As Alex tells us all about the latest 'wave' of advertising below - I thought we could end the week with some stats from attending the recent EIAA conference (European Interactive Advertising Association). - Total Internet spend in 1999 came to £40m, which was seen back then as massive growth. Ten years later, we're now at £3.3 billion! - Ten years ago the three largest reaching sites in the UK were MSN, Yahoo and Freeserve! (remember Freeserve? and where is Google?) - Today, 45% of our Internet time is spent on just 10 sites, meaning the thousands of remaining domains have to fight it out for our remianing online time. Today our audience are'media multi-taskers' - consuming more than one media at a time - e.g. surfing online while watching TV etc etc In terms of the incredible transformation of the communications landscape, I really liked Evan Williams sentiment, on...

Global recession or not, the pace of internet technology development waits for no economic cycle it would seem. Recently google have announced their latest project – something that’s potentially so big they’ve broken with their usual “release it in beta & then keep working on it” approach and have started drawing attention to it months before it’ll be ready for public release. Google Wave promises to be a “new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year”. Twitter killer? Certainly looks like to me. It’s gonna dent the hell out of FaceBook & other such platforms too you’d have to bet. So what is Wave – well in their own words: A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message,...

Integrated Talent Management: Are You There Yet?

Kelly Services reminisces about its journey to deploying Cornerstone's global ITM suite - and shares tips with fellow HR and learning travelers - at Convergence 2009

 

Not too long ago, we announced Kelly Services as a new Cornerstone client.  Kelly is migrating to a global integrated talent management (ITM) system, with platforms for onboarding, learning, performance, succession, compensation and extended enterprise. What's compelling about Kelly's story is the size and scope of the implementation - at 659,000 users (650K temp and 8,900 FT employees) across 39 countries, it is likely the largest global SaaS deployment to date.

 

Kelly Services' corporate training and learning manager, Matt Ludwa, joined us at Convergence 2009 to share with his peers some key learnings from the company’s journey to deploying its global ITM suite - complete with detours, potholes, roadblocks and “hidden gem” finds. 

 

Like many other companies, Kelly’s Human Resources and Global Learning teams are in two different departments.  But in going through the process of replacing the company’s previous learning management system (SumTotal Docent LMS), synergies were revealed between the two teams.  They decided to work jointly to move to a comprehensive, global solution – one that would be a bigger win for the organization because it would:

 

• Better support Kelly’s global talent management initiatives
• Save money
• Create organizational efficiencies
• Build cooperation across the HR and learning teams
• And improve on the functionality of the outdated solution sets

 

As Matt put it, the next step was determining “how much the trip was going to cost.” 

 

With helpful input from Cornerstone, Kelly’s HR and learning teams assembled the business case for the C-level executives.  In addition to identifying expenditures for the previous LMS, the team identified future offsets.  For example, since Cornerstone is SaaS-based, no IT support is required, hosting fees would be eliminated, and less testing would be required.  There also would be process gains, such as forms for new employee onboarding.  But the biggest win would come from “single-sign-on” employee access, eliminating issues with people having to keep track of multiple passwords for various internal systems.  As simple as it sounds, forgotten passwords often prevented users from getting training when they needed it, and one-stop access could help to increase corporate compliance. 

 

Taking into account the expenditures, offsets and gains, Kelly’s team estimated the new ITM system would pay for itself in a year, with a net savings of $100 K over three years. 

