The 7 Top Tips for Implementing Learning Technology. The Vendors View!

We recently brought some very well known and experienced learning technology suppliers together and asked them to list their top tips for implementing learning technologies.

This is what they came up with.

So, if you are contemplating a project this list might just be the difference between success and failure.


1) Internal Ownership
2) Clear Objectives
3) Clear Statement of Work
4) Small, Achievable, Bite Sized Steps
5) Constant Communication
6) Understanding of your own internal culture and what will work
7) Work together as a partnership


Their top 7 are enlightening not just because they will help you with your implementation. What is interesting about the list is it also plays a part in sustaining the ongoing success of learning technologies in organisations well beyond implementation.

As people, personality’s business direction and challenges inevitably start to change, then these seven tips actually become a continuous mantra to keep your solutions live and effective.

After all, what happens if your original stakeholder leaves? You can't ignore the situation; you need to align ownership to the business again so it delivers the ongoing business strategy. And often, that's not as easy as you'd want, especially if there is a fundamental change in learning philosophy or you lose a core business champion. That can be a death knell, especially if their replacement fundamentally don’t see appreciate its value.

It’s not just about the technology; it’s the e-learning structures too. Look at Rapid content... if you have a Subject Matter Expert who moves on, what will happen to their content if aren't replaced?

Each item in the list really does feed a whole thought cycle of planning and action well beyond the implementation. Without fresh objectives, and constant communication about how the technologies drive value for learners or stakeholders your solutions will eventually wilt. If you don't put energy into sustaining your solutions life, all the hard work of implementation will eventually unravel.

So, if you already have technologies in place, see if you can answer all those questions without, hesitation, deviation or repetition. Hopefully, it will only take you just a minute. If it doesn't, perhaps you should start drafting those answers now, or start planning how you’re going to get them answered. And don't just think about your back-bone solutions; think about the content solutions too!

Remember, implementing a solution is only part of the work... keeping it going, especially through turbulent situations requires even more passion, partnership and energy that putting it in the first place.

The LMS M&A Drag Factor

We all know there has been (and still is) a lot of mergers & acquisition activity in the LMS market, with plenty of consolidation going on. But although we've seen a lot of vendor consolidation, how much consolidation of products have we actually been.

Whilst some of the vendors have been very focused on trying to consolidate market share, they seem to be struggling to actually consolidate the customer bases underneath them. For example, Click2Learn and Docent merged to form SumTotal Systems. SumTotal then buys Pathlore, who itself had fairly recently bought DK Systems, and Pathlore still had quite a lot of old Registrar customers that still hadn't moved off that platform. Now SumTotal may have a large user base, but user base for what? Certainly not the current SumTotal platform - yet. And SumTotal is not unique by any stretch of imagination. We even see this is smaller regional providers that have been playing the M&A game. Most of the LMS vendors have at least some of this kind of historical consolidation challenge.

One key reason for this is because many of the major customers just upgrade to the latest release of their old product to maximise their support window. They then sit and wait to see how things evolve with the new company. So it takes a while, often more than two years plus to see how a given customer base will react to the acquisition of its vendor, sometimes longer. We're also seeing the same thing happening (but with even longer timescales) in the HR systems space following Oracle's acquisition of PeopleSoft. This isn't so much a function of size, but of perceived effort versus value to move sooner.

Elearnity has been tracking and analysing these vendors for many years. But one new strategic consideration that we're now factoring in is what I call the "LMS M&A Drag Factor". Its all full well and good having a large user base, but you have to be able to service it and move it forward. That's tough to do in the LMS world with multiple platforms and technology bases. The more diverse this is, the more effort needed to leverage it yourself, and the bigger your investment sometimes needed to create something more compelling to move everyone forward with you, rather than jumping ship with someone else. I think the LMS M&A Drag Factor will have quite an influence on individual companies performances in 2007/8.

David

The changing face of custom e-learning

Last year we did some research looking at the changing nature of custom e-learning production within large corporates in the UK. A couple of key trends were clearly emerging that I think will have a profound impact on the e-learning market - especially given that custom e-learning content has been one of the more bouyant parts of the market.

Firstly, it seemed clear that pretty much all of the organisations we researched were increasing the amount of company-specific e-learning they were doing. But, they were also radically changing their patterns and amount they spend on it too. Most organisations had historically used specialist custom content vendors to develop their content, often having a short list of preferred suppliers. Whilst these arrangements were still in place, the budgets for projects were becoming significantly reduced. Whereas historically they might have spent £50-100K+ per project, now they are trying to get similar work done for £5-10K.

Secondly, as well as exploring offshore production to cut costs (usually with variable success), companies are also increasingly adopting rapid authoring tools - Lectora, Breeze, Articulate, Atlantic Link, etc. to enable self-authoring of content within L&D and line of business. This shifts the point of production completely, but creates a lot of other issues internally as well.

We expect both these trends to continue, and to interconnect. Corporates need to diversify their content production strategies to deal with the increased scale of need, and the associated focus on reducing cost and time for development and maintenance. For volume content, corporates will increasingly mandate the development tool in order be able to self-maintain the outcomes. They may pay one vendor to develop some customised templates that are proven to pre-integrate with their LMS (a topic for another day!), they might pay another company to provide instructional design input to projects, and yet another to quality assure any outputs.

Who will actual content development and production - good question? Some of it will be done internally, some will be done offshore, and some will be contracted out whole as a discrete (yesteryear-like) project with a reasonable budget allowing some creativity and investment in custom media. But the majority will be "fit for purpose", quick to produce, cheap and easy to maintain.

If the above really happens ,and I believe it is inevitable, it will have big implications for the skills and resources needed within L&D to manage it effectively. It will have even bigger implications for the large number of vendors that make a living by delivering whole projects. Nice big £100K+ projects will still be there, but they will become few and far between, the main focus is switching to the mass of "fit for purpose" content that corporates need everyday.

As the corporates also start cherry-picking single service components (template development, instructional design, media production, project management, quality assurance, content input, ...) rather than buying whole projects, I believe the writing will be on the wall for many vendors.

How will they survive this? Some will specialise and down-scale. Running a £0.5-2m custom e-learning company is a lot easier than running a £3-5m one. Others will offshore and automate tools to slash development costs further to compete. A few will aggregate and rise above it - move up the value chain and do a total BPO on learning development, but it will be only a few in each geography. The rest??? Start diversifying now!

E-learning vendors - market ripples

The recent news of that AdVal had gone into administration was not a surprise, but it was a disappointment. Rumours had been circulating for most of the year that AdVal was struggling beyond the norm, but its' recent acquisition of the Maxim business has doubled the consequences of it.

Couple this with other acquisitions and uncertainties over the past year and it paints a mixed picture of change and uncertainty. WBT's recent acquisition by Horizon Technology is another local example. Some of the bigger US vendors have also suffering the same fate. And whilst the LMS market, for example, has seen significant vendor consolidation at the top end, we're yet to see significant platform consolidation follow on from it - i.e. the vendors still have a lot of legacy platform transitioning to deal with.

Whilst these vendor changes are part of a positive trend to a more mature market position, short term they are only magnifying corporate uncertainty. Or if they are not, this may largely through ignorance than insight!

Donald Clark takes role at LINE Communications

Donald Clark continues to expand his variety of roles with a new position (on a consultancy basis) as Director of Strategy at LINE Communications. See here.

Whilst not his first foray post-Epic (he is also involved in the boards of UFI and Learning Light) it is clearly more directly involved in Epic's market space and therefore competitive to them. Donald not only understands the market very well, he is very connected. It will certainly be interested in how this impacts both LINE and Epic in the longer term.