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What happens when your e-learning strategy isn’t aligned with your company's other strategies—or worse, you don’t even have one? Because it will suffer from lack of coordination and focus, there likely will be a duplication of efforts and inefficiencies. Your organization may experience internal skirmishes, if not full-gear battles. More important, you can count on incurring costs associated with lost opportunities. Here’s a nine-step process to help align learning efforts to business results.
Many of us have read Alice in Wonderland. As children, most of us were enthralled, amused, and quite taken with the antics of the Cheshire Cat. He seemed so crazy, yet made so much sense. Well, I believe the Cheshire Cat was on to something that has meaning for us in the business realm. He reminds us that if we don’t know where we’re going, any road will take us there.
Organizations face many e-learning choices. Synchronous or a-synchronous courses? Blended or self-paced programs? Virtual or instructor-led classes? Bulletin boards, discussion groups, or blogs? Courses or job aids? Hosted or in-house? LMS or LCMS? It’s difficult to separate out fact from fiction, leading-edge from bleeding-edge, and myth from reality. Therefore, decisions frequently are made just for the sake of having made a decision. The road taken is often the one that was better sold, the cheapest, or the easiest to agree on—rather than the best choice for your organization. Such decisions fail to reflect a strategy of any kind. They are happenstance.
Successful organizations, though, heed the Cheshire Cat’s insight. They stop and think. They collect information, analyze, and reflect. They develop and follow a process. And, as important as the strategy development process itself, they understand the overall context of a strategy. An e-learning strategy can’t exist in a vacuum. It can’t be disconnected and separate from other learning, development, and performance support activities and strategies in the organization. Rather, successful organizations believe that strategy must be aligned with these elements.
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The Manager’s Perspective
It’s imperative that your e-learning strategy support the overall business or organization strategy. To do this, you need to discover how your organization works and what’s important to it today, as well as how it expects to work in the future and what will be important to it then.
Research tells us that it should only take approximately 5 percent of each stakeholder group to embrace your e-learning initiative for it to eventually become imbedded in the organization. And, once you get 20 percent of each stakeholder group (the early adopters) to support your e-learning efforts, the momentum increases and your implementation becomes nearly unstoppable.
The American Heritage Dictionary defines communication as, “the exchange of thoughts, messages or information.” The key word in this definition is exchange. Exchange implies a two-way process rather than a one-way flood. All too often, organizations develop communications plans that in reality are marketing plans.
Getting your e-learning up and running (in other words, completing the installation) is really only the first stage—and it’s the easiest. It’s the next two stages, implementation and integration, that are truly difficult. You know you’ve succeeded at installation when you e-learning runs error-free. You know you’ve succeeded at implementation when your targeted audiences are accessing their learning options. You know you’ve succeeded at integration when your e-learning is invisible.
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Alignment explained
What do I mean by aligned? (The Cheshire Cat certainly didn’t mention it.) I’d venture a guess that your organization has a business strategy, which is in a direct line between the desired future business results and the current business issues. It spells out specific business and organizational initiatives or activities necessary to achieve desired business results. In order to deliver on the business strategy, your organization most likely has defined a number of supporting strategies, such as a technology strategy, a marketing strategy, a financial strategy, and hopefully a people strategy.
A people strategy typically includes such issues as recruitment, assessment, development, leadership, and succession planning. It doesn’t always cover training and development; therefore, you may need to specify a separate training and development strategy for your organization. Once you do that, you’re ready to develop your e-learning strategy. In doing so,
you should be able to draw a straight line from the business strategy to the people strategy to the training and development strategy to the e-learning strategy to the desired business results. That's alignment!
Enter the nine-step process
Many will argue that strategy development is as much an art as it is a science. Because every organization is different, strategy development can not follow a one-size, one-method-fits-all, lock-step approach. Instead, workplace learning and performance practitioners must approach strategy as an iterative process; as a road to be explored with twists and turns, side excursions, and bumps along the way.
The following e-learning development process lays out nine-steps or stopping points. You don’t need to follow these steps in a linear way, though. In fact, some organizations that have already started down the e-learning path, may need to double-back. But knowing what the steps are and making sure to complete each one ensures clarity for you and your organization about where you’re going and how you plan to get there.
1. Discover your own organization
It’s imperative that your e-learning strategy support the overall business or organization strategy. To do this, you need to discover how your organization works and what’s important to it today, as well as how it expects to work in the future and what will be important to it then.
Take time to understand your organization’s vision—its goals and purpose. Uncover the key business drivers (for example, cost reduction, innovation, service, and product selection), and be sure to find out what's most important in the eyes of senior management.
To understand your corporate culture, put on the hat of a cultural anthropologist. What makes your organization accept change or resist change? Think like a business consultant or MBA candidate. Analyze the business system of your organization and how the business processes, technology, management systems, people capabilities, and culture work together. Identify critical business initiatives that comprise your organization’s business strategy. And, of course, unearth every traditional learning and technology-enabled learning initiatives currently in place.
After thoroughly investigating the current state of your organization, step back and make predictions about how it may look in the future. (This is the fun part. No one knows for sure what the organization or its business strategy may develop, so your speculations are as good as anyone’s.) What will be the vision of your organization in three or five years? What will be the business drivers? How might the corporate culture mature? Then, follow the same process for the various business systems. Think about any critical initiatives that will need to be in place. Finally, imagine what role e-learning will play in the future.
2. Envision the future
In order to generate support and enthusiasm, you need to define a compelling vision that everyone can connect with and feel a part of. This vision needs to be tangible and understandable. It needs to offer inspiration and hope—something worth aspiring to. “On-time performance,” “right knowledge at the right time in the right way,” and “learning-at-the-speed-of-work,” are some examples.
In order to create this vision, detail the attributes or characteristics of the future you envision. Is it convenient, responsive, flexible, fast, easy, broad, focused, and so on? Worth noting: Cost reduction is not on the list. Cost reduction is a benefit—not a feature.
3. Analyze the potential gaps
Plenty of organizations perform typical gap analysis surveys that indentify existing gaps in current processes and plans. But it’s important to analyze the gaps between where your organization is today and where it needs to be in the future. Although each analysis will vary—depending on the organization’s business or structure—general categories should include culture, technology, governance and leadership, processes and systems, and content. In business school, this is simply called doing a gap analysis. So, put on your MBA hat and talk with people, conduct focus groups, compile data, and analyze reports.
4. Understand the market
Every day, new technologies emerge, new suppliers enter the market, and new tools become available. It’s important to understand your choices and make informed decisions that will work today and are aligned with future business directions. This can be another fun part of the process. Meet with suppliers. Read magazines. Surf the Web. Go to conferences. Be a learner.
But be careful to not let your past define your future. For example, perhaps learning at your organization is currently course-based. There are plenty of e-course options on the market, so it seems like a match. Right? Wrong. Your future learning needs may not match a course-based strategy. Perhaps, m-learning, knowledge management, or desktop performance support will better suit your strategy in three years? If so, consider what technologies and services those strategies and tactics will require?
Once you begin to make choices, it’s time to conduct a SWOT analysis. SWOT is another one of those MBA terms; it stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Basically, don’t just take the word of suppliers, colleagues, or published experts. Rely on your own due diligence.
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