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University 2.0
September 06, 2007
The time has arrived for a new kind of virtual corporate university. Is your organization ready?
By Holly Doelzalek
Why did Cerner Virtual University become Cerner KnowledgeWorks last year? Robert Campbell says it's more than a fancy name change. A change in philosophy and strategy dictated not only the new name, but a completely different organization and focus for Cerner's virtual corporate university.
"We called it KnowledgeWorks because it's like a utility: always on and always available," says Campbell, vice president and CLO of Cerner, a health-care information technology company in Kansas City, MO. "Our philosophy is that what we learn today will be used by others tomorrow, so our learning organization should be active and living, continually growing and updated, rather than a static database or course catalog."
That's why Cerner KnowledgeWorks is a virtual corporate university, but it's also both more and other than the usual corporate university. Its content is organized into three types of knowledge stores: dynamic, moderated, and codified. "The dynamic is real-time content that flows back and forth, such as e-mails, instant messages, or conference calls," explains Campbell. "Moderated content includes best practices, such as case studies or wikis that capture information about situations where we did well and how we did it. Codified content is more formal documentation of official company practices, and includes installation guides, help files, and formal training or courses."
To make sure that KnowledgeWorks doesn't turn into a teeming mass, with nuggets of useful information sprinkled among tons of marginally useful junk, the content is moderated from many perspectives. Field experts, subject matter experts, and councils for each of Cerner's formal learning communities work together to sift through all of this content, prune out what isn't relevant, and regularly update what is so that everything users encounter is fresh and at least potentially useful.
The process came about in response to a concern on the part of Cerner's senior leadership that the human capability to meet and execute on company goals needed more support, including a more aggressive approach to gathering day-to-day working knowledge. The idea is to capture and organize that knowledge in a moderated and carefully considered way. "Formal learning is a significant part of our strategy, but it's not the only or even necessarily the more important part," says Campbell.
Virtual? University?
The virtual kind of corporate university has more of a foothold these days than the fixed, bricks-and-mortar kind, not just in large companies but in medium-sized companies that once used to shy away even from a learning management system (LMS) purchase. Sure, GE still has its Crotonville campus and McDonald's has its Hamburger University, and those bricks-and-mortar campuses are a huge part of each company's success. But many of the companies that Karen Barley works with have been more interested in avoiding the infrastructure costs of a dedicated learning facility.
"For the clients I've worked with, virtual doesn't mean exclusively technology-delivered learning," says Barley, the president of Corporate University Enterprise, a strategic learning consulting firm in Falls Church, VA. "They're virtual in that the university's primary presence in employees' lives is virtual—the interface or the portal—and they don't have one designated and dedicated space for all training."
In that sense, Barley says, the distinction between a virtual and a fixed corporate university is easy to miss. Both models use a mixture of delivery for the learning they offer, and a virtual university is often a portal to all kinds of learning, both virtual and fixed—e-learning; instructor-led or classroom training; self-paced learning; coaching; mentoring; and communities of practice, both online and in person.
"The terminology isn't great, because we really don't have good definitions for each," says Kevin Wheeler, founder and president of Global Learning Resources, a training and development consulting firm in Fremont, CA. "Both methods often require a blended model—with most virtual universities, some of the coursework is delivered online, but few have gone beyond that."
In fact, the very term, "corporate university," often is used so loosely as to render the term almost meaningless. Many organizations simply rename their training department "Company University" without building in the connection between learning and company goals that the distinction implies. And other companies, despite the accuracy of the corporate university label, avoid using it in order to increase its appeal—or protect its image. "Some companies feel it's very important to create a trademark or specific name, but many don't want to use the term, 'university,'" says Barley. "A 'university' can sound exclusive or elitist, and suggest grades and haves or have-nots, especially if you have a shop floor where most of the employees have a high-school education, and 'university' can be the exact wrong word to use. Other countries often prohibit the use of the word without the proper accreditation, so global organizations especially can be skittish about using it."
Losing Control
The term, "corporate university," implies a great deal about its function. For many years, corporate universities have imitated real universities in that they have a catalog of set courses that are offered on a regular basis. Although the goal is different—a fully trained employee rather than a well-rounded, educated adult—the underlying philosophy of learners coming to learn preset topics is similar.
But the new generation of corporate universities will have less in common with higher education and more in common with the World Wide Web. It's long been said that informal learning outstrips formal learning by a wide margin at any company, but technology and attitude finally are enabling training professionals to act on that fact, and to facilitate and support informal learning even in the formal structure of a corporate university.
"Especially in virtual universities, a more holistic view of what learning is all about is leading to more integration of informal learning, collaborative spaces such as wikis, blogs, video, and so on," says Wheeler. "A next-generation corporate university ultimately will be a mesh-up of those options so a learner can assemble relevant material on the fly based on his or her real-time needs, rather than a structured situation where someone else dictates what learning they need."
In that sense, the evolution of the corporate university mirrors the evolution of the World Wide Web. The phrase, "Web 2.0," denotes the evolving use of the Web for collaboration, sharing, and two- or more-way interaction, such as wikis, social networking sites, and other Web-based communities. Although learning departments long have encouraged this kind of learner interaction, the incorporation of such Web-2.0 practices in the structure of the corporate university suggests a sea change in the way learning is perceived. "Web 2.0 is about giving up control and letting users talk among themselves to figure out what they need from learning," says Wheeler. "That idea might be scary for some baby boomers, because they're used to a more hierarchical view of the world, but it's going to make sense to the Gen X and Gen Y learners, who are more used to this kind of interaction."
