I attended the CLO Symposium with my ITA colleagues Jay Cross and Jane Hart.  It was an interesting event, with a theme of “Game-Changing Learning: Development for the New Normal“, held at a classy venue on the beach, and was well-organized.  (You can see Jay’s writeup here.)  And the keynotes that I saw were in synch: Stephen Covey talked about the need for trust and Jon Katzenbach on how to build culture were both excellent, as was Dan Pontefract’s story on making collaboration intrinsic to Telus.  At a lower level, however, the conference felt mired in the past.

Jay, Jane, and I ran a unpanel where we took questions from the audience and took turns answering it.  Some folks even had trouble with the format, apparently!  We got questions about how the role of the learning unit changes, about myths and new tools, and about measurement.  Our riff inspired some subsequent inquiries if we could assist.  Well, but of course!

A lot  of the other sessions also seemed to deal with measurement.  A special lunch was held specifically around creating a standard set of measurements: effectiveness, efficiency, and business impact. While the latter is business specific, the other two could be handled. Efficiency tends to mean things like amount per hour of training, etc.  Effectiveness was less clear, but I’m afraid we’d see pre-post test messages instead of number of people completing the competency test (happy to be wrong).  My problem here is that this stuff shouldn’t be a topic in 2011, it should be already well-practiced  and in the repertoire. We should be thinking about how to start tracking meaningful activity in social networks, the value of performance support and more, not old stuff about courses.  And, how to tie it back to important deltas in organizational performance.

As for addressing the social and informal metrics, while I addressed this a bit earlier, let me go a bit further.  If you are putting in performance support (e.g. a portal, but *ahem*, well-designed) or social network, you should be asking yourself what it should be achieving.  Is it closing more sales?  Generating higher revenue per sale?  How about less time spent on customer calls?  If you put in an HR portal, you should expect less calls to HR.  If you put in a social network among sales folks, you might expect a higher percentage of closing. Figure out what change this should  affect, and then find a way to measure it. Which should be the indicator that you have a problem in the first case!

Which is not to say there weren’t good topics on tap too: leadership development for agility, bridging the gap between IT and the learning unit, informal learning, etc.  But when other topics are ‘how to talk to executives’, in- or out-sourcing talent, and on-demand training, it’s clear we’re not where we can, and should, be.

“The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed”, as  William Gibson  has said, but I guess my concern is with some of what is considered game-changing in an era where the new normal is continual innovation and perpetual beta.  Things are moving too fast not to already have mastered the basics of measurement, and be thinking about adapting.  The ability to talk ‘business’ should be a pre-requisite for the job, and the strategic issues need  to be culture and collaboration.  We’re getting there, but then patience has never been one of my strong suits ;).

 

Way  back when we were building the adaptive learning system tabbed Intellectricityâ„¢, we were counting on a detailed content model that carved up the overall content into discrete elements that could be served up separately to create a unique learning experience.  As I detailed in an article, issues included granularity and tagging vocabulary.  While my principle for the right level of granularity is playing a distinct role in the learning experience, e.g. separating a concept presentation from an example from a practice element, my more simple heuristic is to consider “what would a knowledgeable mentor give to one learner versus another”. The goal, of course, is to support future ability to personalize and customize the learning experience.

Back then, we were thinking then as a content delivery engine, but our constraints required content produced in a particular format, and we were thinking about how we’d get content produced the way we needed.  Today, I’m still thinking that the advantages of content produced in discrete chunks, under a tight model, is a valuable investment in time and energy.  Increasingly, I’m seeing publishers taking a similar view, and as new content formats get developed and delivered (e.g. ebooks, mobile web), the importance of more careful attention to content makes sense.

The benefits of more careful articulation of content can go further. In the performance ecosystem model (PDF), the greater integration step is specifically around more tightly integrating systems and processes.  While this includes coupling the disparate systems into a coherent workbench for individuals, it also includes developing content into a model that accounts for different input sources, output needs, and governance.  While this is largely for formal content, it could be community-generated content as well.  The important thing is to stop redundant content development.  Typically, marketing generates requirements, and engineering develops specifications, which then are fed separately to documentation, sales training, customer training, and support, which all generate content anew from the original materials.  Developing into and out of a content model reduces errors and redundancy, and increases flexibility and control.  (And this is not incommensurate with devolving responsibility to individuals.)

We’re already seeing the ability to create custom recommendations (e.g. Amazon, Netflix), and companies are already creating custom portals (e.g. IBM).  The ability to begin to customize content delivery will be important for customer service, performance support, and slow learning.  Whether driven by rules or analytics (or hybrids), semantic tagging is going to be necessary, and that’s an concomitant requirement of content models.  But the upside potential is huge, and will eventually be a differentiator.

Learning functions in organizations need to be moving up the strategic ladder in terms of their overall responsibility for more than just formal learning, but also performance support and ecommunity.  Thinking like advanced publishers can and should be about moving beyond the text, and even beyond content, to the experience.  While that could be custom designs (and in some cases it must be, e.g. simulation games), for content curators and providers it also has to be about flexible business models and quality development.  I believe it’s a must for other organizations as well.  I encourage you to start thinking strategically about content development in rich ways that stop with one-off development, and start thinking about putting some up-front effort into not only templates, but also models with tight definitions and labels.