In Your Call Is Not Important To Us Farhad Manjoo of Slate bemoans the lack of anything approaching even tolerably good customer service from Gmail.

He’s moaning about the free-to-users, advertiser supported Gmail service, not the paid services businesses and government agencies sign up for.

It got me thinking. Sometimes free means a bargain. Sometimes not. I would argue that the affordances of Gmail so far outweigh the possibility of poor customer service that even with no customer service at all, it’s still a good thing.

However, my expectations are fairly low when I sign up for free services. And the old saw holds — You get what you pay for . . .

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!”

Last week I attended mLearnCon 2011 in San Jose, CA.  mLearnCon is a growing and dynamic event by the eLearning Guild that’s focused on Mobile Learning with a mixed audience of technologists, educators, analysts, corporate L&D professionals, training & courseware providers, and technology vendors (typically for authoring tools, mobile delivery platforms, LCMSs, and LMSs).  This year some really good points came up that reinforce what we have learned the hard way via our own (and our clients’) experiences in implementing mobile learning.  I felt it might be worth recapping here.

1. What is mLearning? It might sound surprising that there is no clear commonly agreed upon definition of Mobile Learning.  Does it include learning on laptops or not?  Does it imply Internet connectivity?  Does it apply if the experience is not mobile per se?  Does it have to involve some level of collaboration among learners?  Personally, I am not surprised there is no single definition for all.  Because what is becoming clear is that Mobile Learning really means different things to different people (depending on objectives, needs, scope, constraints, resources, and more).Now, as a side note, if you ask me about what definition I feel closer to, I will choose something that approaches mobility from the learner’s point of view and not from a technological perspective; for example the definition in the MOBIlearn Guidelines report that considers mobile learning “… any sort of learning that happens when the learner is not at a fixed, predetermined location, or learning that happens when the learner takes advantage of the learning opportunities offered by mobile technology.”
2. mLearning is not eLearning on a smartphone. Ok, everyone seems to agree that if you take eLearning and squeeze it to fit the dimensions and resolution of a mobile device is probably not the way to go. And we know enough now to avoid the early eLearning mistakes. Yes?  Right, so why are most conversations focusing on how to make Powerpoint flash content run on iPad?  Is this even the right approach?  On the other hand, what about all this eLearning content that has (finally & successfully) been developed?  Can we port it to mobile?  Should we? According to an excellent study by Bryan Chapman, the average cost of creating an hour of interactive eLearning is $18,500 which can rise to $50,000 with more advanced interactivity. So, how do you justify the ROI moving to mobile learning while protecting this eLearning investment? I think there is a real business challenge here.
3. It’s the learner, stupid. Maybe it’s just me, but I am seeing that most conversation revolve around devices and platforms instead of the learner.  With mobile, we have an opportunity to design technologies and solutions that put the learner in the center of the learning experience.  An experience that includes content, activities, and people, along with the ability to access and administer all these in an intuitive, if not seamless, way.  The simplest way to do this is by meeting the learners where they are, whenever they need it, and with whatever approach is most effective for the particular situation.  We also have the know-how to do all that while addressing key business drivers like supporting an increasingly mobile workforce, improving on-the-job performance, increasing the impact of corporate L&D programs, and developing a new generation of talent.
4. mLearning is an evolution, not a revolution. This is what our clients have really taught us.  You need to think big about mobile, but start small.  Take an objective, a program, a specific group mobile and work hard to make sure the undertaking is successful.  It’s always worth listening to your own audience to see what their needs and particular situations are, and hence what makes sense to go mobile.  And always link mobile learning to your overall learning and talent strategy, because that’s where the value lies.
5. There is no silver bullet in mLearning. No matter what vendors say, there is no single solution for all.  We are dealing with such a diverse ecosystem of technologies and business situations that we need to be thinking along the lines of multiple solution approaches.  And, I would suggest let’s not take innovation out of the way we think about mLearning.  I think there are great things to achieve in front of us, so let’s not make the mistakes of the past.

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.

Fantastic series of pieces on how to think about and present data.

Terms like infographics and data animation don’t begin to explain the power of all of this new capability.

Find it here.

My hometown newspaper, The South China Morning Post (SCMP), recently went live with a reader driven mashup site dedicated to reporting environmental damage. The SCMP calls the site Citizen Map. It looks like it’s gaining traction. The public responded with more than 20 tip-offs in the first few days.

Mashups are nothing new. Typical examples include real estate listing databases married to neighborhood maps and school district information, sites that track epidemic outbreaks around the world and geo-location restaurant guides.

But most mashups are meant to broadcast a single author’s voice, or at least a single group’s message. What the SCMP has done looks a little different. The paper has put together a number of services, some commercial, some open source, that let other people generate the content around a theme. Arguably, user generated content is nothing new either. Think Twitter or Facebook.  But Twitter and Facebook cater to everyone, or at least try to.

I would guess that the SCMP has no idea where this is going to go but the framework is clear: the SCMP has created a point solution (in contrast to an enterprise or utility solution) to aggregate community generated information on environmental damage. Individual postings might lead to follow-up investigations, government responses (one hopes), name and shame reporting or public debate.

The site is powered by an open source solution called Ushahidi. Ushahidi itself is fascinating, a software development project born out of a Kenyan political movement to remove corrupt and violent politicians. But what the SCMP has accomplished with the Ushahidi solution is interesting to me as a learning and development and performance support practitioner because it shows the power of what is increasingly becoming the way forward — the deep integration of easy-to-deploy open source/open standards solutions into commercial or semi-commercial user-facing point solutions, usually around a single theme or event and often with a known shelf-life.

Citizen Map includes, among other integrated services: Google maps, Twitter, SMS services, online form reporting and email.  The options allow for point-of-need or point-of-impulse interactions — when you’re hiking you can send an SMS and follow up with details later. With its defined scope, broad interaction affordances and the promise of real world follow up, the site is brilliant. It makes a difference.

Lessons for learning

• People pay attention — the power of open, community discussion cannot be underestimated. Budget holders tend to take notice when public sites aggregate and amplify broad concerns. Inside companies the same dynamics rule. If client, staff, shareholder and/or ecosystem partners start to speak in concert around defined interest areas, executives listen. Nothing drives change quite like fresh air.
• Learning and development, if we truly want a seat at the table, must become a bit more like the fifth estate — think CNN getting the story and facilitating dialogue. Reporting the news, providing a forum for the concerned and the experts and becoming good at supplying aggregation, editing and curation services — these things start to become the new focus. This means that the provision of some “training” services starts to look more like promotion of fast-moving information consumables rather than investment in long-term project outputs.
• Aspiring to be good at point solutions is great; it’s nothing to be ashamed of — on the spectrum from quick and dirty point solutions on the one end, through to interim, enterprise and long-term utility solutions on the other end, achievement on a series of point solutions is a fantastic career arc and truly useful to the organization.

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.