If it isn't Broken…
What's wrong with the old model, where corporate universities offered courses that were revisited once a year to make sure they aligned with company goals? Stacey Harris argues that model once worked, but now once a year is not enough.
"The global market shifts so quickly, and a company has to meet customer needs daily, which means the nimblest companies are revisiting their business goals in some way every month," says Harris, an advisory consultant for e-learning research firm Bersin & Associates in Stamford, CT. "Learning has to be in step with that, so it can help the company shift when it has to."
Kee Meng Yeo, learning director in the Americas for London-based food and personal-care products manufacturer Unilever, found that to be true when he was at Johnson & Johnson and charged with creating Johnson & Johnson eUniversity. "We had a highly decentralized organization with a lot of learning taking place, and resources all over the world that had to be brought together, so a virtual university made the most sense," Yeo says. "But we needed to increase the company's rate of learning by leveraging our learning resources across the organization and increase our speed to market by facilitating the availability of those resources, so we could get them out to employees as quickly as possible to help them do their jobs."
In fact, Global Learning Resources' Wheeler believes the requirement for speedy delivery and the desire for the integration of formal and informal learning may change the role of the training professional. "Instead of dictating structured learning, the training professional will become someone who can sort through all kinds of different learning resources, including classroom training but also all the collaborative and unstructured resources, and steer learners in the right direction for their particular learning need," Wheeler says. "The training professional will give them the resources and let them chat, collaborate, share, and discover what they need to learn. That's world class, when you combine formal learning with other useful material and match the learner with what he or she needs in terms of background, interest, and specific needs."
Harris believes this kind of approach is better than the traditional corporate university approach. Rather than a centralized model of learning, Harris argues for a shared-services model. "It's a more federated model where certain shared or common services such as the corporate university are used across the enterprise, but there are also performance consultants or learning professionals embedded in each business unit," Harris says. "It's less of a training perspective—create a catalog, design the courses, and wait for learners to come—and more of a solutions or performance perspective. How can some type of learning help your business unit to solve a specific problem quickly?"
Sidebar: Quick Tips
No two virtual universities will look alike. But some general principles apply to creating or updating a virtual university.
• Measure, measure, measure. "Especially with a virtual university, you must have clear performance metrics for what will be produced by whatever you need money for," says Robb Powell, the president of Gradepoint, a learning consulting firm in Detroit. Kee Meng Yeo, learning director in the Americas for Unilever, warns against going straight to the easy metrics, such as "we saved $20,000 by converting to e-learning!" That's because the point is to show how the money you spent led to efficiencies, better performance, or valuable talent development. Otherwise, you'll find yourself trapped in a yearly cycle of having to show more savings.
"Savings are what I like to call blue dollars," says Cerner Vice President and CLO Robert Campbell. "It's hypothetical or play money. But if you measure, say, how much you were able to accelerate the development of new consultants so they're able to bill their hours sooner, that's a real dollar/cost comparison of value to the company."
• Return on investment (ROI) may not be the best way to pursue evaluation. "Instead, measurements around actionable performance indicators make more sense," says Bersin & Associates advisory consultant Stacey Harris. "For example, if the learners are salespeople, you can use indicators that equate to more sales. That way, you show you're following the same scorecard they are."
• Easy does it. Whether you're converting from classroom to virtual or setting up a brand new virtual university, the transition has to be gentle and carefully thought out. When Yeo began putting together Johnson & Johnson eUniversity, he deliberately avoided starting from scratch. Instead of installing a new learning management system (LMS), he found better ways to use the old one, and he did the same with the portal technology IT already had in place. "By taking that approach, we saved time and money and we honored the people who had worked hard to put those things together originally," he says.
• Don't rush in and convert everything, or dump in everything you have. Not all instructor-led training will be easily converted, and online or virtual versions of that training will be paced and segmented differently than its in-person version. "You have to break things up into 15-minute chunks," says Gradepoint's Powell.
• Give learners time to get used to the new delivery method.
• When adding less structured content, such as blogs, wikis, and podcasts, make your selection process careful and ruthless. Quality should win out over depth as you're launching the first content, Powell says. "You can show the value of what you're doing by maintaining a consistent quality over time and by continually adding new content while updating the existing material."
• Put yourself in the learner's place, and ask yourself, "Why would I use this?" The first step is to align your offerings with the organization's business needs or mission. Then drill down to the performance of the people the university is for, so you can tailor your content to their needs. One solution is to work toward building in competencies. For example, knowing what it takes to perform certain roles helps you to determine what would be helpful to employees in those roles. A learner who wants to be a director of production, who can find out what training, development, or content he or she needs by using the university portal, has a definite reason to use that portal.
Sidebar: Higher Education
Whether virtual or physical, corporate universities can learn quite a bit from the booming curriculums of the more than 130 accredited online providers of higher education in the U.S. The Online University Pavilion on the Training Tech Solutions Expo floor (October 15-16 at the Salt Palace Convention Center) will reveal what the most effective online and corporate universities are doing, what's next, and what online universities might have in store for your training program.
Taking virtuality one step further, check out the Serious Games and Simulations Pavilion at Training Tech Solutions for state-of-the-art demos of the latest learning simulation and gaming wares.
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