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.

So, what is a good (no, great) product demo?

We'll take a look at some of the best practices for presenting a product and for viewing a product presentation...

The best way to start a demo is the way you will end the demo. Heh, I didn't make this up but the theory is that you most remember the last most important thing you saw and most presentations 'end' with the best thing you will see. So, why not show the best up front, cement that vision, and then work through the rest of the product?

Most presentations tend to stray away from the core functionality that the customer wants to see. So, give them what they need to see and only what they need to see, really, everything else is just a distraction for the viewers.

The power of the presenter is to illustrate the "Power of the Delta", if you can differentiate the way it is done today and the way it could be done tomorrow, then you created the proper vision that will resonate and 'stick' to the viewers.

Heh, if I am tying to impress the viewers, the best way is to develop illustrations for their use cases (how they will use the product in each specific instance). The first illustration is to show the baseline, the shortest way to do it. Then you show the improved version, using some options to make it better, more efficient. Lastly, you show the advanced version, basically on steroids (bad word these days for David Ortiz in Boston) with the bells and whistles...a visionary approach>

Now, let's talk about questions that arise from the audience. If you really need to know, sometimes, we love to hear those questions, other times the hair rises on our back! Why?

There are three types of questions:
- a great question
- a good question
- a stupid (sorry!) question

Can you figure out what a GREAT question is...easy, it's a question that leads you directly into your next presentation point. Perfect! Give them kudos and move forward.

OK, how about a good question? Something that you can effectively address but the answer really doesn't impact everyone just a select few in the audience. For the others, its boring. So, you take it over to the 'parking lot', write it on the white board and address every detail after the main preso. This way, whoever is interested in the answer can stay, the others can leave. Perfect, everyone gets what they want.

Finally, a 'stupid question'. I hate to do this, but it's question that a distractor asks where the only purpose is take the presenter away from where they are into an unknown space that has no relevance to the audience or the objectives of the meeting. Even if you want to or can answer it, you do NOT want to, it's a waste of every one's time and serves no purpose. SO, take it to the parking lot, just like above and deal with it later, see if that person is willing to stay late so they can get the answer in private, one on one, with the utmost attention. Guess what, they will leave because it is not even worth their time. Result: detractor is detracted, case solved!

I was thinking "Why am I important to my customers?" it is the word 'custom'

So everyone has some importance to someone...we hope. In the course of what I do everyday, selling complicated software solutions to large companies and their HR organizations, I look to build relationships and trust with the prospective 'customers' that I work with, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. Some call your prospects who purchase services or product from you a 'client.

Firstly, I like to use the word 'customer', my client sounds like there is an arms-length transaction at hand, you know, what the attorneys and Wall Street people do. If you think about it, the word 'customer' is comprised of 'custom' - 'er' (see www.dictionary.com). So if you think about it, a custom, habit or practice means an established way of doing things. Custom, applied to a community or to an individual, Habit, applied particularly to an individual, implies such repetition of the same action as to develop a natural, spontaneous, or rooted tendency or inclination to perform it: to make a habit of reading the newspapers. Practice applies to a set of fixed habits or an ordered procedure in conducting activities.

So I decided that I want to 'practice' the 'habit' of providing a 'custom' experience to my customers!

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....

WSJ highlights what talent managers know: keep developing, keep training THROUGHOUT THE CRISIS

Some of the sound bites from this article are beginning to sound all too familiar.

I thought all of the talent managers would want to read a synopsis of what Dana Mattioli had to say in her "Theory & Practice" column published on 2/9/09

Those of us who remember the previous downturns all too well, see the same things happening again. Companies historically cut leadership-development programs during downturns, but the moves backfired and prompted midlevel managers and top performers to leave before the economy recovered…It’s obvious that without capable managers “the ability to come through (the recession) in a healthy fashion is diminished”.

Josh Bersin of Bersin Research (a talent management analyst) says the deepest cuts are typically in training for ‘soft skills’ such as communicating with co-workers and conducting meetings. He says “…leadership development is taking a growing share of training budgets. Identifying and grooming leaders is important in good times…in time of crisis when the economy is struggling…it’s imperative”.

Executives need to deploy the proper set of tools that will provide direct operational impact (lower costs and increase productivity): by increasing retention, by deepening your bench strength, through employee development, and filling those critical skill gaps.

As the Wall Street Journal identifies, the problems being sewn today require new systems for tomorrow. Looking forward, 2nd generation Talent Management Systems can offer HR partners, OD&E specialists and executives with tools that will increase employee development, engagement and productivity.

I'm not sure how your company manages this today or what your vision is for the recovery, but feel free to schedule 10 minutes with me to discuss specific customer case studies that might help you.

So...I was inspired to write more from a reader- like a self review or analysis

I just did an interesting thing...I reviewed my salesmanship from 2007 vs. my performance from 2008. "Very, very Interesting"...someone once said that from a famous movie. As a salesperson...I am gauged on my performance. And my performance this year was entirely different..and better, than last year. Incredibly so, somehow all of the pieces just fell into place. Selling software solutions is a time-consuming, often detailed process. Getting all of the pieces to fall into place requires some intrinsic strategy, requires the customer or stakeholder to understand, acknowledge and trust you.


I had a good time, enjoyed the fruits of labor...more like the juices of the grill.

It's kind of weird how it happened, it was a suddden change in what I was doing...somewhat impercpetible to myself and the people around me. Using a coach and adopting some of the philosophies of a number of disparate sales books, i made it gel together and IT WORKED. Like 7 of 9 customers trusted me enough to buy from me and you know what...I never asked for their business. I exceeded my goals and downstream made some good money.

So, now the question is..how repeatable is this? can I replicate in '09 what I did in '08?

Well, that is an open question and the results are TBD....

I Want to Have My Performance PRE-Review

Well it's getting to be that time of the year...you sit down, answer a bunch of sections of your performance review, provide some cogent commentary, hit the send button and DING!, your manager has a task assigned to them via email. So, they log into the portal, start their review of your performance over the past year...seeing all of your thoughts and comments, they append their own subjective comments on top of yours. And DING!, off it goes to HR.

Is this really what should be happening? I just wrote my own PRE-view and sent it to my boss. I wrote about what I would like to do next year based upon my perceived performance this year. Based upon problems I encountered this year, I proposed solutions and options that might be applicable for next year. Do I really want to review my entire past year, what was good, what was bad, where I can improve? Will I learn anything from that analysis? Maybe, I could get some developmental ideas to improve some aspects of my job or increase my competencies...but shouldn't we be talking about that during the course of the year?

I want to be able to look forward, anticipate what problems & issues I might encounter and be able to plan proactively. It's like an IDP, but it's not based upon what was done but upon what needs to be done. I don't know why people haven't thought about this. Selling performance systems, I always hear the same stories about the process, the work flow and the development plans. Everyone is looking back, I have yet to hear any company or department that is looking forward, using the PRE-review!