Senior Management Sponsorship
Often, a valuable strategy during the senior management sponsorship phase is to demonstrate the link between learning and solving real problemsbusiness problems. An executive sponsor who understands and sees the value can help build a strong case in the boardroom. His credibility can ride the project through skeptical questions and tight budgetary demands.After an executive sponsor expresses willingness to champion the project, he should be well versed with the case and ideally offer input to the business case. The more an executive sponsor is involved in the pilot, the better he can represent the program to others.
Hindsight Is 20/20: Cross-Functional Collaboration
Internet learning efforts occur several places around the organization. How are you going to align all these effortsespecially those that lie outside your charter?Unless you are in an authoritarian company, it is almost impossible to get "all these efforts" in line. And the last job you want is to be the e-learning police department for the entire corporation.If your CEO or some other executive said, "We're going to be completely moved to e-learning in 18 months" or something like that, you are probably experiencing the joy of multiple disjointed efforts. The executive always thinks that pronouncement gets the entire team on the same train as it leaves the station, headed toward the stated goal. More often, the reality is that without specific direction, everyone gets in separate rental cars and takes off in her own direction.The way to be successful during a time of cross-organization experimentation and competition is to completely partner with the corporate IT and networking team. If you work with the IT team to address business problems, establish some standard tools that IT will endorse and support, and then demonstrate cost and learning effectiveness, you will succeed. The key is bringing the IT and the networking teams the business problem you are trying to solve early in the process, and getting their help to create the technical solution to that problem. The best part of this is that IT should extend their net police role to include e-learning tools and deployment, so you don't have to do it.After these standards are clearly specified and accepted within the company, you get to encourage the experimentation and pilots that other groups want to do. The main thrust changes from compliance to convergence. Bringing in new tools, new processes, new disciplines, and new media is the only way to keep pace with the changing technology of the learning industry.Doing that haphazardly and without discipline or process creates chaos for the learner community, and usually creates technical problems for IT. Learners cannot find all the content they need, even if it is out there; or if they find it, they don't have the right software or hardware to successfully launch it. Or the networking folks in IT find bandwidth impacts that negatively impact the company, or software that has surprise effects on other applications.None of the preceding are desirable, and all are counterproductive to the goal of positively impacting the company and the business. |
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