As I prepare my keynote for our upcoming research conference, IMPACT 2009:  The Business of Talent®, I came to the realization that one of the most important issues in management today is the need to build talent and learning processes which make organizations ready for change. Why "ready for change?" Because "Enduring Organizations", those which survive and prosper over long periods of time, have one strong quality: they adapt. They have an uncanny ability to identify market shifts, make decisions, and move into new markets faster and more effectively than their competitors.  And today, as we will be explaining, we are undergoing "transformative change" - change which demands tremendous flexibility in our organizations. In my keynote and throughout the conference we will highlight some of these companies - and show you precisely what they do which makes them so flexible, nimble, and effective at getting out of bad businesses and positioning themselves quickly to take advantage of new markets.
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As Karen O'Leonard mentioned this week, customers are still not that happy with their Learning Management Systems.   Without mentioning any particular vendors, let me give you a little more detail on what we've found from our survey of around 520 corporate LMS users and managers: 87% of companies believe ease of use is critical to success:  25% believe their product fully meets that need 87% of companies believe e-learning content integration is critical to success:  33% say their LMS manages e-learning correctly 79% of companies believe reporting is critical to success:  only 17% say their LMS meets their reporting needs 55% of companies believe customization is critical to success:  only 10% say their LMS meets their customization needs. Amazingly enough, this satisfaction is as low (or lower) than we saw in our 2004 and 2007 LMS customer satisfaction research. Let's face it, learning technology is still one of the most difficult and rapidly changing areas of enterprise systems.   Organizations must carefully plot their learning systems strategy, constantly watch the vendor landscape, and work closely with IT to make their learning environments easy to use.
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In the last 6 weeks three of my closest friends have been laid off from their positions, and each case gives an example of how difficult it is to manage such programs effectively. Our research report The Manager's Guide to Successful Downsizing highlights many of these topics in detail, but let me give a few examples here. Case 1: Senior Program Director, very high performer, part of a project which is cancelled. This person is a very senior project and program manager at a large healthcare provider. He has a BS in Industrial Engineering from Cornell and an MS in Operations Research from the University of Michigan.
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