In Your Call Is Not Important To Us Farhad Manjoo of Slate bemoans the lack of anything approaching even tolerably good customer service from Gmail.

He’s moaning about the free-to-users, advertiser supported Gmail service, not the paid services businesses and government agencies sign up for.

It got me thinking. Sometimes free means a bargain. Sometimes not. I would argue that the affordances of Gmail so far outweigh the possibility of poor customer service that even with no customer service at all, it’s still a good thing.

However, my expectations are fairly low when I sign up for free services. And the old saw holds — You get what you pay for . . .

When we, as high-technology vendors, refer to innovation, we usually have product innovations in mind. This means that we often overlook the amazing process innovations that our users perform day-in and day-out using our products and solutions in their lines of business. This month, in our yearly Next Steps user conferences in Chicago, London and Bangkok, we asked our customers to tell us what interesting (= unconventional = innovative) ways they use our Learning Management System (LMS). We were looking for use cases that we wouldn’t normally anticipate for an LMS, use cases that fall outside the realms of the L&D department, use cases that span functions across the enterprise.

Needless to say we were amazed! Here are some of the cases that came up.

1. An airline is using our LMS for Dangerous Goods Handling (DGH) compliance training. When an employee fails to complete the required training on time, the LMS revokes security clearance so that the employee is automatically locked out of the airport’s goods handling areas and a manager is notified for further action.
2. An insurance provider used our LMS to co-ordinate swine flue vaccinations for all their employees. The company created a class called “Flu Vaccination” that was available on certain dates & places, and they were able to successfully track the vaccinations of over 7,000 employees in just two weekends.
3. An electrical equipment distributor is using our LMS to manage temporary employee transfers between their different locations. They do that by using the course enrollment policy workflow to initiate a transfer request, communicate the reason of the transfer to the respective manager, and notify transfer approvals to the HR & Finance departments.
4. A financial services provider is using our LMS to co-ordinate their regular Investor Relations events by creating courses for the different sessions, assigning investor-related materials to these courses, and tracking registrations to these courses for all the required stakeholders.
5. A religious organization is using our LMS to perform yearly HR audits by comparing user profile data in the LMS (from a required IT security course that takes place once a year) to HR employee records.
6. An automotive parts provider is using our LMS o manage their franchise network, certify franchisees, collect franchise fees, and perform equipment audits.
7. An airline is using our LMS for disaster volunteer coordination by matching people to different volunteering activities and assigning relevant workflows to take action when disaster strikes.
8. A software company is using our LMS to manage their internal ISO 14001 environmental policy certification.
9. A housing association is using our LMS to develop a series of Human Trafficking Awareness e-learning modules aimed at different audiences in order to educate and raise awareness of human trafficking among authorities, communities, and the general public.

To all our users … “Thank you!”

Last week I attended mLearnCon 2011 in San Jose, CA.  mLearnCon is a growing and dynamic event by the eLearning Guild that’s focused on Mobile Learning with a mixed audience of technologists, educators, analysts, corporate L&D professionals, training & courseware providers, and technology vendors (typically for authoring tools, mobile delivery platforms, LCMSs, and LMSs).  This year some really good points came up that reinforce what we have learned the hard way via our own (and our clients’) experiences in implementing mobile learning.  I felt it might be worth recapping here.

1. What is mLearning? It might sound surprising that there is no clear commonly agreed upon definition of Mobile Learning.  Does it include learning on laptops or not?  Does it imply Internet connectivity?  Does it apply if the experience is not mobile per se?  Does it have to involve some level of collaboration among learners?  Personally, I am not surprised there is no single definition for all.  Because what is becoming clear is that Mobile Learning really means different things to different people (depending on objectives, needs, scope, constraints, resources, and more).Now, as a side note, if you ask me about what definition I feel closer to, I will choose something that approaches mobility from the learner’s point of view and not from a technological perspective; for example the definition in the MOBIlearn Guidelines report that considers mobile learning “… any sort of learning that happens when the learner is not at a fixed, predetermined location, or learning that happens when the learner takes advantage of the learning opportunities offered by mobile technology.”
2. mLearning is not eLearning on a smartphone. Ok, everyone seems to agree that if you take eLearning and squeeze it to fit the dimensions and resolution of a mobile device is probably not the way to go. And we know enough now to avoid the early eLearning mistakes. Yes?  Right, so why are most conversations focusing on how to make Powerpoint flash content run on iPad?  Is this even the right approach?  On the other hand, what about all this eLearning content that has (finally & successfully) been developed?  Can we port it to mobile?  Should we? According to an excellent study by Bryan Chapman, the average cost of creating an hour of interactive eLearning is $18,500 which can rise to $50,000 with more advanced interactivity. So, how do you justify the ROI moving to mobile learning while protecting this eLearning investment? I think there is a real business challenge here.
3. It’s the learner, stupid. Maybe it’s just me, but I am seeing that most conversation revolve around devices and platforms instead of the learner.  With mobile, we have an opportunity to design technologies and solutions that put the learner in the center of the learning experience.  An experience that includes content, activities, and people, along with the ability to access and administer all these in an intuitive, if not seamless, way.  The simplest way to do this is by meeting the learners where they are, whenever they need it, and with whatever approach is most effective for the particular situation.  We also have the know-how to do all that while addressing key business drivers like supporting an increasingly mobile workforce, improving on-the-job performance, increasing the impact of corporate L&D programs, and developing a new generation of talent.
4. mLearning is an evolution, not a revolution. This is what our clients have really taught us.  You need to think big about mobile, but start small.  Take an objective, a program, a specific group mobile and work hard to make sure the undertaking is successful.  It’s always worth listening to your own audience to see what their needs and particular situations are, and hence what makes sense to go mobile.  And always link mobile learning to your overall learning and talent strategy, because that’s where the value lies.
5. There is no silver bullet in mLearning. No matter what vendors say, there is no single solution for all.  We are dealing with such a diverse ecosystem of technologies and business situations that we need to be thinking along the lines of multiple solution approaches.  And, I would suggest let’s not take innovation out of the way we think about mLearning.  I think there are great things to achieve in front of us, so let’s not make the mistakes of the past.

