Elearning! Magazine: Building Smarter Companies via Learning & Workplace Technologies.
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tion. That's something else you don't learn on YouTube. However, try to find some- body with 30 years of career coaching experience who's also a whiz at using social media tools. They're very, very rare
world to deal with those things. But think about it: You can have the ivory tower and have 10 brains working on a problem, or you can have thousands of brains working on it. The other thing is that you can't make
'Over and over again, we've seen over-investment in
formal learning and lack of investment in information.' —BobbieYazdani, Chairman, Saba
people, so what we decided to do is create a team of two, so I've got my social net- working guru working with my 30-year mentor to provide a complete solution."
QUESTION: How has that need to extend the community outside of your firewalls started to change your thinking about learning?
YAZDANI: "The main driver is leverage. [Members of] the professional learning community are saying that they want to have assets and investments that they can leverage to larger communities. So they look at creation of programs, content, technology. They want to use all those assets in as many places as they can get to, hence the concept of giving their learning capabilities that had [previously] focused around employees and Human Resources to customers, partners and suppliers. "Maybe 50 percent of our projects in the
learning space today are not employee- focused projects, but dealer-, franchise- and manufacturing-focused."
RUSSELL: "But we also have to under- stand that when we put things outside the organization and open them up to the masses, there are different sets of rules that people there play by. So you have to be willing to take it on the chin if you do that sort of thing, because once you let go of the controls, you also open it up for risks. People may not always do what you think, expect or want them to do. "You have to be brave enough in that new
34 March / April 2012 Elearning!
it look like you're selling something. If you give kids and people something of value, they'll participate — but if you try to sell them something, they shut down."
QUESTION: What do you see the role being of the LMS in this "new world"?
YAZDANI: "The way we've known the LMS is going to evolve. The future of the LMS will be very different than it's been. It will look different. Its built-in capabilities
search function and personalization would become very important. The prescriptive nature of the service would also be quite important, so it would become a recom- mendation engine. It would be self-curat- ed, less about the destination and more about a service that gets imbedded on a mobile device, portal or productivity tools. "Our own next-generation platform is
about open social infrastructure. Industry standards have evolved, and we're leverag- ing them to create a very different, light set of learning experiences."
RUSSELL: "You won't be able to recog- nize the LMS of the future. If you look at the evolution of this industry, the LMS grew up separately from the other com- ponents of knowledge management, but the reality is that it should be an inte- grated part that you basically cannot see. If there's analysis going on, it should be able to analyze everything that employ- ees are doing during their workday. In the near future, you won't be able to tell the difference between a business system and a learning management system."
TODD: "The era of the monolithic piece of software of a decade ago, particularly in the LMS space, does not have a place in
'In the enterprise of the future…a deep people
analytics solution will have a very rich, big database that sits
underneath a set of loosely coupled applications.' —Alan Todd, Chairman, Corporate University Xchange
will be different. We see the LMS evolving into a service rather than a stand-alone system. It would co-exist in an enterprise architecture. It could be manifested in a portal that could serve employees, cus- tomers and partners. It would transform how you get your job and work done. Curation and delivery of the content would be inherent in this service, and the
the enterprise of the future. A deep people analytics solution will have a very rich, big database that sits underneath a set of loosely coupled lightweight applications that can run on any devices, anywhere. The LMS will be remade in front of our very eyes. The world is longing for sim- plicity, so the future is simple apps that work with a nice deep back end."
