Chief Learning Officer - February 2008 - (Page 35)

environment Telstra leadership is looking to the Learning Academy to have a direct impact on business performance, specifically through higher customer satisfaction, improved productivity of the workforce and quality of work, increased job satisfaction and cost reductions. The fact that the Learning Academy started operating at full capacity one month earlier than originally planned certainly reinforced the COO’s feeling that the outsourcing decision was a positive direction for Telstra. So the first phase of generating value from a learning outsourcing arrangement often centers on the basics of figuring out how much is being spent on what and whom, toward what business goals. Achieving that global perspective is the basis for the majority of cost takeout through things such as better vendor and software management and centralized procurement. The second phase or second year of the maturity curve is where delivery and access begin to achieve real results in terms of employee performance and satisfaction and in terms of additional refinements to the cost model. By the third phase, an organization begins to think about grander things from its learning outsourcing strategy: measuring business impact, contributing to top-line growth and even innovation. Greater Centralization and Control A second important goal of learning outsourcing is closely related to the first: to achieve more control over both learning outcomes and learning spend. For many large multinationals, learning has evolved within a distributed model in which different geographies have operated with a fair degree of autonomy. Each division may have its own LMS, its own software and supplies, and its own vendor contracts. If CEOs of that kind of organization want to support the broader business goals just discussed with a new approach to learning as a general corporate capability, they have a huge challenge on their hands. Indeed, we have found that many CLOs and COOs who now talk freely about the business value being generated from their learning outsourcing strategy actually started out looking instead for global consistency and simply gaining more control over what was being spent and what it was being spent on. For many executives, the need for this global visibility and transparency into learning operations and budgets comes when they are asked to develop a business case for a transformed learning function and a global learning capability. Business case development is often difficult because there is no single place to look for a global perspective on learning spend: That information is buried among reports and budgets from different geographies and lines of business. At the beginning of an outsourcing partnership, the question of value creation is almost always asked. However, until organizations are able to answer some fundamental questions around where they are spending money, how they know where they would ideally like to spend it, and how they know they are spending it efficiently and effectively, it’s hard — and perhaps fruitless — to get into the conversation about value creation. Organizations that are talking today about value creation from learning outsourcing got to that point only by first traversing the difficult territory of “What are we spending and why?” Can Outsourcing Be Innovative? Short answer: yes. Certainly, outsourcing can be the opportunity for innovation in the manner in which learning and knowledge management make an impact on business performance. Indeed, veteran outsourcers are finding that having a partner in place to run the “factory” of learning design and delivery frees them to think more creatively and substantively about the needs of the business and innovative ways to support that business. However, the best outsourcing providers also become the source of new ideas and innovations. This has been the experience at BT, a global communications services company that has pursued a learning outsourcing strategy to support its global 21st Century Network platform, which allows BT to deliver software-driven services that are faster, more reliable and simpler to use. According to Peter Butler, head of BT Group’s Learning Academy, “My focus as the learning executive is on delivering a measurable change in behavior or performance of our workforces on behalf of the organization and its new strategic goals and business models. Strategically, that’s what I am all about. How that happens becomes the job, then, of the outsourcing provider. If I’m focusing too much on the how, it’s challenging for me to be innovative about the what.” At the same time, by opening up the organization to the fresh ideas of an external provider, a company can often develop innovations beyond what it might otherwise have come up based only on an internal perspective. “Internal centers of excellence or shared service centers certainly have their place in the overall mix of operational approaches to learning administration and delivery,” Butler said. ENVIRONMENT continued on page 54 Today, for a number of reasons, the subliminal message of cost reduction through outsourcing is no longer swaying many minds. Once those savings are achieved, then what? 35 February 2008 I www.clomedia.com I Chief Learning Officer http://www.clomedia.com

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Chief Learning Officer - February 2008 Editor's Letter Table of Contents Business Impact Trends Best Practices Effectiveness Guest Editorial Learning Solutions Home Depot: Building Better Associates CLO Profile Environment Realizing the Vision of “One Philips” Tactics Sun Microsystems’ Next-Generation Worker Video Game Recruiting Tool Productivity The Regence Group: Blended Measurement Human Capital NASA: A Case Study in Technical Leadership Development Case Study Business Intelligence Advertisers' Index Editorial Resources In Conclusion

Chief Learning Officer - February 2008

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