 

So once you have the C-level buy-in, what does it take to ensure a large-scale global implementation runs smoothly?  According to Matt, it is “having a good itinerary” – defining at least at a high level where the organization is and where it wants to go in terms of its talent strategy.  A clear roadmap helps to:

 

• Ensure executives have a clear view of where you’re going
• Build excitement for the journey
• Avoid the “when are we going to be there” questions
• Ensure quick, on-time arrival – and at the promised destination
• Provide the needed information to “have fun when you get there”

 

Despite having a strategic roadmap, the implementation wasn’t without its “detours, potholes and roadblocks.” But these also provided some key implementation learnings for the Kelly team, such as:

 

• Make sure you know all of your requirements 
• Determine a way to do a pilot to test the system
• Get the hierarchy data into the application quickly so configurations can begin
• Gain consensus up front on how to configure the system (Kelly organized an unofficial advisory board for their deployment)

 

The implementation process also revealed some unexpected benefits.  For example, the Kelly team found they were able to come up with new and innovative ways for engaging employee usage of the system and achieving sign-offs on requirements such as compliance and ethics.  The team continues to find ways to drive people back to the application via staggered functionality/process launches, supported by communications that evangelize the system’s benefits.  In less than a month of deploying Cornerstone’s ITM system, Kelly’s learning team was able to garner 100 percent compliance – a major achievement.  Other quick wins included the roll-out of a new onboarding program and simplification of Kelly’s curricula. 

 

Ultimately, according to Matt, the secret to a successful global deployment of an ITM system boils down to four things:

 

• Demonstrating application benefits to achieve global executive sponsorship
• Knowing your regional requirements and audiences
• Communicating frequently
• Learning from previous missteps and keeping it simple when possible

 

Kelly, which had its initial deployment in the U.S. in February, continues to work with Cornerstone to get the whole suite implemented and integrated globally across the organization.  So, while the team hasn’t yet arrived at their ultimate destination, they are on the right path to providing value for job candidates, Kelly’s customers and Kelly’s suppliers so the organization can be better and stronger. 
 

Charles Coy is the Product Marketing Director for Cornerstone OnDemand

 

 

 

 

Dell have launched Della - a website for women and how their computers can help enhance their lives by looking cute, fashionable and help them count calories. Look above, at how the happy women, sit closely together with their pastel coloured laptops and share laughs, horopscopes and no doubt, are on Cosmo online, gleaning pearls of wisdom on how to make their relationship work. Puts me in mind of one of my favourite Harry Enfield schetches - Women know your limits So, how can I expect to benefit from a netbook as detailed on the Della site? Well, once I get beyond how darn cute they are I can easily find recipe's, count calories, watch fitness videos and ensure I shop successfully at vintage clothing stores. Then there is the accessories section - where I can shop to my hearts content. Oh dear...why are women seen as a specific niche...

Lately, I've been mulling over the reports that newspapers intend to charge for their online content. A futile exercise by Murdoch and the like, long after the dam wall has bust? or justified compensation for valuable content that in fairness should be paid for? It's a tricky one for sure. To pay or not to pay. In terms of recruitment, we blogged about the subscription model on recruitment sites, such as The Ladders a while back and more recently and much deeper into the recession, Matt has got the debate going nicely on his own blog. I read an article from the Observer recently and it made me think. It was all about Charles Percy Snows 'infectious idea/meme' that there exists two cultures in society. Literary Intellectuals v. Natural Scientists - both who had mutual incomprehension and mistrust which had negative repercussions for society. According to John Naughton, today its...

This was in the FT yesterday ... Future of Newspapers some very interesting points ... have a good old read.

What do Pancakes Have to do with Training?

Pearson's Convergence 2009 Case Study Presentation Examines Training as a Profit Center

 

Did you know your LMS could potentially be used to create a new profit center for your organization?  This was the subject of Pearson’s case study presentation, entitled “Training as a Profit Center,” at Cornerstone's Convergence 2009 client & partner conference.

 

Pearson is the leading pre K-12 curriculum, testing and software company in the U.S.  One of these programs is the Pearson School Systems, which includes solutions for student information, assessment, reporting and business.  Because School Systems is filled with several features and functions –- and schools have a wide variety of set-ups and needs –- training is critical in order to understand how to use the products. 

 

School districts have limited time to attend in-person training sessions, not to mention school budgets are getting smaller while the costs for Pearson to deliver classroom training (including travel) are increasing.  Training also is cyclical, making it challenging for Pearson to meet these spikes in demand. 

