What happens when your e-learning strategy isn’t aligned with your company's other strategies—or worse, you don’t even have one? Because it will suffer from lack of coordination and focus, there likely will be a duplication of efforts and inefficiencies. Your organization may experience internal skirmishes, if not full-gear battles. More important, you can count on incurring costs associated with lost opportunities. Here’s a nine-step process to help align learning efforts to business results.

Many of us have read Alice in Wonderland. As children, we were enthralled, amused, and quite taken with the antics of the Cheshire Cat. He seemed so crazy, yet made so much sense. Well, I believe the Cheshire Cat was on to something that has meaning for us in the business realm. He reminds us that if we don’t know where we’re going, any road will take us there.

Organizations face many e-learning choices. Synchronous or a-synchronous courses? Blended or self-paced programs? Virtual or instructor-led classes? Bulletin boards, discussion groups, or blogs? Courses or job aids? Hosted or in-house? LMS or LCMS? It’s difficult to separate out fact from fiction, leading-edge from bleeding-edge, and myth from reality. Therefore, decisions frequently are made just for the sake of having made a decision. The road taken is often the one that was better sold, the cheapest, or the easiest to agree on—rather than the best choice for your organization. Such decisions fail to reflect a strategy of any kind. They are happenstance.

Read More...

By Lance Dublin

Lance Dublin is an independent management consultant based in San Francisco, California. He specializes in corporate learning and change management. His emphasis is in strategy development, program design, and change implementation. Lance can be reached by email at ldublin@pacbell.net or by visiting his Website; www.lancedublin.com.

Article source: Learning Circuits