When we, as high-technology vendors, refer to innovation, we usually have product innovations in mind. This means that we often overlook the amazing process innovations that our users perform day-in and day-out using our products and solutions in their lines of business. This month, in our yearly Next Steps user conferences in Chicago, London and Bangkok, we asked our customers to tell us what interesting (= unconventional = innovative) ways they use our Learning Management System (LMS). We were looking for use cases that we wouldn’t normally anticipate for an LMS, use cases that fall outside the realms of the L&D department, use cases that span functions across the enterprise.

Needless to say we were amazed! Here are some of the cases that came up.

1. An airline is using our LMS for Dangerous Goods Handling (DGH) compliance training. When an employee fails to complete the required training on time, the LMS revokes security clearance so that the employee is automatically locked out of the airport’s goods handling areas and a manager is notified for further action.
2. An insurance provider used our LMS to co-ordinate swine flue vaccinations for all their employees. The company created a class called “Flu Vaccination” that was available on certain dates & places, and they were able to successfully track the vaccinations of over 7,000 employees in just two weekends.
3. An electrical equipment distributor is using our LMS to manage temporary employee transfers between their different locations. They do that by using the course enrollment policy workflow to initiate a transfer request, communicate the reason of the transfer to the respective manager, and notify transfer approvals to the HR & Finance departments.
4. A financial services provider is using our LMS to co-ordinate their regular Investor Relations events by creating courses for the different sessions, assigning investor-related materials to these courses, and tracking registrations to these courses for all the required stakeholders.
5. A religious organization is using our LMS to perform yearly HR audits by comparing user profile data in the LMS (from a required IT security course that takes place once a year) to HR employee records.
6. An automotive parts provider is using our LMS o manage their franchise network, certify franchisees, collect franchise fees, and perform equipment audits.
7. An airline is using our LMS for disaster volunteer coordination by matching people to different volunteering activities and assigning relevant workflows to take action when disaster strikes.
8. A software company is using our LMS to manage their internal ISO 14001 environmental policy certification.
9. A housing association is using our LMS to develop a series of Human Trafficking Awareness e-learning modules aimed at different audiences in order to educate and raise awareness of human trafficking among authorities, communities, and the general public.

To all our users … “Thank you!”

We have announced three Next Steps conference locations for 2011 — all in September. The first in Chicago; the second in London and the third in Bangkok. Please come.

At Next Steps you can network with your peers from different industries, share your best practices, provide your input into our new products, or just listen to how the latest developments in our enterprise knowledge, learning, assessment, compliance, and talent solutions can free up your people to do what they do best.

This year we will be offering a completely new NetDimensions Product Workshop on the second day led by our technical consultants and featuring two tracks with a total of eight different hands-on sessions. We invite you to enroll in this unique knowledge-packed training program to gain practical NetDimensions product insights that you can immediately apply in your own environments.

Come to the NetDimensions user conferences and let’s take the next steps together.

A tag cloud example of the power of visual representation (see below — click the image once or twice to make it full-size).

Or you can explore the original posting here.

Admittedly, even a list of lists is still subject to curation bias. However, the authors make a point of providing method and target disclosure. This is a great example of what can be done (efficiently) to give people serious, actionable information.

What could you do with this idea at your company? Think a Top 20 list for customer service strategies or a Top 10 list for sales with click-throughs going to explanations and war stories.

There is a brilliant instructional design lesson here.

There is a lovely post at TNW (The Next Web) on how open resource initiatives are putting first-rate academic teaching online for free.

You can find it here.

It got me thinking — it would be easy to incorporate some of this free material in corporate courseware and offer it via LMS catalogues. We have a publishing technology we call The Courseware Manager in our LMS which allows users to easily mix and match content inside a SCORM wrapper. It would be child’s play to bundle some of the open academic resources with company specific content and testing.

It’s an interesting idea. I wonder how many companies are doing things like this.

The Guardian, one of my favorite UK newspapers, just released an excellent, frightening article on Mexican drug cartels laundering money through an American bank, Wachovia. The drug money ended up in a lot of different places after winding its way through Mexican Casas de Cambio (money exchange and transfer services), the City of London and the world’s money laundering capital, Miami Florida.