 

This leads me back to the name of my post:  What do pancakes have to do with training?

 

Pearson decided there was an opportunity to address these issues – AND create a new profit center – by providing distance learning courses.  Like pancakes, these courses need to be:

 

• Popular and “delicious” so people would “consume” them
• Quickly made, in order to meet demand and be timely and relevant
• Cheap to produce and easy to sell

 

As for providing online access to these courses, Pearson decided to tap into its Cornerstone LMS system, which it was already using internally for Pearson employees.  This way, school districts would be able to access the courses anytime, anywhere.

 

To facilitate the on-demand delivery the distance learning coursesto their extended enterprise of educators, Pearson worked with their Web team to take their internal Cornerstone system external.  Providing single sign-on for their customers was important, and the ease of configurability of Cornerstone’s system helped Pearson to enable this.  The result was Power Source, a Java-based portal designed by the Pearson team that integrates Cornerstone’s learning platform, allowing educators to go to one place to access all Pearson content.  Because Cornerstone easily integrates with other systems, users don’t see a difference between the Pearson site and the Cornerstone platform.  Pearson also worked with Cornerstone to ensure the system had the ability to accept and process purchase orders, which is the currency that schools use to pay for training. 

 

Pearson has a passion for the learner, so it was important to make their “hot cakes” sticky – meaning the courses needed to contain ideas that "stuck" with participants.  To achieve this, Pearson combines personalization with humor, brain-energizing content and pleasing aesthetics in order to make the courses memorable.  When users sign on to a course, the story is all about them.  Content is designed to exercise the mind and be active vs. passive.  Educators practice tasks through contextually based simulations they can apply in the real world.  And visuals for the courses fall under the “keep it simple” rule, consisting of hand-drawn graphics. 

 

Pearson is now able to provide educators with an affordable, convenient, simple and engaging solution for online training -– one that goes beyond WebEx and actually makes learning “cool.”  School districts can now purchase subscriptions to an entire series or course library and access it anytime, anywhere.  And since the solution is SaaS-based, scalability is a non-issue -– whether you have to train educators in one district or throughout an entire state.  It also has created efficiencies for Pearson –- with trainers having more availability to provide online support for educators vs. flying around the country to meet with individual clients and having limited availability. 

 

And that, folks, is the secret to making sure your learning courses sell like hot cakes.  
 

 

Charles Coy is the Product Marketing Director for Cornerstone OnDemand

We don’t tend to plug many conferences on Digital Recruiting but I couldn't let the opportunity to mention mine and Paul Harrison’s double header and double bill coming up over the summer pass by. As well as both speaking at the Onrec conference next month (Paul is talking social media and I’m chairing the panel debate) we are also both doing a turn at the UK’s first, Social Media Recruitment conference in July. Paul will be regaling the audience with his thoughts on how to put a corporate social media strategy together and I’ll be getting my crystal ball out to predict how social media will evolve in the future. Rumours that we’re both in the running for the most overexposed digital recruitment professional of 2009 award are of course completely unfounded ;-) Matt

It's Bank holiday Monday and in the absence of anything decent of TV, I've put on one of my favourite movies, Gone with the Wind whilst I tip-tap on my laptop. The opening quote of the movie describes the fall of the American old south - Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered. A Civilization gone with the wind..." Simultaneously I've been catching up with the latest news online and came across the article on how The Evening Standard is about to launch an advertising blitz ahead of it's relaunch this month- Evening Standard launches ad campaign to say sorry to Londoners After carrying out market research it found that Londoners have deserted the paper due to it being overly negative, too partisan and anti Ken Livingstone, too national in its outlook and not London focused enough. '...Buses and tubes will carry...

I’ve already vented here on the broader issues of the many social networking sites out there. And I had to laugh out loud when someone tweeted this week about how to solve the problem. In seriousness, the individual suggested you have two facebook pages (one personal, one professional), two twitter accounts, and who knows how [...]