Chief Learning Officer - October 2008 - (Page 49)

IN PRACTICE WHO OWNS INFORMAL LEARNING? “The ease of access to some of these technologies means that people have little or no understanding about when and why a community should or shouldn’t be used, [or] when or why a Wiki should or shouldn’t be used,” Howe said. The solution can be as simple as educating the workforce on what the tools are and how and when to use them. Bottom-Line Impact and Beneﬁts for the Future It’s hard to directly measure the impact of informal learning, especially when success typically is measured based on individual productivity, Howe said. “Today we don’t necessarily value people who help others perform their work, which is really where a lot of the social networking comes in,” he said. However, there’s signiﬁcant anecdotal evidence to support the idea that informal learning has a direct effect on the bottom line, he added. “Within our own company, there are plenty of examples of where we have managed to win a sale or we’ve managed to execute a piece of work more effectively because someone was able to connect with someone else via a community,” he said. “They wouldn’t necessarily have been able to do that using other mechanisms.” Also, the advantages of leveraging informal learning can be measured in other ways. For example, tools such as blogs and wikis can bring fragmented information together in one place and often facilitate faster, more up-to-date learning — all for free. “The way that [formal] training and learning takes place, it’s not fast enough for today’s world, where product releases and things like that are happening by the day instead of by the year,” Cross said. “So how else but informal learning are people going to learn about this stuff?” He pointed to Intel as an example. Not long ago, a learning professional in the organization downloaded free wiki software and developed a site for employees to post stories, anecdotes and other tidbits. It soon became the unofﬁcial place to go to for enterprisewide information, Cross said. “All of a sudden, people said, ‘Hold it, this is the only place you can go where it’s Intel-wide. Everybody can get to it,’” he said. The wiki even replaced knowledge management systems that cost millions of dollars, Cross said. “People create value by essentially improvising services or by innovating, ﬁguring out new ways to do stuff,” he said. “Now more than ever we need people who can think for themselves, ﬁgure it out and take action — not go looking in the rulebook somewhere — because the rules change so fast now. You’ve got to learn how to learn for yourself if you’re going to keep your head above water.” CLO O ne of the main challenges for companies struggling with the concept of informal learning is ﬁguring out who should be in charge of it. Though employees are the ones generating the content, there needs to be someone in the organization ultimately responsible for facilitating the discussions and enabling the networks. In many companies, however, learning in general is fragmented by location or department. After all, even centralized learning organizations must customize training programs for different functional areas. “[Informal learning has] been an area that’s slipped between the cracks because there’s no chief informal learning officer; there’s no accountability for this stuff,” said Jay Cross, CEO of Internet Time Group, a learning solutions provider. “A lot of it is just wisdom and good management, and therefore there’s a whole massive area which tends to just be random guess rather than, ‘What can we do organizationally?’” Nick Howe, vice president of Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) Academy, said this is true at his company. “We don’t have anybody who’s responsible for knowledge management. We don’t have anybody who’s responsible for communities. We don’t really have anybody who’s responsible for an information strategy,” he said. “And so myriad people are doing what they can to try and help their own organizations be more productive.” For example, the IT organization assesses its learning needs and takes care of them independently, while the HR organization runs leadership development, Howe said. “It’s still a little bit fragmented even though we pull most of it together. We’ve never tried to be responsible for all learning at the company.” But Howe is seeking to tie all their efforts together under one umbrella by speaking with senior executives from various internal functional groups, including marketing, ﬁeld products, professional services and maintenance services. “I’m reaching out to them to say, ‘Is there a better way that we can work together?’” he said. Even with the efforts becoming centralized, however, companies still must grapple with the question of who should own informal learning. “This isn’t an area where I think any one group can or should control things,” Howe said. “Informal learning is about peer-to-peer learning and collaboration, and I think for those organizations that are involved in providing the systems and processes to enable that, they themselves have to collaborate in order for this to be successful.” Additionally, formal and informal learning aren’t mutually exclusive, Cross said. There is an element of ﬂow — or in his words, “a continuum” — between them. That means the learning organization will need to be comfortable taking on new responsibilities in this arena, while also understanding that the efforts must be entirely collaborative. “It’s logical,” Howe said. “If the role [of chief learning ofﬁcer] is deﬁned as ﬁnding the most efﬁcient and effective way for the employees, partners and customers of the company to gain the skills and knowledge they need to execute the business strategy, then that becomes a much, much broader scope and allows you to get into some of these other areas.” CLO – Agatha Gilmore, agilmore@clomedia.com 49

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Chief Learning Officer - October 2008

Chief Learning Officer - October 2008 Editor’s Letter Connections Business Impact Best Practices Effectiveness Guest Editorial How Fast Is Your ‘B’ Team? Hampton Hotels CLO Profile Save the World, Make a Buck: Seven Ideas From the Nonprofit Sector Developing Leaders at Amnesty International Learning Measurements: It’s Time to Align Aligning Measurement to Business Success Training Employees With Special Needs How to Reach Disabled Learners Hands Off: Facilitating Informal Learning Who Owns Informal Learning? Case Study Business Intelligence Advertisers’ Index Editorial Resources In Conclusion

Chief Learning Officer - October 2008

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