How would you rate the amount of information available within your organisation on a scale 1-5?

If you gave a high rating (and I suspect a lot of you will have in this information-rich age) then here’s another question – how easy is it to get to the information you need, when you need it and turn it into the knowledge you need to achieve your organisation’s goals?

Do you feel like the former CEO of Unilever who said that “If Unilever only knew what it knows, it would double its profits?”

In a recent meeting with a global FMCG client, we were told that the new learning platform we were in the process of reviewing made “finding useful links and information so much easier – compared to using the organisation’s extensive and state-of-the art intranet”.

So was their intranet really an out-of-control monster with too many sites, pages of information and hundreds of documents and other resources well hidden from view?  Or was this an example of how the learning department can add real value?

I’d say that here it was the latter and that this illustrates where the learning and development function should have a pivotal role.  Harnessing the immense pool of knowledge you have at your disposal (often more than just the intranet) and developing people’s capacity to find and interact with the right information in a meaningful way.

Information of many types becomes your “Corporate Toolkit” if you like – and there are three initial steps that you can take to harness its power:

1)    Identify what is in your Corporate Toolkit

2)    Moving L&D to play “midfield” to help your people learn faster

3)    Blend in smart learning and development practices

What’s in the Corporate Toolkit?

I can’t remember where I heard it, but I like the adage ‘Information flows and knowledge grows’ and the Corporate Toolkit can be thought of as the flow of information and tools that your people need in order to develop their own ‘knowledge’, capabilities and competencies.  It potentially encompasses the full range of information, insights, experience and creativity available within the organisation.

Although that sounds like nothing new, what is evident over the last few years is that with the emergence of new (especially web-based) technologies, the way people interact with information and with each other is changing.  Corporate information can be shared over dispersed networks of people, who in turn have greater possibilities to access and create further “nuggets” of information both individually or in collaboration with colleagues who may physically be sitting many miles and time-zones away:

-       Corporate and functional web pages – internal and external

-       Dashboards and reports (e.g.: market, company and competitor information)

-       Newsletters

-       Documents (e.g.: manuals, procedures, case-studies)

-       Presentations

-       Video/podcasts

-       Links and signposts

-       E-learning programmes and resources

-       Expert advice, discussion and debate (forums, messaging, FAQs, blogs, wikis, social networking and other web tools).

The fact that there are so many accessible forms of rich information doesn’t necessarily create value in itself. “People are five times more likely to ask a colleague for information than to consult any online resource.” (Source: 2005 MIT research findings).

Is this really surprising?  Your people have enough to do than to be searching for just the right pieces of information/guidance that they need.  In essence, the challenge is not to manage all of the information, rather to help people to get hold of the right information at the right time in order to build capabilities to do their job better.

Moving L&D “midfield” to help your people learn faster

“The ability to learn faster than our competitors may be our only sustainable competitive weapon.” – Arie de Geus, former strategist for Royal Dutch/Shell.

If helping people to learn – and to learn quickly – is so vital, then your learning and development function may need a broader focus than it has had in the past, with a mandate to increase peoples’ capacities to handle new strategies and external factors by enabling them to use the collective knowledge of the organisation – the Corporate Toolkit – and providing guidance, instruction and pathways towards using that new information.

The role becomes less like a goal keeper – defensive and reactive – and more like a mid-field player: constantly passing the right information to the ‘attackers’ to allow them to score (to do their job effectively).   This allows L&D to not only develop informed information seekers, but also to deliver the core content to people who need it right away (hot media) and also to signpost/trigger the usage of different ‘Learn More’ resources to people who may wish to access it straight away or at a later time depending on their personalised learning needs and preferences (cool media).

Blend in smart learning and development practices

So how can learning and development provide guidance, instruction and pathways to the right elements in your ‘Corporate Toolkit’?

The answer lies in how the world of technology (and how people react to it) is changing at an incredible rate.  Once upon a time, when the pilot shut down the engines of the aircraft, passengers readied themselves for the torment of the baggage carousel.  Now, the silence is broken by the noise of mobile phones being switched on and beeping as incoming messages arrive.  People can’t bear being away from technology nowadays – email, text messaging, the web. Are decisions being made without our invaluable input? How can I survive without being able to Google anything?

The opportunity lies in harnessing our technology to enable the evolution of the new pathways and platforms for knowledge networking and exchange throughout learning and development.

Here’s a top-5 list of features that need to be combined for what ‘good looks like’:

1. Web 2.0 type learning platforms that incorporate your Corporate Toolkit of ‘learn more’ resources, either physically (as downloadable files) or as pathways (links/URLS) and which can be seeded from different points in different learning journeys.
2. Intelligent tagging of the Corporate Toolkit – resources, people and course content – using taxonomies related to usage rather than ownership so that meaningful connections and searches can be made.
3. Inclusion of predictive personalised information flow (recommendations): “Because you are in this role, like these types of courses, are connected with these people, you will like this particular case-study”. Instead of searching for data, data finds us. In a sense, data knows us.
4. E-learning toolkits with triggers (such as roadmaps or decision trees) for learners to use – identifying learning and information resources relating to a specific business area/skill/challenge along with hints, tips and encouragement for using the resource/tool.
5. Collaborative spaces (such as community forums) to build communities of practice to share and build knowledge.  Spaces where commentaries can be added to resources so that context and enrichment is integrated with data and information – especially to capture that most elusive of expertise, the ‘tacit’ knowledge and expertise that has not yet been written down: “63% of employees complain of the difficulty in accessing undocumented knowledge as a major problem.”–KPMG survey, 2003.

And to get people to use it?

Keep It Simple Stupid, an expression that has become increasingly dear to me – we all should have a lot more simplicity in our lives.  As an electronics retail client commented recently: “When our people have to think to find information, it’s time for us to rethink.”

Simple and seamless is what you should aim for.

Jo Kaptijn, Learning Designer