Our global business environment is characterized by a fluid exchange of money, technology, processes, people, ideas, information, and knowledge. This rate of change compounds daily, if not hourly, driving some of the challenges that confront enterprises around the world, including:
A high-velocity business environment
Slow growth in the global economy and increased competition
Demand to move rapidly up the learning, change, and technology curves
Globalization and decentralization
Orchestrating disparate operations toward a common purpose
Increasing requirements that employees work outside their cultural comfort zones when collaborating with teams in other firms and other countries
Mergers and acquisitions
Acceleration of mergers and acquisitions to win market share, increase access to additional financial resources, and expand geographic/global presence, among other reasons
Legal and regulatory mandates
Professional certification requirements have long been established in industries such as finance, healthcare, and accounting, and legal and regulatory requirements have increased in other segments as well.
Limited pool of talented people
A shift in the industrial nations toward a strong services economy moves knowledge front and center in meeting customer needs, at the same time as baby boomers are beginning to retire, leaving a huge talent vacuum in companies and industries
Virtually every company has seen part of their business transformed by new technologies and processes, launch of new products and services, and penetration of new market areas, among other trends in the global economy. This requires a change in the skills and roles of employees, and therefore engenders an increased need for training and education, in other words — Learning!
Training and performance improvement programs represent a significant expenditure. This expenditure in most organizations ranges from 1.3 to 13 percent of total payroll costs (Galvin 2001). Though learning needs have increased significantly in organizations over the last few years, only a small number of organizations have increased their budgets. For most organizations budgets have been flat, at best, or have been cut. But more importantly, there are organizations that have been able to allocate money to invest in e-learning initiatives, while others have experienced less success in acquiring, or reallocating existing budgets, for e-learning.
The lack of e-learning initiative funding has been due primarily to insufficient visible alignment with specific business goals and no real proven impact on the business, in other words the programs may have been just nice to have or were simply too expensive compared to the potential benefits and measured results. The 25 cases presented in Chapters 10 through 17, will provide company specific perspectives gained from e-learning experiences, including:
Aligning e-learning initiatives with business goals
Ensuring the business impact of learning initiatives
This chapter discusses whether e-learning makes business sense for your organization and offers assistance on how to create a vision, strategy, and business case for your initiative.