We had a wide ranging discussion of how learning will change and evolve from a traditional function to one that is more integrated into the fabric of every employee’s life. Key themes that emerged include:

1. The team from Sun Microsystems kicked off the event with a major theme we discussed for the rest of our day and half. The trend, dubbed, “Learning 2.0″ is moving corporate learning from structured programs to collaborative learning experiences. This means top-down push learning is being replaced by self service “pull” learning with an overall goal of taking our General Motors production model for designing and delivering learning and shifting this to a Google-like search model.

Sun is determined to push its LMS system (currently the heart of its learning system) to the periphery of a new, strategic (and open source) tool that will allow flexible, web-enabled learning from anywhere, including mobile devices, and will encourage employees to contribute to course content creation.

2. Learning is becoming more social, informal, continuous and embedded in our daily activities. While the term “social learning” has gained a cult status, the ability to collectively create and collectively understand is becoming a mandatory skill for employees at all levels. In fact, credit Suisse shared their online virtual communities of practice model which connects employees to others in the organization based on their skills and knowledge sets. It makes it easy to find expertise, to “know what Credit Suisse knows.”
3. Learning is becoming more mobile. Millennials view the Internet as something that comes to them not something they go to. With over 2 billion mobile devices in use, mobiles have now eclipsed PC’s in the marketplace. We should remember that as we consider delivery options for current and new programs. At Sun Microsystems, technical training is being delivered globally to field engineers on their iPhones, seems like this model will continue to gain traction in the coming months.
4. Finally, after many demo’s of new tools, programs, games for learning and metaphorical learning experiences, we closed with the need for learning professionals to:
   • Focus less on how technology is changing learning and more on how the learners, especially the 80 million Millennials, are bringing new expectations and demands to the workforce. These include being able to use the same applications they have grown up with, such as Instant Messaging, Mobile web conferencing, BlackBerries and video-sharing on-the-job.
   • Be open to new needs and expectations of four generations in the workforce.
   • Understand and share how to make change happen in an organization. It’s not easy but there are lessons in how to improve your odds of success with implementing innovations in corporate learning.

if you are interested in learning more about the Learning Innovation Network, send me an email at jeanne@newlearningplaybook.com We are looking for more learning departments operating “on the edge.”

“How do I identify the stars within the enterprise, motivate them to share their knowledge and then empower them with a toolkit that is seamless?”

Do you recognize yourself in this quote?

In fact, AMR Research estimates that in 2007 the total amount spent on knowledge management was $73 billion and this is expected to grow by 16% in 2008. Why? I believe that increasingly companies are going to great lengths to capture and utilize the vast amounts of unstructured information that is flowing through, and around them. KM (Knowledge Management) is a vast, catch-all phrase that encompasses all kinds of software from portals to search engines to content management systems. Now the decisions around how to unlock this knowledge becomes more complex because more and more questions get raised:

• Does this synch with your company’s Social Media strategy?
• Do you want your application to be “searchable?”
• Can users create content that is both public and private?
• Finally, what polices and guidelines need to change as you attempt to “unlock” this knowledge for the benefit of all?

According to Forrester Research, 50% of the Global 2000 are planning to adopt some type of enterprise 2.0 solutions by 2013. This equates to a $4.6 billion market. The chart below shows how companies of various sizes are looking to adopt Web 2.0 in their respective organizations. So, if you work at a Global 2000 company (defined as having 20,000 employees) your organization is either in a buying mode or considering buying enterprise 2.0 software. Here are a few questions for you:

• Is your Human Resources and/or Learning department involved in this decision?
• Have you made a presentation to your department and to your IT department about the issues you need solved in order to unlock this knowledge?
• Have you created relationships with key “influencers” in the organization so your point of view is understood and heard.

Let me know where you are in this process. What’s clear is that with a market the size of $4.6 billion there will be a number of alternatives to consider in building the best solution to tapping into your organization’s collective wisdom.