We have announced three Next Steps conference locations for 2011 — all in September. The first in Chicago; the second in London and the third in Bangkok. Please come.

At Next Steps you can network with your peers from different industries, share your best practices, provide your input into our new products, or just listen to how the latest developments in our enterprise knowledge, learning, assessment, compliance, and talent solutions can free up your people to do what they do best.

This year we will be offering a completely new NetDimensions Product Workshop on the second day led by our technical consultants and featuring two tracks with a total of eight different hands-on sessions. We invite you to enroll in this unique knowledge-packed training program to gain practical NetDimensions product insights that you can immediately apply in your own environments.

Come to the NetDimensions user conferences and let’s take the next steps together.

A tag cloud example of the power of visual representation (see below — click the image once or twice to make it full-size).

Or you can explore the original posting here.

Admittedly, even a list of lists is still subject to curation bias. However, the authors make a point of providing method and target disclosure. This is a great example of what can be done (efficiently) to give people serious, actionable information.

What could you do with this idea at your company? Think a Top 20 list for customer service strategies or a Top 10 list for sales with click-throughs going to explanations and war stories.

There is a brilliant instructional design lesson here.

There is a lovely post at TNW (The Next Web) on how open resource initiatives are putting first-rate academic teaching online for free.

You can find it here.

It got me thinking — it would be easy to incorporate some of this free material in corporate courseware and offer it via LMS catalogues. We have a publishing technology we call The Courseware Manager in our LMS which allows users to easily mix and match content inside a SCORM wrapper. It would be child’s play to bundle some of the open academic resources with company specific content and testing.

It’s an interesting idea. I wonder how many companies are doing things like this.

Fantastic series of pieces on how to think about and present data.

Terms like infographics and data animation don’t begin to explain the power of all of this new capability.

Find it here.

The Guardian, one of my favorite UK newspapers, just released an excellent, frightening article on Mexican drug cartels laundering money through an American bank, Wachovia. The drug money ended up in a lot of different places after winding its way through Mexican Casas de Cambio (money exchange and transfer services), the City of London and the world’s money laundering capital, Miami Florida.

One statistic that caught my eye was the amount of unchecked money Wachovia shifted from 2004 until the bank got caught out in 2010 — some US$378.4 billion, more than $4 billion of which Wachovia moved in cash. Some part of that total (the full numbers may never be known) was in effect, according to the Guardian, “no questions asked” banking services for drug dealers.

You can find the article here.

The ending of the story doesn’t look too bad for Wachovia or for its new owner Wells Fargo. Some public embarrassment, a fine, costs and a deferred prosecution, which means the company got its wrists slapped. As one security expert noted in the article, nobody in the boardroom ever got to hear the rattle of handcuffs.

Things don’t seem to be working out quite so well for Mexico.

Things may not be working out quite so well for the rest of us either. As Martin Woods, the whistle-blower who sparked the investigations, said:

“What happened at Wachovia was symptomatic of the failure of the entire regulatory system to apply the kind of proper governance and adequate risk management which would have prevented not just the laundering of blood money, but the global crisis.”

If you are responsible for learning and development, you are likely responsible for compliance training, certification and reporting too. This story drove home for me, yet again, just how important the compliance function is. Our clients tell us that compliance courseware, testing and policy and procedure documentation can take up anywhere up to 70 percent of the normal use of an in-house learning management system.

I wonder if we’re nearly as serious about it all as we should be. If you knew, if you truly understood that your failure to help properly communicate and enforce know-your-client and anti-money-laundering policies at your bank could contribute to mayhem and lawlessness in a country like Mexico, along with all of the social ills the drug trade causes everywhere, would the stakes suddenly feel different?

How about for health and safety standards? Dangerous goods handling? Workforce tolerance issues? Environmental safeguards?

