sort the important from the trivial and to know what action to take.

That’s why I’m so glad that Elliott Masie is coming to London on 16th April to run his only ‘Learning Directions’ briefing outside the US this year.

Elliott has been a leading thinker in this industry for over three decades, and I’ve shared many conversations with him which have given me cause for thought. The London event in the series (the other 5 are in the US) is a chance to spend a day in conversation with him, getting away from the daily grind for a moment to consider where we’re heading.

It will be a discursive and wide-ranging day, with an emphasis on separating reality from hype. From details such as how we can get the most from User Generated Content, to the big picture view of some of the world’s learning leaders, the idea is to sort out what’s really important. For me, well-structured thinking time like this is essential when we’re setting our strategies for the future.

One thing I like about Learning Directions is that it’s not just a one-day event. Elliott will be providing a follow-up webinar, and further resources based on the feedback he collects during the six one-day sessions.

The Learning and Performance Institute (which I chair) will be hosting Elliott in London. Further information and details of how to register for the event are on the LPI site. Please note – places are limited, and LPI members are eligible for discounts.

I hope to see you in London on April 16th!

The learning content pyramid

Question: are organisations now creating more or less of their own learning content than they used to?

Answer: I don’t know. And I’m not sure anyone else does, either. In fact, I don’t believe any industry data on this exists. That may be reasonable – after all, the definition of ‘learning content’ is slippery thing – but it still rankles.

An animated conversation about this with several providers and users of learning content a few weeks ago at Sally Ann Moore’s iLearn Forum in Paris was fascinating but inconclusive. Every possible opinion was expressed, and no conclusion reached.

Of course the conversation took a long time wandering around the different types of ‘content’ that we might be talking about. Did we mean classroom courses? Online courses? MOOCs? Free stuff from the internet? Generic stuff? User-generated content?

To try and make some sense of the different types of content I sketched out this pyramid of different types of content, the lowest part of the pyramid being where there is the greatest volume:

The learning content pyramid

By ‘content’, I’m referring to materials people learn from. This includes reference materials and courses. It could be on any medium – Google plus, a video on your phone or a book. To be clear: I am not suggesting that content creation/sourcing and maintenance is the only role of L&D.

From the bottom of the pyramid the five layers are:

Freely available – The internet provides an almost unlimited set of resources to draw on for learning. The trick is to choose the right ones. In an LSG webinar recently Virgin Media’s Mike Leavy showed (among other things) how they incorporate free content from on their corporate Cornerstone OnDemand LMS (see at 41:30 in the video). And this goes beyond a few links to YouTube. It includes iTunes U, free courses from MOOC suppliers Coursera and Udemy, talks from TED and lessons from the Khan Academy as well as free online courses from the Open University’s Learning Space.

With online courses now available for free from the world’s leading universities, why would you not include MOOCs in your available content? As the range of these offerings widen (see my previous blog on MOOCs), the challenge for L&D here is to move from solely creating content to sourcing it – in particular in filtering to make the most useful stuff visible (see my previous blog on filtering as one of L&D’s 4 key content skills).

Generic – There is a strong, global market for online learning materials, so strong that before writing anything, L&D must always ask who else might have already produced it. When he first arrived at Lloyd’s as CLO, one of the first things Peter Butler did was to stop his L&D team producing courses on topics such as Microsoft Excel and Word. The company already had a subscription to an online course provider, meaning that these courses were available for use at no additional marginal cost. Maybe these weren’t exactly the content and quality the L&D team would have liked, but they were certainly good enough. The L&D team’s time was better spent doing higher value work.

And ‘generic’ needn’t mean ‘poor quality’. Video Arts has produced high-quality generic management training materials for more than 20 years. And neither need ‘generic’ mean ‘non-sector specific’ either. When Ray O’Connor produced an anti money-laundering course at his legal firm, he realised that it would be useful outside the organisation, and made it more widely available. It’s always worth checking with your L&D colleagues in your industry before you start writing anything.

And as well as the celebrated providers of online content such as Skillsoft there’s always the original generic content – books. The rise of the e-book removes the headache of providing and circulating physical books, leading to a rise in online books clubs that like that run by Shell Senior Innovation Adviser for Global HR Technologies Hans de Zwart  where both the meetings and the books can be virtual.

User generated content (UGC) – UGC is all that great stuff which people naturally create in work that others can learn from – whether it’s explicitly designed for learning or not. A typical example would be Black & Decker’s use of short videos shared between members of its field sales team (see the CERTPOINT case study)

As well as very targeted material like this (most UGC videos are under 5 minutes long), UGC also includes chat sessions (like those from LSG webinars or Twitter #lrnchat meetings). I’d suggest that UGC is not entirely free, as we often like to believe. There may be no upfront cost, as there is with generic content, but it certainly takes time (and sometimes money) to set up and maintain the systems for sharing UGC, and we should never kid ourselves that opportunity cost is not a real cost.