The May issue of Harvard Business Review is now off the shelves but the cover story, entitled, “Leadership’s Online Labs,” by Bryon Reeves, Thomas Malone and Tony O-Driscoll has become a buzz among Chief Talent Officers and Chief Learning Officers.

If you are like me and did not grow up playing multiplayer online games also known as MMORPG’s (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) it is important to give you some context. Multiplayer online games are a large and growing market with current estimates topping 50 million users. World of Warcraft alone has 10 million players who each pay a subscription fee of $15 a month. According to the Palo Alto Research Center, participants’ play an average of 20 hours a week, their average age is 27 years old and 85% are male. They are not exactly your typical corporate employee, but the question is this: What can we learn from how these virtual teams form to solve a problem and then disband?

Questions about what the participants do when they play these games has caught the interest of corporate talent and learning officers. Essentially, they are facing the same organizational challenges as many of our leaders in today’s FORTUNE 500 firm, namely they are:

• In constant recruitment mode
• Experimenting with being creative about motivating and rewarding top talent
• Using the latest collaborative tools so global teams can be constantly connected to each other
• Incorporating more personalization into day-to-day interactions with team players

So, if we believe these online games are a preview for what leaders will be facing in the next few years, what can we learn about what works? Here are some lessons and observations from Leadership’s Online Labs article:

1. Think first about how to change the game rather than solely focusing on “building individual leadership competencies.” Two suggestions: First think about offering immediate individual and non-monetary team rewards. This can range from public ratings and ranking systems recognizing stellar individual contributions (think Amazon ratings here) to devising a game-inspired set of incentives where players have visibility into what their reward will be if their team is successful. As the HBR article states, “the power of online games is that people care very much about the virtual gains and losses, even if the currency that records them can’t be exchanged for dollars.” So the processes we set up for documenting individual contributions and allowing these to be rated, commented on and ranked is a very powerful incentive.
2. Create more detailed views into the profiles of team members as I discussed last week in my article, “Performance Learning 2.0“. The static employee profile used for decades by human resource officers is slowly being replaced by a “personal employee tag cloud” where you can view a snapshot of an employee’s personal and professional life—courses taken, language fluency, projects worked on and work/life goals for next few years. But a note of caution here, employees will ask how this data will be used and companies will need to develop a set of guidelines and policies if they go down this road.

Some questions for you and your teams as you leverage the lessons of online games:

• What is your Facebook Strategy? This has come to mean do you have a strategy for embedding social media into your learning/talent development offerings? This does not have to also mean losing control or taking risks regarding security. Rather, it implies that your organization is making a commitment to experiment with using social media as a way to become relevant to the Millennial Generation.
• How much of your Learning & Talent Management staff is from the Millennial Generation? Are you tapping into this mindset as you partner with your customers to design and develop new programs?
• Are you taking the lead to “educate” your organization’s IT department on how game-inspired processes and incentives may need to be created to attract, develop and retain Millennial Generation. For example, have you created a presentation on social media for learning and shared this with your IT department? Remember IT departments need to be brought along early rather than having Human Resources “come up with a solution and then try selling it to IT.” One way companies are doing this is appointing a Chief Technology Officer for their learning department.

Please share your thoughts with our growing community and me.

This consumerization of business software, a term coined by Gartner, Inc, will have a tremendous impact on our employees. Increasingly, employees on-the-job will come to expect software to be as easy to use as creating a profile on Facebook or an account on Ebay. They will no longer tolerate training courses or training manuals that go through endless “how-to-use” scenarios. Instead, they will expect an “IPod” experience — elegant, fun and engaging. Take a moment to think about the software your department uses, can you say this? Often the norm is one where employees endure lengthy training or spend hours poring over reference manuals only to be more confused than when they first downloaded the program.

One company leading this movement is SuccessFactors, a company providing performance and talent management solutions to over 3 million employees in 1,750 companies. Looking at the current solutions and those about to be released, it seems clear such sites as Facebook, Ebay and Amazon have inspired them. The latest offering of SuccessFactors, called SuccessDirectory, is a Web 2.0-based collaboration solution that enhances a company’s Employee Profile section in its Performance Management solution to include social media technologies like tagging and social networking.