What if we got serious, what if we got very pro-active and, for example, started sending weekly, thought provoking compliance questions to employees’ smart-phones? What if we gave surprise examinations with anyone who failed put on immediate unpaid leave pending re-certification? What if we got the CEO to host “what if” webinars on what constitutes best practice and what constitutes cause for immediate dismissal or referral to the authorities?

This all sounds harsh I know but the stakes are high. At least in aggregate, the stakes are much higher than we might think day to day.

My hometown newspaper, The South China Morning Post (SCMP), recently went live with a reader driven mashup site dedicated to reporting environmental damage. The SCMP calls the site Citizen Map. It looks like it’s gaining traction. The public responded with more than 20 tip-offs in the first few days.

Mashups are nothing new. Typical examples include real estate listing databases married to neighborhood maps and school district information, sites that track epidemic outbreaks around the world and geo-location restaurant guides.

But most mashups are meant to broadcast a single author’s voice, or at least a single group’s message. What the SCMP has done looks a little different. The paper has put together a number of services, some commercial, some open source, that let other people generate the content around a theme. Arguably, user generated content is nothing new either. Think Twitter or Facebook.  But Twitter and Facebook cater to everyone, or at least try to.

I would guess that the SCMP has no idea where this is going to go but the framework is clear: the SCMP has created a point solution (in contrast to an enterprise or utility solution) to aggregate community generated information on environmental damage. Individual postings might lead to follow-up investigations, government responses (one hopes), name and shame reporting or public debate.

The site is powered by an open source solution called Ushahidi. Ushahidi itself is fascinating, a software development project born out of a Kenyan political movement to remove corrupt and violent politicians. But what the SCMP has accomplished with the Ushahidi solution is interesting to me as a learning and development and performance support practitioner because it shows the power of what is increasingly becoming the way forward — the deep integration of easy-to-deploy open source/open standards solutions into commercial or semi-commercial user-facing point solutions, usually around a single theme or event and often with a known shelf-life.

Citizen Map includes, among other integrated services: Google maps, Twitter, SMS services, online form reporting and email.  The options allow for point-of-need or point-of-impulse interactions — when you’re hiking you can send an SMS and follow up with details later. With its defined scope, broad interaction affordances and the promise of real world follow up, the site is brilliant. It makes a difference.

Lessons for learning

• People pay attention — the power of open, community discussion cannot be underestimated. Budget holders tend to take notice when public sites aggregate and amplify broad concerns. Inside companies the same dynamics rule. If client, staff, shareholder and/or ecosystem partners start to speak in concert around defined interest areas, executives listen. Nothing drives change quite like fresh air.
• Learning and development, if we truly want a seat at the table, must become a bit more like the fifth estate — think CNN getting the story and facilitating dialogue. Reporting the news, providing a forum for the concerned and the experts and becoming good at supplying aggregation, editing and curation services — these things start to become the new focus. This means that the provision of some “training” services starts to look more like promotion of fast-moving information consumables rather than investment in long-term project outputs.
• Aspiring to be good at point solutions is great; it’s nothing to be ashamed of — on the spectrum from quick and dirty point solutions on the one end, through to interim, enterprise and long-term utility solutions on the other end, achievement on a series of point solutions is a fantastic career arc and truly useful to the organization.

In Born To Win, his book about the 1983 America’s Cup race, John Bertrand relates the story of Dennis Conner bragging that Bertrand and his fellow Australians would never beat Conner because Conner had a better boat and a better crew to sail it, a crew 100 percent made up of world-class, individual champions.

Bertrand said he didn’t need a team of individual winners because he had something better — a winning team.

The Australians made a lot of mistakes and suffered some spectacular hardware failures but, in the end, did beat Conner, a four-time America’s Cup winner.

In fact, Bertrand’s win took the cup away from the Americans for the first time in 132 years.

Science is now rallying behind John Bertrand’s view of success. New research from M.I.T. shows that team performance depends not so much on the team’s top performers or even on the team’s average intelligence but rather on group dynamics and emotional sensitivity. One of the key indicators of high performing teams is simply air time. Teams that let members talk tend to outperform and teams that include a high proportion of women tend to outperform too (are we really surprised?). From the Boston Globe article on the research:

Questions about how to make groups better have taken on new urgency as evidence has accrued that teams are usurping the central spot once occupied by solo contributors. A 2007 Science study found that in science and engineering, patents, social sciences, and even to some extent in the arts and humanities, there is a shift at work — new knowledge is increasingly being produced by teams.

So, aside from the obvious response about corporate social networks, what are the implications for learning and development programs? What should L&D professionals be looking at and trying to improve if company success is really more about group performance than up-skilling individuals?

I’m not sure there will be a single set of right answers to the challenge of this new (and fast growing) body of research but useful L&D responses might include:

• A new emphasis on socialization training during onboarding with periodic “social” follow-ups
• Top-down coaching programs to make sure senior executives are setting the right example
• Less money spent on individual self-improvement programs and a lot more money spent on initiatives that foster good group dynamics