Why are companies moving away from older learning systems?

Why is this happening all of a sudden? Is this a case of follow the leader? Why migrate to another system when you have spent lots of money in getting the first one correctly positioned?

I'd like to inject my thoughts into this market phenom in a series of short articles on the best practices in selecting your 2nd or even 3rd Learning Management System.

People get tired of their systems, people just get tired of things they own, whether they be personal or business. When things get old, you want to freshen things up...like getting a new paint job or getting a new piece of furniture.

So, why not freshen up your technology system? Well, it's not that easy. Many companies purchased systems years ago when the way of the world said: "buy this, install this, customize this and you'll love this". There are many people dependent upon those systems, IT folks keeping it backed up, database people writing scripts.

I see companies with learning systems that are 5 and 6 years old and you know what, they never got freshened up. Same old look and feel, same old functionality. In fact, its the same old people who are using them...they can't get the newer employees to learn and develop because they are trying to satisfy their needs with older, tired-looking, and slower-working learning technologies.

So, these companies are on the hunt for newer technologies, fresher looks, faster systems and more importanly, something they can purchase and NOT have the same staleness fall into their laps in another 3 years.

Companies are digging deeper in new technologies and service models that utlize Software as a Service, such as salesforce.com, workday ERP, igoogle for business.

There is no hardware, software, middleware, databases, or business intelligence tools to buy, install, maintain, and upgrade. It is based upon a multi-tenancy model that means that each customer securely shares one physical instance of software without ever seeing each other’s data.

There are No Pain Upgrades, seamless for that matter...
With traditional on-premise applications, many customers often fall drastically behind the latest technology & feature releases. With SaaS, all software updates and upgrades are seamless delivered throughout the year to all customers at one time.

Use The Best Available Technology...
Make sure your product is built on a next-generation architecture (using .NET 2.0 and AJAX) that enables the deliver of services faster – deliver implementations & integrations through the use of Web services - so they can easily interact with other applications. In this way, the platform is always moving ahead, it's not getting about getting stale.

Investing in Talent Management: what's needed to enhance your ROI

What Provides Positive Return from Your Investment?

Integrate Your Learning and Performance to Achieve Talent Management-
The talent management suite covers the employee lifecycle from onboarding through learning management through performance measurement and succession planning and into a pay-per-perfromance culture. Assessing employee performance in isolation is often not enough – you should be able to close skill gaps with dynamically recommended training and development. Don't get stuck with different tools, disconnected databases and no unified view of the data.

Use Talent Management 2.0 web tools-
Workforces are changing fast – hierarchies are flatter, workers are more geographically dispersed, and generational differences are as sharp as ever. Integrated talent management now must account for the numerous ways that your employees interact, learn, and work. An integrated approach is required – one that enables high-impact success around employee collaboration, professional networking, development, and performance. Make use of social networking to foster engagement, drive adoption through intuitive interfaces, make sure there is some AJAX programming that will decrease the use of those pop-up blockers.

Utilize a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) delivery model-
On-demand delivery is fast, cost-effective, secure, and meets the needs of some of the world’s largest global enterprises. SaaS architecture provides clients with minimal IT costs, high flexibility, great reliability, and the lowest total cost of ownership. Unlike silos of talent management systems, An integrated SaaS delivery model is fully deployable across the entire enterprise within weeks.

Make Sure the Tools Are Configurable for Your Business Processes-
Every organization is unique and a one-size-fits-all approach to talent management does not work. The need to configure your Organizational Units is entirely more scalable and more flexible than domains and allows for ready matching of your specific workflows and processes with the processes and work flows being managed by the application – down to the tiniest of details.

That's just some of my advice....