This morning I stumbled over an image posted by Guy Wallace of Pursuing Performance, another valued thought-leader I follow. His post stoked a rant. Here are both…the image…and the rant.
Tag: LMS
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It’s Time to Go Ninja!
Who “woulda thunk it” possible to be swept up…or is swept out more appropriate…into the chaos of three corporate downsizing events in less than seven years? Could that even happen to the same guy? Oh, but yes it can…and it has. You’re reading his words right now. January 26th was when I was jettisoned through the window of opportunity yet again. The frequency of being jettisoned could cause one to pause and reflect, asking “Why me?” and question “What did I do? …or not do?” The first time around, I went through the routine stages of the grieving process. The second time…not as much. This time around…I got it. It’s time to go Ninja!
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What About the Other 95%?
Several years ago I had the privilege of being invited to sit on a panel discussion called “The Future of the Business of Learning”. Josh Bersin was one of the other panelists and shared some interesting data that validated my passions around pursuit of a performance paradigm. Josh shared that, on average, we spend about 5% of our 2,000 hour work year in some form of formal training…that’s about 100 hours. For some industries, that’s high…but hey…it wasn’t what Josh shared…it’s what he did not share. A little math took place in my head…and the rest is history…
Have you ever noticed how entrenched technology…and even some methodology…are accepted as the rule or the standard and innovation around those rules and standards get kind of…locked down? Even so, being in the “locked box” of technology, some innovation does indeed take place, but often it never exceeds the limitations of the box in which it’s locked down. The LMS comes to mind as one such technology, and learning design surfaces as one such methodology.
A few years ago, I am quite certain, I would have been fighting this “cloud” concept tooth and nail. There was something about having my own staff running my own servers behind my own firewall that provided a sense of security and control. To an extent it did, and the IT staff would be the first to man the ramparts to fight off having anything living outside the firewall – much less allowing anyone outside to get into our systems. I feel their concern, and I respect the need to protect the network and data resources behind the firewall. So does that make a cloud-based LMS a better solution?
I can remember my first Learning Management System (LMS) implementation from years ago. Actually, in those days they called them Training Management Systems (TMS). This one, Registrar, if I recall correctly, despite its limited functionality, worked better to meet our needs than the four LMS platforms I have endured since. Registrar was simple. It tracked learning. Learning was simple. You did it in a classroom. Period. With the advent of e-learning, the innovation dam broke, and the TMS morphed into LMS and soon a component of a more complex Human Capital Management (HCM) beast. The core competency of registering, tracking and administering training remained intact, but the feature-rich technology largely overran our ability to embrace all the potential it represented. In other words, many training departments fell behind compared to what the technology they owned could ultimately deliver.
In a recent dialog on the CLO-Network, we discussed why so many LMS owners were not happy with their systems – that there seemed to be a “disconnect” between what they envisioned they would own after GoLive and what they actually wound up owning. Why is there such a love-hate relationship with LMS (and other) technology? Why does it seem that someone else always has the better system? Truth is, “better” is a relative term.