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By Dan Pontefract, 10/24/2009 6:44 PM

This past week, I attended the SharePoint 2009conference in Las Vegas. I’ll provide some feedback on that particular release in another blog posting (read Bill Simser for now) but what the conference itself got me thinking about was that, thankfully, the standalone LMS is definitely going to become redundant. Dinosaur. Soviet Union. Saturn Car. Hierarchy. (you get the picture)

Those organizations (and frankly public learning institutions) that are clinging to their standalone learning management systems as a way in which to serve up formal ILT course schedules and eLearning are absolutely missing the big picture. Sadly, there are too many organizations like this out there.

The LMS should no longer be thought of as a destination for the learner. This is the nuclear fault of the LMS itself and of antiquated thinking from our learning leaders; it encourages standalone learning by driving people to register for an event … be it an ILT class or an eLearning module.

Sure, clever instructors, faculty and learning administration management/leadership teams may find unique, albeit independent, ways in which to embed some form of informal and/or social learning before as well as after the event, but this is merely triage as opposed to a lobotomy.

When you hear people say ‘we need Facebook for the organization’ … I don’t think that’s exactly what they mean. Jon Husband does a good job of illustrating this over here.

Facebook for the organization implies three things:

• A development platform that serves up formal, informal and social content & connection for all
• A single ‘window into the org’ versus many separate applications and systems (I wrote about this here)
• Learning happens naturally, by osmosis, and without care for how it happens

The LMS insinuates the notion that you ‘go to training’. This is asinine in today’s world.

If you want to change the culture (as Will Kelly describes here) it’s surely not just about the technology. But … to change the culture, you also need to drive an organization to believe that training does not only happen in an event (ILT and eLearning) and thus, by keeping the standalone LMS alive and kicking, you exacerbate the issue.

Employees need to constantly connect, they need to constantly share, and they need to learn from one another. This cannot happen solely in an ILT class and it surely does not happen in an eLearning module.

Set up your ‘Facebook for the organization’ by embedding an LMS (or LMS like features) into your enterprise-wide collaboration platform. Coaches, mentors, online buddies need to coexist within the wiki’s, blogs, discussion forums, webcam meetings, online presence, etc. which needs to coexist within the list of formal classroom and eLearning offerings which needs to coexist with your documents, knowledge management, videos, podcasts, which needs to coexist with the profiles, skills, and recent activity-feed happenings of all employees.

Blow up your LMS. Find a way to integrate it into your collaboration platform.

This is where the future is taking us.

Oh, and I don’t think Google Wave is the reason to get rid of your LMS as Michael Feldstein describes. But I like what he does have to say about the LMOS for academic institutions.

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By Dan Pontefract, 08/30/2009 4:56 PM

If you haven’t heard of Marshall McLuhan, well you’re simply missing out on one of Canada’s most innovative minds.

Derrick de Kerckhove, Director of the McLuhan Program of Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto since 1983 wrote McLuhan for Managers in 2003. Shamefully, I didn’t know about the book until this year, courtesy of Jon Husband.

In the book, Derrick (and co-author Mark Federman) introduce the Laws of Media through a tetrad:

• Extend (what does the artefact enhance or intensify or make possible or accelerate)
• Obsolesce (what is pushed aside by the new organ)
• Retrieve (what older, previously obsolesced ground is brought back and inheres in the new form)
• Reverse (what is the reversal potential of the new form)

Harold Jarche has written about the tetrads and applied it to commons-based peer production. I’m sure there are others out there as well.

As I unplugged for almost 4 weeks during the summer, I began mentally noodling what the tetrads may look like in terms of a Learning 2.0 philosophy. I define Learning 2.0 in a corporate learning setting as follows:

• Philosophy – shifting from training is an event, to learning is continuous, connected & collaborative. (simply put – moving from solely formal classroom and eLearning, to formal, informal and social learning concepts)
• Alignment – being less fixated on a centralized training function, and more on a federated (hub and spoke if you will) talent and collaboration holistic entity

Thoughts?

Comments (1)

By Dan Pontefract, 06/24/2009 5:48 PM

There are organizations in this world that ‘get it’, there are those that are figuring it out, and there are those that just can’t see the light.

I’m referring to the tsunami of change concerning the way in which people expect to operate, not just inside the corporate walls, but as good ole human beings.

You may argue that Gary Hamel and Thomas Malone were (or are) ahead of their time. In each of their revolutionary (and obviously evolutionary) books (The Future of Management and The Future of Work), the underlying principle is that in order to drive results, innovation, productivity and efficient use of time, the organization needs to become flat.

Malone states ““As managers, we need to shift our thinking from command and control to coordinate and cultivate — the best way to gain power is sometimes to give it away.”

Hamel opines “… management and organizational innovation often lags far behind technological innovation. Right now, your company has 21st-century, Internet-enabled business processes, mid-20th-century management processes, all built atop 19th-century management principles. Without a transformation in our management DNA, the power of the Web to transform the work of management will go unexploited.”

But in reality, it’s not just about the organizational structure. I believe, in order to achieve a Work 2.0 mantra in the workplace, we need to combine our thinking around structure, systems and culture.

Structure refers to the aforementioned ‘flat-based hierarchy”, or heterarchy. (perhaps wirearchy as Jon Husband coined)

Systems are the actual technologies AND processes that allow the structure to happen. If the systems and processes are in fact segregated, decoupled or found in silos themselves, one will never achieve the Work 2.0 vision.

Culture is a little tricky, as one might argue this is in fact the Work 2.0 vision itself, but in reality, an organization has to help formally shape the culture, in an unconscious way. Culture gets a bad reputation in many circles, but think of it as an organizational philosophy. (ie. it’s encouraged to ask questions, it’s ok to have differing opinions, share everything you know, etc.) I do like Michael Idinopulos’ opinion on culture not being a starting point. The culture (or philosophy) is part of the overall Work 2.0 mix.

By combining the structure (ie. management flattening aspects) with the systems and culture, I think you’d see organizations a lot healthier, and ready for future challenges, particularly as Gen X and Millenials take on more responsibilities within the org.