In this first post, part of the Friday series “LMSs that kick ass,” I’ll be highlighting one Learning Management System (LMS). First up is Cornerstone OnDemand.
I met Charles Coy, Director, Product Marketing, at our 2008 Innovations in Learning Conference (Cornerstone OnDemand was a sponsor). I can tell you that’s he’s passionate about his work. Clearly, Cornerstone OnDemand ‘gets it.’ Via an email interview, I spoke with Charles about what Cornerstone OnDemand is working on and look forward to viewing a demo of their new release in December. I encourage you to engage Charles here to learn more. Check out the ‘difficulties’ answer at the end and let me know if that rings true.
Q: What social media tools is Cornerstone OnDemand incorporating into their LMS?
Cornerstone Connect is the company’s new enterprise social networking platform. This is a full social networking and communities environment, complete with professional networking features (rich user profiles, communities of practice, expertise location, alumni networks, etc.) and user-generated content/Web 2.0 features (blogs, wikis, syndication, surveys/polls, discussion forums, tag clouds, file/document/video/podcast libraries, etc.).
By encouraging collaboration and making it easy to join communities of practice, Cornerstone Connect fosters social learning, organizational memory, professional networking, and better communication across the employee base and the extended enterprise.
It is critical to note that Cornerstone is, first and foremost, a talent management company. Cornerstone Connect aims to amplify the talent management processes our clients are already engaged in by providing complementary and supplementary capabilities. The following are some of Cornerstone’s explicit business cases for social networking in talent management:
§ Employee onboarding – Cornerstone Connect takes the strategic onboarding process to its full potential by including the element of socialization – cited by Aberdeen as being a critical component.
§ Training / informal learning – If the oft-cited T&D aphorism is true (80% of training budgets are spent on formal learning, but fully 80% of what people actually learn is informal, social, on-the-job), then Cornerstone Connect is there to enable informal (collaborative) learning by networking people and driving easy access to geographically dispersed collective knowledge.
§ Employee performance support – It’s not what you know, but WHO you know. High-performers excel because they are well-networked in the organization and Cornerstone Connect provides tools to facilitate expertise location, professional networking, and ongoing participation in communities of practice.
§ Workforce and succession planning / Internal recruiting — Better visibility into informal networks enables bottom-up, socially-driven succession planning (more powerful than typical C-level).
§ Alumni/retiree engagement networks – Alumni and retiree networks are a great first step for an organization wanting to test social networking waters. Build communities (famously like McKinsey already does) to keep alumni and retirees engaged with the organization (for business development, organizational memory, and potential re-hires).
§ Customer communities / Partner communities – serving an extended enterprise audience to develop customer engagement, customer self-service, and partner/channel enablement communities where successful customers and partners can interact with like-minded participants. Cornerstone already offers training for the extended enterprise; this is a logical extension of that practice area.
Cornerstone Connect is being released to general availability in early December. (Screenshot below)
What drove your decision to incorporate social media tools into your LMS?
Cornerstone positions its entire integrated talent management system around the concept of three pillars: Connect, Develop, Perform.
This positioning is based on market and demographic drivers that the company sees impacting its current clients and prospective sales:
The highly networked organization – people are collaborating and communicating in new ways; they are demanding faster, more responsive methods for transferring knowledge and for learning. This is based in part on global, geographically dispersed workforces; an increase in remote workers; and the short information cycles of the knowledge economy.
Further, generational impacts drive Cornerstone’s approach. Gen Y is entering the workforce at one end, bringing with it new expectations about communication, collaboration, work styles, and career development. At the other end of the workforce, retiring Baby Boomers are taking an entire stratum of senior leadership skills and organizational memory. Social media tools can address the changes at both ends of the workforce.
As a result of these and other drivers, Cornerstone has spent the past 8-10 months developing (entirely in-house; entirely Software-as-a-Service) an rich enterprise social networking platform to help clients amplify their existing talent and people management processes.
If you could predict what LMSs will look like in three years, what do you see?
Cornerstone believes that the way that people learn today demands that the LMS evolves. Structured, formal learning activities will not go away; and the need for the delivery and tracking of professional development content will persist. But in the trenches, driven by demographic and economic factors, line employees will no longer accept sitting in a classroom or enduring a linear e-learning class as a prescribed form of learning (especially of learning in the context of career development).
Incorporating multiple modalities of learning is not the challenging part. We can build communities of practice into business workflows and develop social media environments. The challenges, in Cornerstone’s view, revolve around engagement and tracking. Getting people to contribute and then assessing the value of this 80% social learning element for the organization.
In the context of talent management, learning and social learning become part of an integrated whole — using the LMS and collaborative learning to boost ongoing employee performance. This includes ensuring that employees are properly networked within the organization so that learning and knowledge transfer happens all the time without the need for structured intervention. When I need an answer to a question that will enable me to do my job better, an integrated search shows me classroom, e-learning, social learning, documents, blogs, discussions, podcasts to subscribe to – and it’s all immediately at my fingertips.
What difficulties are you seeing in the incorporation of social media among your current customers/potential customers?
Right now the issues are governance, IT intervention, conceptual buy-in, engagement/usage, and tracking. And each challenge is a significant one.
Cornerstone is an early adopter of social media, built into talent processes – at least among its competitive class. We believe (and this seems to be validated by much of the conversation at HR Tech) that there is strong interest in social media as a component of HR / talent management activities. It is a great fit conceptually. But providing the explicit, specific business impact cases is critical – showing the end user that this is not social networking for the sake of sharing vacation photos but the business impact comes in improving onboarding initiatives, boosting employee performance, and facilitating collaboration enterprise-wide.
Thanks Charles! Cornerstone Connect kicks ass!
(I’ve attached some datasheets provided; screen shot below – click to make larger)
cornerstone_datasheet_connect_01oct08
cornerstone_datasheet_connectdevelopperform_10oct08
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