One statistic that caught my eye was the amount of unchecked money Wachovia shifted from 2004 until the bank got caught out in 2010 — some US$378.4 billion, more than $4 billion of which Wachovia moved in cash. Some part of that total (the full numbers may never be known) was in effect, according to the Guardian, “no questions asked” banking services for drug dealers.

You can find the article here.

The ending of the story doesn’t look too bad for Wachovia or for its new owner Wells Fargo. Some public embarrassment, a fine, costs and a deferred prosecution, which means the company got its wrists slapped. As one security expert noted in the article, nobody in the boardroom ever got to hear the rattle of handcuffs.

Things don’t seem to be working out quite so well for Mexico.

Things may not be working out quite so well for the rest of us either. As Martin Woods, the whistle-blower who sparked the investigations, said:

“What happened at Wachovia was symptomatic of the failure of the entire regulatory system to apply the kind of proper governance and adequate risk management which would have prevented not just the laundering of blood money, but the global crisis.”

If you are responsible for learning and development, you are likely responsible for compliance training, certification and reporting too. This story drove home for me, yet again, just how important the compliance function is. Our clients tell us that compliance courseware, testing and policy and procedure documentation can take up anywhere up to 70 percent of the normal use of an in-house learning management system.

I wonder if we’re nearly as serious about it all as we should be. If you knew, if you truly understood that your failure to help properly communicate and enforce know-your-client and anti-money-laundering policies at your bank could contribute to mayhem and lawlessness in a country like Mexico, along with all of the social ills the drug trade causes everywhere, would the stakes suddenly feel different?

How about for health and safety standards? Dangerous goods handling? Workforce tolerance issues? Environmental safeguards?

What if we got serious, what if we got very pro-active and, for example, started sending weekly, thought provoking compliance questions to employees’ smart-phones? What if we gave surprise examinations with anyone who failed put on immediate unpaid leave pending re-certification? What if we got the CEO to host “what if” webinars on what constitutes best practice and what constitutes cause for immediate dismissal or referral to the authorities?

This all sounds harsh I know but the stakes are high. At least in aggregate, the stakes are much higher than we might think day to day.

In Born To Win, his book about the 1983 America’s Cup race, John Bertrand relates the story of Dennis Conner bragging that Bertrand and his fellow Australians would never beat Conner because Conner had a better boat and a better crew to sail it, a crew 100 percent made up of world-class, individual champions.

Bertrand said he didn’t need a team of individual winners because he had something better — a winning team.

The Australians made a lot of mistakes and suffered some spectacular hardware failures but, in the end, did beat Conner, a four-time America’s Cup winner.

In fact, Bertrand’s win took the cup away from the Americans for the first time in 132 years.

Science is now rallying behind John Bertrand’s view of success. New research from M.I.T. shows that team performance depends not so much on the team’s top performers or even on the team’s average intelligence but rather on group dynamics and emotional sensitivity. One of the key indicators of high performing teams is simply air time. Teams that let members talk tend to outperform and teams that include a high proportion of women tend to outperform too (are we really surprised?). From the Boston Globe article on the research:

Questions about how to make groups better have taken on new urgency as evidence has accrued that teams are usurping the central spot once occupied by solo contributors. A 2007 Science study found that in science and engineering, patents, social sciences, and even to some extent in the arts and humanities, there is a shift at work — new knowledge is increasingly being produced by teams.

So, aside from the obvious response about corporate social networks, what are the implications for learning and development programs? What should L&D professionals be looking at and trying to improve if company success is really more about group performance than up-skilling individuals?

I’m not sure there will be a single set of right answers to the challenge of this new (and fast growing) body of research but useful L&D responses might include:

• A new emphasis on socialization training during onboarding with periodic “social” follow-ups
• Top-down coaching programs to make sure senior executives are setting the right example
• Less money spent on individual self-improvement programs and a lot more money spent on initiatives that foster good group dynamics

We just finished our start-of-the-year meetings in Hong Kong, Synergy 2011. Our resellers, who showed up in force, came from all over the world (you can find a list of NetDimensions resellers here).

