How To Buy an LMS Or Training Technology Will Not
Save You — You Have To Do The Hard Work Yourself No Matter
What The Salesman Told You
A learning management system (LMS)
can help your organization in various ways. It can reduce
costs in a number of areas, some of which may not be obvious.
Replacing classroom training with on-line
training will eliminate two of the largest expense items associated
with training: instructor fees and travel and accommodation
expenses.
Less obvious are the cost savings associated
with improvements in performance by different users, such
as training administrators using an LMS's scheduling and tracking
features or general users taking advantage of just-in-time
learning topics.
But in much the same way that buying a beautiful
racing bike will not, by itself, turn you into a Tour de France
champion like Lance Armstrong, buying a new learning management
system (LMS) — no matter how good (and ours really is
the best) — will not solve your company's training problems.
As much as I would like to believe that a
new software package (preferably ours) will make you happy
and right all the wrongs in your organization, it cannot and
we cannot pretend that it will. No software package will be
enough on its own.
For a business the challenges are complicated.
Not only do you have internal product, procedure, induction
and general self and management development training needs,
but you also have to deal with regulatory requirements in
regard to legal and compliance training, continuing professional
development training to keep various staff license holders
current and health and safety training, among other training
needs.
Add to that list the culture issues:
What kind of company are you, high touch or
tough guys?
Do your senior managers believe in developing staff, and if
so, which ones and how?
Do your staff manage their own training or do you tell them
what to do and when to do it?
Will you be allowed to try things even if they fail or will
failing even once end your career?
The money issues:
Can you find funding and where will it come
from: geographical business units, corporate headquarters,
product groups? Some from everywhere?
Do you have to show return on investment figures before you
can make any kind of move?
Do you have to compete for funds, and if so, with whom?
The IT issues:
Will your IT folks be your friends or your
enemies? Have you even spoken to any of them in the last 12
months?
Can you actually run an enterprise implementation project?
And if you cannot, can you find someone you can trust to run
it for you?
The rollout and ongoing marketing issues:
Can you create awareness, demand, buzz?
Can you really support and reward your people when they do
try the service?
Can you create feedback loops and use the feedback to keep
making your service better?
I once spoke to an American HR executive at
a major financial services industry organization who told
me that her IT head told her she could have any LMS she wanted
as long as it was IBM. She was miserable when I spoke to her,
which is not to suggest that IBM is a bad choice. The point
is that she had no control. The solution, the vendor, the
consulting team, the strategy and the implementation schedule
were all imposed on her. She had no freedom to explore anything
outside of her IT department mandates.
I have since heard similar stories from other
HR executives. I know of one company that has been waiting
to start an e-learning pilot for three years because its IT
group cannot find a way to put the pilot on its 'Top 100'
list of projects.
So, you need to do some checking. Will you
run your company's LMS project, or will IT?
You need to find a champion. The best champion
will be someone very senior and very respected in your organization.
This person should stick his neck out and help you sell the
idea up to management and down to all the users.
Speaking of whom, your users, at all levels,
need to be addressed seriously by you. You need to find out
what they need and what they think they need. There's no future
in giving your people a solution to what they think is someone
else's problem. You need to help them solve their problems
and be seen to be doing that.
You need to take the time, do your homework
and go through a thorough process of discerning your company's
needs, your budget, your timelines, your champions and stakeholders
(I would map them and keep visiting them all throughout to
make sure nothing changes), your personal knowledge and resolve,
your company resources (will corporate communications help
you with the marketing?) and, finally, all of the risks you
can identify.
Then you need to start short listing vendors.
Start with an industry analyst like Brandon Hall, who reviews
the top 70-odd LMS vendors every year. By this point you should
have a 'must have' list for features and functionality specific
to your company.
Finally, add to your list the following:
The LMS you buy must be scalable: it must
be designed from the ground up to handle large volumes of
data while maintaining high levels of system performance.
The LMS you buy must be flexible: the system
must have a modular structure so that it can be quickly customized
to meet specific processing needs.
The LMS you buy must be open: we recommend
a 100% Java architecture that runs on Microsoft, Unix, Linux
and Mac OS X platforms. The LMS must also be able to easily
interface with legacy systems and with customer relationship
management, enterprise resource planning and human resources
systems.
The LMS you buy must be international, browser-based
and database-driven: it must allow courses and tests to be
delivered in any language.
Once you've done all that work, call us, please.
Jay Shaw, CEO
NetDimensions
