Time for the Training Department to be Taken Seriously
For those of you who read my blog, have seen any of my blog comments, or follow me on twitter, you’ll know that I’m a fairly big critic of training departments that still tend to disconnect themselves from the rest of the enterprise, be it stand-alone learning content development processes, and now much to my chagrin, siloed social learning initiatives. Today, I’m going to talk about learning content management (ECM) and enterprise content management (LCM).
The enterprise content management software market currently exceeds $4B, so it’s quite clear that the vast majority of organizations place strong emphasis on their ECM strategy – a strategy that the training organization unfortunately typically takes no part in. In his paper At the Intersection of Learning and Enterprise Content Management (available for download at the resource library section of our web site), Chapman Alliance analyst and Brandon Hall associate Bryan Chapman makes clear the repercussions of such a strategy:
- The training department cannot leverage content used in other parts of the organization,
- There is limited or no collaboration between training and other enterprise functions,
- Training have limited influence on the enterprise content strategy.
If there is any question as to why the training department has become increasingly marginalized and the CLO role quickly diminishing, this should provide some good insight.
But this blog post isn’t about why learning needs to engage with the enterprise. I’ve already written about this extensively in my Plugging Learning into ECM white paper (also available for download at the resource library section of our web site). What his blog post is about is what happens when the training function actually engages with the rest of the organization to take a leading role in the enterprise content management strategy and radically grows its sphere of influence to elevate learning from riding the bench to a star player within the enterprise.
In mid-May, along with Xyleme CEO, Mark Hellinger, I attended EMC World where one of our enterprise customers, Informa, had the opportunity to showcase their integrated Xyleme LCMS / EMC Documentum solution to the ECM community. For those of you unfamiliar with scope of this event, EMC World 2010 boasted about 8,000 attendees, filled up the entire Boston Convention and Exhibition Center for four days, and closed down Faneuil Marketplace, one of Boston’s biggest tourist destinations, for a private party for event attendees. It was very different from the typical training conferences that we regularly attend.
In front of an audience consisting of the people responsible for developing and executing on their company’s ECM strategy, Bob Hecht, Senior Vice President of Publishing Technologies at Informa, presented on how Informa’s performance improvement businesses, the groups responsible for the development of the company’s training content, transformed the company’s content-driven business through an enterprise project they dubbed “Olympus”. So how did they do it and what were the results? Read on!
Read more…
ECM, Learning Content Management
Dawn Poulos is the primary author of this blog. She is Xyleme's VP of Marketing, writes a lot about XML, learns a tremendous amount from the training community and hopes she’s adding some insight.