Created internally – with so much else available for free or at low cost, the centrally generated materials we create must be context rich. This is where L&D adds value (again – see Interpretation – a crucial part of the L&D role)

BP’s internal ‘Moments of Truth’ programme, for example, uses video and story-telling to raise diversity and inclusion issues far more effectively than didactic approaches. (Click for the slides, or for the context of the 2012 Brightwave event “Beyond the Course” where I first saw this.)

‘Moments of Truth’ has very high production values, because that is appropriate for this subject: inclusion is a core issue for BP, and will remain part of employees’ learning for years to come.

Not all internally-generated content need be as beautifully prepared or even as emotionally engaging as ‘Moments of Truth’. The key differentiator is that it should be context rich, steeped in the reality of that particular organisation. When power tool manufacturer TTI wanted to improve efficiency in handling returned goods, it produced a clear online course with the 10 most common mistakes in handling returned goods. Sounds simple. It was. It also generated $33-$35m in savings over a 2 year period. (Click for the case study.)

Internally-generated materials don’t have to be fancy, just context rich and effective.

Commissioned – There will always be a place for high-quality commissioned content. The subject may require specialist knowledge beyond anyone in the organisation. It may also be a high-profile piece of work that demands great production values.

I sense, though, that commissioned content is an increasingly specialized field. As the cost of production has fallen, with great content creation and editing tools available at low-to-no cost, many of the barriers to creating good content have fallen. Global competition has also made this a tough market to be in. The bespoke content providers that remain have to offer a service where value rests on a combination of production and learning expertise as well as subject matter understanding.

As Clive Shepherd pointed out in 2008, Nick Shackleton-Jones originally proposed a three-layer model of content development at an eLearning Network event in the UK. The pyramid above has five layers, but it remains only a model. The map is not the territory.

If you choose to think of content in terms of a layered pyramid, I would love to hear your comments and insight. How many layers does your pyramid have? Where are you focusing your efforts now? And do you see your focus changing in the future? Perhaps if we engage in a broad conversation around this, we may be able to answer my original question: are we  producing more or less of our own learning materials internally?

Interpretation – a crucial part of the L&D role

What is the role of L&D, and what should it be?

I’ve been thinking and talking about this a lot recently, because the pace of change in our profession is pretty fast and because the old certainty – that L&D was about creating and delivering courses – no longer holds. 

The days when L&D was the main (and sometimes sole) provider of information to employees has gone. The internet saw to that. Once knowledge was power. Now information is free and almost frictionless. So if all we’re doing is providing generic information to people, we don’t deserve to be in a job.

Making sure people can find and learn from the right things, however, remains an important part of L&D’s role. The process use has just stepped up a level of sophistication.

That process follows four steps. Directly or indirectly we need to:

Note – this may seem to be a description of the curation process. It is, but it is also the process we follow when creating learning content. We find the information we need to express, filter to focus on the essentials and then express it in the right format – interpret it – before making it available.

Currently in the profession we’re talking a lot about the first and last of these – about smart search and the ways we can share cleverly, making sure people can find and learn what they need.

But where the L&D department really adds value to my mind is in the third step, interpreting. This is where L&D should be using its combination of knowledge of the business, with its expertise in learning to ensure whatever the topic, it is framed in a way that makes sense to the precise context of the organisation. A generic health and safety course is ten times more valuable when expressed in terms of how that affects people at work in your organisation. A book on business leadership has more impact when discussed in respect of your own work. A YouTube video on sales makes a greater difference to performance when linked to other, work-related materials.

Conversations and social networking within the organisation may not require much interpretation to those involved (here L&D’s role is more to facilitate the conversation) – but there may still be an interpretive role to play later. Making sure that the gist of a good conversation is available later to those who didn’t participate is,  I believe, something L&D should absolutely be doing, and it certainly involves interpretation.

I’ll be talking about this – and other things – in a webinar on 19^th March, with Randy Emelo of Triple Creek (and I’m indebted to them for the graphic above, which they produced from my words). Randy will explore how Triple Creek can help L&D with these four steps. Like me Randy’s background includes classroom and technology work and he’s also been thinking about this topic for a number of years. It should be a good session.

Learning from Others: How Technology is Changing the Role of L&D runs on 19^th March at 15:00 UK time (10 ET). I hope to see you there!