Let’s assume for the moment that you work on a global team and collaborate everyday with team members across the globe that you have never met in person. Wouldn’t it be great if you could create a profile here where you could share your educational background, work history, post a photo of your choosing, list your professional training, languages you currently speak, ones you want to learn over next few years, books and music you enjoy, hobbies and some information about your family? In fact, creating and sharing your profile, could really help you get to know your virtual team members better and may even lead to doing your job better.

Why will this movement be so important? Well, if you have a teenager, like I do, you know how they download new software or personalize their cell phone. Do they ever read the manual? Of course not. They just dive in and use it. With 80 million Net Gener’s about to enter the workforce these Millenials will demand their professional networking be similar to how they build their personal networks. But as the head of Talent Management or Learning at your organization, here are some questions I would ask a company touting an enhanced Performance Management solution:

• What has been the research with Millennials in using performance management solutions with a social networking component?
• Do these programs impact recruitment and retention of Millennials?
• Can anyone across the entire organization access my profile or is it like Facebook where you can grant access?
• What is the process for updating these internal profiles if the new data is outside taking a new course?

Let’s say I just learned a new language “on my own time” but updating this may be the last thing I remember to do. But if I know that updating my internal profile will impact my chances for promotion, then I am motivated to review my profile on monthly basis and update with every new skill, course, etc.

Share your experience with integrating social networking into performance management. What has been the reaction of your employees (especially the Millennials where social networking is in their DNA)?

I have been giving seminars this past month on how companies are experimenting with social media to maximize knowledge sharing and collaboration and one theme is consistent across companies of various sizes and locations: they are turning to their training departments to be the test beds for using new social media tools like blogs and wiki’s.

This is the case with Jet Blue University (JBU), the corporate university of Jet Blue Airlines. Jet Blue University has 200 faculty spread across three locations, in Orlando, Florida (where they train flight crews), in Queens, NY (where they train operations and technical crews) and in Salt Lake City ( the training arm for reservations and customer services representatives).

Early in 2008, Jet Blue University powered its training faculty with a Web 2.0 toolkit of blogs and wiki’s as a way for them to share best practices and be the pioneers for social media tools. Murry Christensen, Director of Learning Technologies at Jet Blue University, says that the main driver to experimenting with these new technologies is to capture process improvements and “next” practices that are working among faculty across the country.

It really makes a lot of sense for companies to use their “learning organization” to test out new ways to collaborate and share best practices. First, for employees in the learning department of an organization, part of their job is to share best practices around the enterprise. However, often they have been frustrated with their company’s attempts at knowledge management systems. So now they can become blogger champions and learn first-hand the power of social media while using the tools to do their job—share lessons learned across their community of peers..

Secondly, while the training faculty may have good intentions about sharing best practices, they often lack an easy tool that allows them to collaborate with their peers. So, I can see how empowering the training faculty to be a community of blogger and wiki champions can create excitement and even be a vehicle to re-invent and re-brand an entire learning organization. Some topic areas to think about having your faculty share best practices using blogs and wikis’ include, new-hire employee on-boarding, leadership development of high potentials and even company-wide blogging guidelines, assuming the company then decides to expand this initiative enterprise-wide.

Finally, professionals in a company’s learning organization want to “role model” what is expected across the organization. What better way to be a role model business unit than to be the first to use these new social media tools.

The Jet Blue University’s social platform, which went live early this year, was provided by Awareness, a company that focuses on delivering enterprise-wide blogs and wiki’s to both internal and external communities.

In fact, the folks at Jet Blue University are so enamored with their “experiment” that they went ahead and made a series of videos describing why they did this. Tune in to hear what they say below:

So, is your learning department taking the lead to “test out” new social media tools for the enterprise? What has been your experience to date?