Our resellers are a powerful, variegated group with clients large and small and up to the minute insights. They had a lot to say. I’ll share a couple of points that impressed me and give you a heads up on what our community is doing today and planning to do for the rest of the year.

In no particular order of importance:

It’s a two-speed economy now

Think fast growth for some verticals and regions (much of sub-Saharan Africa and the BRIC and MIST countries) but slow growth overall and free-floating anxiety just about everywhere. The watchword is caution. In late 2008 and in 2009 HR departments laid people off by the thousands. In 2011 they’re hiring (selectively) but the memories hang on. Consequence? Money will get spent this year but cautiously. It won’t be falling like rain.

Executives are looking to make smart buys — buys that will support fast growth, slow growth, no growth or another sharp decline. This is a mental reset signaling no really big projects unless they’re urgent and mission critical and nothing that can’t pay for itself short-term.

Buyers are planning and making moves, including trading up on systems that have grown long in the tooth but only if the new systems’ benefits clearly outweigh the costs of not only the new systems themselves but also the cost of doing nothing and just holding on for the time being.

In this sense the United States is starting to look a lot more like the rest of the world: every new corporate initiative must not only be cost justified on its own merits but also benefit weighed against every other expenditure the company could make.

Implications include:

• More SaaS (Software as a Service) hosted application offerings with the IT department acting as advisor and gatekeeper and less like a primary services provider in its own right. The new SaaS/cloud biases play into the core vs. context framework IT departments are increasingly adopting — think things that are necessary (but may or may not be considered mission critical) like email services, learning and performance management systems, customer relationship management platforms, document retention and control systems and third-party transaction processors.
• HR systems that are faster to deploy and easier to migrate away from should a new strategy so demand (think M&A). This idea meshes nicely with SaaS offerings as long as your context is someone else’s core — suppliers for whom the provision of X system is their main concern (whatever “X” is) are going to be able to roll X out and keep it up far more cost effectively than your own folks are likely to be able to accomplish.
  
• A new willingness to tolerate, even encourage the adoption of multiple point solutions for business unit pain points.
  

The meaning of mobile

Our African resellers are some of the most determined, creative and astute business people I’ve ever met. They struggle with problems not seen everywhere, including poor or non-existent infrastructure and extremely thin bandwidth. For them our mEKP portable LMS is a game changer, allowing users to plug in to and work on literally any computer they can find and walk away after, flash drive securely in hand.

Our U.S. reseller Intelladon demonstrated an iPad app they created for one of their clients, Hollister Wound Care. The app, which is for doctors and nurses, helps healthcare professionals diagnose wound types and severity and suggests remediation options. The app is powered on the back end by EKP, our award winning LMS. Very cool.

We also walked through the new smartphone interface we’ll be releasing in May. This mobile option will give users access to just about everything EKP does. It works equally well on iPhones, iPads and Android phones and tablets.

The take-away for me is that there isn’t going to be a single answer to the question of mobility. Instead, there are going to be a lot of answers — some appropriate for certain use cases and others appropriate for other circumstances. And this is good.

Analyze this

We introduced two compliance optimizations: support for 21 CFR Part 11 electronic security standards and Compliance Analytics, a new EKP feature set that allows compliance managers to define and report on compliance requirements in a myriad of ways.

21 CFR Part 11, though originally intended for pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers, biotechnology companies and other U.S. Food and Drug Administration-regulated industries, has become a de facto standard for digital security in many highly regulated industries. We are proud to be one of the very few LMS providers that support the 21 CFR Part 11 standards. In this age of wikileaks, security has become an increasingly important concern for everyone, including learning and development professionals.

Compliance Analytics is, if you will, the other side of the security coin. The ability to tag training programs, courseware and performance support assets against regulatory requirements and slice-and-dice report on take up, exceptions and progress data is the flip side of ensuring secure acces in the first place. We’ll be demonstrating how Compliance Analytics works in March at a U.S. industry event along with our reseller eHealthcareIT.

