For many organizations, content management is considered a critical
strategy for keeping up with a fast-paced and resource-constrained
business environment. According to Forrester, the demand for
enterprise content management (ECM) software reached a staggering
$3.9 billion in 2008. Despite the dominant role content management
plays within an organization, training typically continues to work
in isolation from the enterprise, with departmental learning
content management systems (LCMSs) that may or may not have
interoperability with wider enterprise initiatives. This can
prevent training professionals from effectively leveraging valuable
content from other parts of the organization for training purposes
and gives them little or no influence on defining an organization's
overall content strategy. But this is all about to change. Learning
is benefitting from the next wave of enterprise content management
consolidation. Obstacles that currently make learning content
management an island within the enterprise are being torn down and
training is emerging as a critical service of the enterprise
content management platform.
Why training is Isolated
Whether it's company policies used as part of new hire orientation,
product information leveraged for sales training, or standard
operating procedures critical for compliance courses, virtually
every department within the enterprise has content that is useful
for training purposes. Unfortunately, often the only way for
training to "borrow" this valuable content is to recreate another
version of it, resulting in duplication of development, increased
maintenance costs and the content integrity issues that go along
with maintaining multiple versions of the same content.
Understanding why the training organization cannot effectively
leverage enterprise content for training purposes requires a small
history lesson. The ECM market, at $3.9B, is a far more mature
industry than learning content management (LCM), which had its
start in 1999 and whose market is estimated at around $150M.
Learning content management typically has focused on how to migrate
classroom-based training to e-learning, and delivering these online
courses via such standards as SCORM that are unique to the
training domain. Unfortunately, these unique requirements of
learning have created an isolated set of systems and processes that
have little communication or interoperability with other content
management systems within the organization. This often results in a
duplication of development efforts, manual processes for
customization, and increased translation and localization costs.
Plugging learning into the enterprise
ECM has grown into a major software category through the
consolidation of different point solutions including document
management, web content management, document imaging, records
management, and digital asset management. The good news is that
learning is positioned ride the next wave of ECM consolidation. By
integrating learning into this ECM environment, it is no longer a
separate and isolated infrastructure within the organization. In
fact, it's not in its own infrastructure at all anymore. Rather,
it's simply another application that sits atop the ECM platform and
leverages the full breath of ECM functionality, thus breaking down
the following barriers that currently separate LCM from the
enterprise.
Learning silos. Learning as an ECM application
uses the content and media repositories of the ECM platform rather
than the current practice of separate repositories for training
content. This content integration goes a long way in achieving a
major goal of training organizations which is to provide access to
critical content at the point of performance. For example, tech
support materials, used primarily by end customers, is now housed
with training content and can therefore be easily leveraged as part
of software application training. In this type of scenario, the
training organization not only better meets their own objectives
but they also begin to contribute to the overall goals of the
enterprise by putting relevant content to use for business people
and business processes. When LCM is an island, the latter is
unachievable.
Redundant functionality. Learning as an ECM
application understands that the enterprise content management
market has a mature set of best-of-breed tools that can easily
handle a large portion of training's content management
requirements. Therefore, when learning is an application, training
professionals leverage the same ECM application used by the rest of
the enterprise. In this scenario, many current learning content
management vendors now focus their research and development
resources on functionality that is unique and critical to the
training industry, including
- support of key training standards such as SCORM, Common
Cartridge, and QTI
- e-learning functionality such as assessments, adaptive
sequencing, and interactivity
- multiple delivery formats such as print materials, web
courses, and mobile applications
- LMS integration.
Web 2.0 adoption. The rate with which companies
are adopting Web 2.0 technologies is growing at a rapid pace.
According to top consulting firm McKinsey, the impact on learning
has been substantial with some of the highest usage rates reported
for knowledge management and training. Unfortunately, what is not
broadcasted so enthusiastically is that satisfaction with these
technologies is often lagging. McKinsey goes on to report that only
21 percent of enterprises using Web 2.0 tools are satisfied with
their use.
Simply deploying Web 2.0 tools at a departmental (or training)
level will most likely not have the desired impact in terms of
adoption rates. Rather, statistics show that Web 2.0 initiatives
must occur at an enterprise level. When Learning operates in
isolation with their own set of Web 2.0 tools, adoption of these
tools at an enterprise level is difficult, if not impossible to
achieve. However, learning as an application simply uses the same
Web 2.0 tools the rest of the enterprise is leveraging, making
adoption seamless, painless, and most importantly, sensible for the
rest of the organization.
Interoperability between tech docs and learning.
The information contained in an organization's technical
documentation is critical to the training organization, especially
as it relates to improving workforce readiness through just-in-time
performance support tools. Unfortunately, keeping e-learning
materials and technical documentation consistent and up-to-date has
so far been an elusive goal of the training function. This is
because when learning operates in isolation from enterprise content
management, training materials are created separately from
technical documentation and stored in separate silos. This
duplicates development efforts and creates multiple version of
content that are increasingly difficult to keep synchronized.
Learning as an ECM application bridges the chasm between industry
standards by allowing multiple content standards to be applied to a
single source of trusted content. This type of solution fully
integrates previously separate content development processes for
learning and technical documentation to drastically improve content
sharing and reusability.
Bottom line
Training plays a critical role in organizations: maximizing
organizational performance by ensuring that critical employees have
the information they require to effectively do their jobs. For the
vast majority of companies, this training material comes from many
sources throughout the enterprise, is constantly changing and needs
to serve a global audience. In this dynamic environment, an
isolated set of learning technologies and processes can
significantly hinder the training organization from effectively
meeting their goals. Recognizing this, an increasing number of top
enterprises are choosing to integrate their learning content
management systems and processes into the wider ECM ecosystem.
Doing so enables organizations to capture critical content in a way
that makes it searchable, reusable, and able to be repackaged
across multiple contexts and audiences, thus moving learning to the
forefront of enterprise content management.