The Extended Enterprise LMS

John Leh of Talented Learning has added another entry to his already impressive body of work on extended enterprise eLearning. In the conclusion to his latest blog post Leh writes:

Offering extended enterprise learning is about helping your corporation (large or small) increase overall sales revenue, improve profit margins and stay ahead of competitors in a challenging global marketplace.

As extended enterprise eLearning has been our bread and butter at KMI Learning, you won’t be surprised to read that we agree wholeheartedly. He goes on to write:

However, like all LMS solutions, extended enterprise learning isn’t easy.  Developing and delivering content that attracts and engages multiple “voluntary” learning audiences requires a business mentality and skill set that isn’t common among typical HR/training professionals.

I’d like to extend this thought by commenting that the mentality and skillset that Leh references aren’t all that common among LMS and elearning content providers either. Extended Enterprise eLearning  is a different animal. Here are just a few of those differences:

• An extended enterprise LMS absolutely must be accessible to virtually all browsers and operating systems.
• The extended enterprise LMS needs to be simple and straightforward both for the end-users and administrators. It does not need many of the features and functions that inward facing corporate systems require (Think talent management)
• The extended enterprise LMS must be able to integrate with a wide variety of third-party systems and the provider must be willing and able to perform integrations quickly.
• Most importantly the provider of extended enterprise elearning services must truly act as a partner.  I know that word has been devalued of late (I receive a few emails each day from prospective vendors offering to be KMI’s “partner”) but in this case, it’s really true. The provider has to offer the responsive and flexible support that a wide and varied learning audience requires.

KMI Learning is exactly the kind of true partner that an organization contemplating the launch of an extended enterprise initiative needs. As proof, we offer the fact that we’ve been with our two largest Extended Enterprise clients for 21 and 20 years respectively! We’ll profile these and some of our other implementations in future articles.

You can read John’s article here. And more on the subject here.