Plays nicely with others

Last year we won a Brandon Hall Gold Award for technology innovation. We won the award for the PTK (Portal Tool Kit) a set of APIs that allow programmers to hook our EKP learning management system into just about anything. Would you like a course catalogue to appear in a commercial website? No problem with the PTK. Would you like someone to be able to register on your compliance intranet and see what s/he needs to do to meet current regulatory requirements? How about competencies? Or license and certificate management? How about letting your managers check the records of the people who report to them? Or would you like to get EKP talking to your HR or financial systems? All fast and easy integrations with the PTK.

This year we’ve gone several steps further. We’ve developed widget libraries to help non-programmers incorporate EKP functionality into websites without having to code anything.

First up is our set of plugin macros for Confluence, the world’s most popular enterprise wiki. We’ve actually done a two-way integration with Confluence. EKP courses can themselves dynamically create Confluence spaces with all the right permissions and access security. This gives instructors and administrators a way to set up knowledge sharing and community sites on the course level. At the same time, you can, with the help of a bunch of short parentheticals like {enroll: xyz course}, set up Confluence pages to incorporate EKP functionality. This gives subject matter experts an easy way to incorporate EKP functionality into websites.

EKP gives Confluence rich learning and performance management functionality. Confluence gives EKP enterprise collaboration functionality with Microsoft Sharepoint extension options.

Our second widget library is for WordPress, the world’s most popular content management system. With WordPress you get zillions of sites like Solo Practice University (there’s an awesome social network layer for WordPress), TechCrunch, Sap.Info (the information platform for the SAP community) and the Harvard Gazette. Not to mention sites for the likes of NASA and BMW.

On the WordPress dashboard you simply drag an EKP widget to where you want it and press save. Like magic, you now have an integrated LMS / content management system.

Could that be any easier?

Would you like fries with that?

Of course there’s more. Watch this space. We intend to surprise you this year.

Recently, NetDimensions invited a panel of very smart people to discuss a provocative question: Is the LMS Dead?

The panelists were Charles Jennings, Craig Weiss, David Wilson and Richard Nantel, all very articulate and all more than a little opinionated. I moderated, which mostly meant I tried to stay out of their way.

It was great.

We were overwhelmed by the number of comments and questions we received during the webinar. Unfortunately we had no time to answer all of the questions during the event.

We know it’s important to get to those answers, as well as explore further some of the topics raised, so we are organizing a tweet chat session for you to talk to the panelists directly on Twitter.

On December 7th, at 8:00am PT / 11:00am ET / 4:00pm GMT, all our panelists will be on Twitter for 60 minutes to discuss the future of the LMS.

Just logon to Twitter and use the hashtag #lmschat to join the discussion with Richard (@rnantel), Craig (@diegoinstudio), David (@dwil23), Charles (@charlesjennings) and your fellow attendees.

The folks at Google have written a book — well, I’m sure they’ve written a few (and indexed a few more) but this particular batch of Googlies have written a children’s book for grownups that explains how the web works to those of us who are, shall we say, technology challenged, which means most of us if we’re being honest.

You can find the e-book here.

And when I say “technology challenged” I don’t mean to be disparaging. I think even those among us who use the Internet every day may lack a deep understanding of how it actually works. For example, how many people do you know who can actually describe how a car engine works? I mean, how it really works?

The book is charming. Clear, concise, aimed at intelligent adults and beautifully illustrated, it’s a must read for all your learning and development staff who do not muck around with code but who might benefit from understanding more about web architecture issues. There is a bit of Googlie self-promotion in certain chapters but hey, it’s free.

Thank you Google.

Recently we introduced a new product, mEKP. It’s different. mEKP gives you the power to carry gigabytes of technical documentation, learning, career and personal development support, licensing and certification records, podcasts, video and a whole lot more — all in your pocket.

It’s secure. It’s multi-platform. It is, as Brandon Hall says, disruptive. This particular revolution began quietly but make no mistake, it’s already making waves. Think of this scenario — 2,500 teachers in a poor country, each with a mEKP stick giving her or him a year’s worth of professional development training, daily lesson plans, class handouts, various kinds of support collateral — all without Internet connections to the schools.

Change happens. We think (we hope) we’re contributing to some good change in the world.

Click here for more.