Making plans to upgrade your learning and data ecosystem for 2024 and beyond? With more advanced products and services, generative artificial intelligence (AI), and improved data and analytics capabilities, it should be easy to meet your organization’s learning and performance goals, right? Not so fast.
First, you probably can’t buy all the new tools all at once. And, you probably already have a myriad of tools and services in your learning technology ecosystem, each with their own licensing timeline and product road maps. Charting a course for updating the ecosystem to meet new needs can be challenging!
Based on our observations and consulting work with clients, you’ll need to build a team, take inventory of your existing tools, and connect to organizational strategy and culture. You’ll prioritize your needed capabilities, look for opportunities, make your case, and (with any luck) manage the implementation and change. Let’s explore each of these a bit more closely.
Build the Team
Identify the key stakeholders and a project sponsor for the work ahead. Look beyond your department and consider including others that create learning for the same audiences. Also, think about IT, procurement, business intelligence, or other internal support functions. Ultimately, you’ll want a team that will help you in your analysis and your change management approach.Create an Inventory of the Existing Landscape
Start by creating a list or map of the currently used tools. This includes everything from authoring tools to delivery platforms, analytics tools, and the project management systems that keep it all moving. Be sure to collect and include services and tools used by learning and development (L&D) teams, human resources and organizational development teams, compliance, manufacturing, IT, and sales—effectively any organization that may create and serve up its own learning-related content.As you do this, you may find that there is duplication, or gaps, or that different teams in the organization use different tools for the same purposes. You may also find what we call “islands”—tools completely disconnected from the rest of the ecosystem—and homegrown tools—those created to serve your organization’s specific or unique needs. Even if you stop here, what you will uncover is often enlightening.
Some questions you may include during your inventory include:
- What function does this serve in the ecosystem: curation, content development, delivery/deployment, cataloging, analysis, and more?
- How do the people who use the tool feel about it?
- What data standard(s) does this product use?
- What manual and automated connections to other tools does it have? And which do we use?
- What are the licensing terms and timelines?
- What data types are being passed between or stored in each system or tool?
Depending on how deep or broad you have time to go, you may also want to consider including people or processes in your ecosystem inventory.
Connect to Organizational Strategy and Culture
Look at your organization’s top 3–7 priorities for the coming year(s), and how L&D, particularly the learning technology ecosystem, can support them. Sometimes it’s clear how the learning organization can support these organizational strategies. Sometimes it’s a little vague and you need to make the connection. Here are three quick approaches to this, depending on the nature of the organizational priority:- A priority directly speaks to growing people’s capacity. In some cases, the organizational priority is to develop and grow the capacity of your people. It’s often clear how L&D and the learning technology ecosystem can support this.
- A priority addresses operational or business excellence. When the organization’s priority focuses on decreasing cost, improving service, or improving product, the L&D organization builds the skills of the people who will take this on. Sometimes these are the direct skills in question, and sometimes these are the skills of the leaders who will make these changes happen.
- A priority addresses market-facing excellence, such as customer service or brand image. In this case, the L&D organization can take on and model some of the same customer-facing approaches that the business takes when focusing on its internal customers.
Once you identify how L&D connects to organizational strategy, you can then begin to identify the capabilities of the learning technology ecosystem that will be called upon to meet these needs. By focusing on the systems’ capabilities, and not the exact tools themselves yet, you’re much better able to identify a holistic approach to delivering on capabilities across a suite of software solutions. Some examples of capabilities include:
- Personalization
- Interoperability
- Natural language processing
- Data-driven and analytics tools
- Translation
- Gamification
- Integration with business systems
- Adaptive learning
- Mobile access
- Accessibility
- E-commerce
- Social learning
- Spaced learning
- Scalability
Also, consider how your organization’s culture may affect your learning ecosystem strategy. Think about aspects such as how quickly and enthusiastically your organization embraces change, the appetite for having many different or specialized tools versus having a few robust solutions, and how decision making occurs.
Prioritize Needed Capabilities
Once you identify the capabilities that your learning data ecosystem will need, you can then identify a desired future state and assess your current tools and platforms for their ability to meet your needs. You may find that you have anywhere from five to 12 capabilities. Depending on the size and capacity of your team, that may be far too many to take on all at once. In this case, prioritizing the capabilities and how fast you need to progress on them will help guide your efforts toward implementation. We like to take a sit, crawl, walk, run approach to this categorization.
Review Ecosystem Components for Opportunities
Now you are ready to review the various components of your ecosystem and identify which components to take on first. Because it’s unlikely that you will be able to (or even want to) throw everything out and start from scratch, you’ll need to prioritize and take an orderly approach to managing change.- Which platforms and tools already satisfy many of the desired capabilities and are well-liked by those who use them?
- Which licenses are coming due?
- What is the length of time to select and implement a replacement?
- Where can the biggest and most appropriate advancement in capability be realized?
- Where can duplication be resolved most easily?
- Where does it make sense to try multiple approaches in parallel and select one or more future tools later on?
- Which vendors have road maps that are similar enough to yours that would enable you to ride along rather than replace the system?
Present Your Findings
Now you’re ready to pull together a plan that will enable you to get buy-in and resources for the changes you are proposing. By connecting your proposal to organizational strategies, you can clearly outline how the land organization and learning technology ecosystem will support them now and into the future. Creating a map of your learning ecosystem from now into the future can help leaders visualize the changes that you’re proposing.This will also enable you to outline budget needs for the selection, implementation, and licensing of new technologies over several years. You should generally expect the first year to two years of your plan to be fairly solid. However, the further your road map goes, the more likely it is to be changed by organizational strategy and the evolution of offerings in the marketplace. Years three to five and even further out are less sure than years one and two of your plan.
Manage the Change
As you gain support for your ecosystem changes, you will need to engage in full-scale change management approaches to ensure success. Consider bringing in the stakeholder team that you identified at the beginning as key assets in this approach. At this point, you may also want to bring in advisory groups from your learner population and others affected by the change as well. This will be an effort that will often warrant robust project management support.Schedule a Review for Next Year
Now would be a fantastic time to schedule the time and team to review and revise the plan for next year. If you have resource planning tools for the L&D organization, you can put in a few weeks or months of effort on the schedule for next year to set this time aside and ensure it’s a priority.Your learning data ecosystem journey is both complex and critical, reflecting the evolving needs of your organizations in 2024 and beyond. At every stage, you will be engaging with business leaders and L&D team members to make thoughtful decisions about how best to support learners and your organizational strategies. As you do so, you’ll create a roadmap that is not just a plan for technology integration—but a blueprint for building a resilient, agile, and forward-thinking learning culture that drives organizational success.
