Chief Learning Officer - August 2007 - (Page 38)

productivity Learning from Key Learning Indicators Chris Moore Like all business managers, learning leaders need indicators to advise them on their progress toward accomplishing their path to success. Chief learning officers use seven key indicators to measure and monitor the success of their initiatives. Imagine yourself on the bow of a ship. It’s nighttime. A thick fog fills the air. You can barely see your hand in front of your face. But you have no worries — you know exactly where you are, where you’re heading and what obstacles lie in front of you. That’s because the ship’s radar system and auto-navigation devices are looking 360 degrees around your vessel, warning you of unforeseen risks and giving you information to adapt accordingly and in plenty of time. As a chief learning officer, wouldn’t you like to have something similar that indicates risks and opportunities for your business initiatives? Well, the possibility isn’t too far-fetched, if you consider the concepts of business intelligence and apply them to learning. Business intelligence is all about making better decisions. It’s also about learning what’s happening with the business and how to take action to increase the probability of success. Like the ship’s captain, business managers need indicators to advise them on their progress toward accomplishing their path to success. In the financial world, indicators are widely used as predictors. Consider the concept of a key learning indicator, a high-level measure that shows progress in attaining your success criteria, one that predicts the outcome of a strategic goal and its enabling objectives. The interesting aspect of the key learning indicator is that it not only measures success, but it describes it, as well — a perfect combination of art and science. Think of key learning indicaAugust 2007 tors as the set outcomes for which you’re striving with your organization. Examples of key learning indicators are operational excellence, workforce transformation, speed to productivity, fiscal responsibility and compliance. The artistic part is in describing the desired outcome, whereas the scientific part is an exercise in alignment and measurement. Alignment of learning goals to business goals has become the CLO’s fundamental responsibility. But it doesn’t stop with the simple articulation of an aligned goal and its corresponding key learning indicator. Rather, you must peel back the onion, so to speak, and clearly identify what your organization must accomplish to reach that goal. The result is a series of enabling objectives that act as composite measures of progress toward attaining your defined goal. Let’s say you identify five enabling objectives for a goal and, to date, you have successfully completed four out of five. Your key learning indicator (i.e., your measure of goal attainment) reads at 80 percent. As you assess and monitor the values of your key learning indicators over time, you can easily see whether you’re making progress against your strategy. The aforementioned example is very simplistic. In reality, objectives for a goal can be weighted in their importance. Progress in accomplishing each objective also can be measured quantitatively rather than qualitatively by assigning a quantifiable metric and comparing the actual value of the metric at periodic I www.clomedia.com I Chief Learning Officer 38 http://www.clomedia.com

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