Chief Learning Officer - December 2008 - (Page 38)

IN PRACTICE CREATING AN AGILE ORGANIZATION WITH LEARNING 2.0 T he speed of economic and marketplace change is one of the greatest barriers to effective workforce performance. A concern frequently expressed by CLOs and other C-level executives is that their companies’ missions are changing so rapidly that people can’t keep up with what they need to know to compete and be successful. They also lack support and reinforcement of the behaviors needed to execute new business strategies rapidly and effectively. A suite of new learning and knowledge management technologies referred to as Learning 2.0 is showing great promise in creating an approach to workforce enablement that is nimble enough to keep up with a rapidly changing business and workplace environment. Learning 2.0 combines innovative approaches and technologies in three areas: Web 2.0 learning, knowledge management and collaboration, and real-time performance support. agility by helping people perform their jobs in new ways to support changes in business strategy. With applications we call “performance workspaces,” tools exist to create comprehensive solutions that deliver a workforce-centric, role-based desktop environment. This is comprised of the knowledge content, legacy applications, productivity tools, learning, collaboration and expert network capabilities that enable workers to perform effectively and to alter that performance rapidly in response to changing work environments. Putting It Together: The Microsoft Mobile Academy One solution that brings together a number of Learning 2.0 principles is the Microsoft Mobile Academy that uses the company’s new Podcasting Kit for SharePoint. The Academy helps Microsoft’s salespeople get up to speed on particular products and solutions so they can capitalize on an immediate customer opportunity. The Academy provides information that is always fresh: the latest information about Microsoft products married with the latest and most successful sales techniques. Content comes directly from product experts and salespeople, and also can be harvested from conference calls, presentations and thirdparty vendors. Then it can be turned into short deliverables such as podcasts and videocasts. Microsoft has an internal user base of 22,000 for the Academy and has opened it up to 5,000 partners in its distribution network. This user base generates more than 500 podcasts per month, and these have signiﬁcantly increased the sales force’s knowledge about products, competitors and best practices. The Academy also gives the ﬁeld a communications channel for immediate feedback to sales, product and learning leadership. This solution, and others like it, is evidence that leading organizations are growing increasingly comfortable with moving more of the responsibility for learning to the workforce itself. Keeping an organization strategically agile means helping people access the knowledge and experience that is always around them. CLO Tom Hoglund is Accenture’s global lead for collaboration and knowledge management. He can be reached at editor@clomedia.com. Web 2.0 Learning Web 2.0 learning uses technologies such as podcasting, social networking and instant messaging to deliver just-in-time, point-of-need, bite-sized learning experiences. The learning can be delivered through the user’s device of choice, such as a PC, smart phone or MP3 player. With no lengthy course-development cycles, relevant content and training gets to workers faster and at less cost to the company than purchasing courses or developing them on a custom basis. Knowledge Management and Collaboration The ﬁeld of knowledge management continues to redeﬁne what enterprise learning really means and how it can be harnessed and directed to maintain strategic agility. By facilitating interaction with peers and on-the-job experience, knowledge management solutions help companies deploy an important ﬁlter: information, tactics and behaviors that have proven successful in an actual performance environment. Real-Time Performance Support Performance support tools are another way to maintain strategic goes around comes around. Some of our most effective learning experiences today are actually the instructor-led sessions we run in conjunction with what we call our ‘performance solutions,’ 10-minute Web-based learning nuggets that people can take at their desktop.” HCSC is combining those e-learning experiences with follow-up instructor-led sessions to provide opportunities for people to ask questions, dialogue with peers and apply principles to their work. Ultimately, said Burfeind, “People want a chance to practice, and they want to be able to ask a learning person, a coach or even sometimes their own supervisor for guidance and further direction based on what they’ve learned.” ILT provides the human element and the community experience necessary to move learning from theory to practice. 38 Chief Learning Ofﬁcer • December 2008 • www.clomedia.com At the same time, ILT doesn’t have to equal slow learning. Burfeind and her team have developed toolkits that have not only improved development times for the instructor-led sessions but have also moved the entire process more deeply into the business. With the toolkits, she said, the learning and development teams can speed up the process that used to involve having a learning instructor understand the business need, develop a learning program and then go out to the people or bring them to a training facility. Instead, she said, “the design team provides a development toolkit for the supervisor or developmental specialist out in the ﬁeld who can use our templates and tools to teach the lessons whenever they are appropriate, to whomever needs the learning most critically.” http://www.clomedia.com

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

Chief Learning Officer - December 2008 Editor’s Letter Contents Connections Business Impact Best Practices Effectiveness Guest Editorial The Future of Learning CLO Profile Learning Opportunities Embedded in Social Networking ManTech Leverages Knowledge Management Approaches for Social Networking Agility Training for the Learning Organization Creating an Agile Organization With Learning 2.0 2008 Learning In Practice Awards Corporate Social Responsibility: How Can Learning Contribute? Union Fenosa Corporate University: How CSR Education Impacted the Bottom Line Training in the 21st Century: Everything Old Is New Again Zions Bancorp.: Connecting the Dots Case Study Business Intelligence Advertisers’ Index Editorial Resources In Conclusion

Chief Learning Officer - December 2008

For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.