Show report
Where e-HR meets e-Learning
SAP: What is the return on training investment?
Presenter: Mark O'Dowd
Mark O'Dowd bowled in off the street, umbrella in hand -
exchanged a few words with Karen from Snowdrop as she vacated
the podium - jacked in his laptop and proceeded to give a
slick, engaging presentation that didn't quite deliver on
its title.
Who cares, it was great to be away from buses parked in loading
bays and back in the world of enterprise graphics, big vision,
white teeth. O'Dowd has the sort of authority and likeability
that evaluates well at Kirpatrick level one (my happy sheet
was full of smiley face) and you know you're in safe hands
with a 28,000-strong company which is helping 9,000 customers
in more than 50 countries to manage more than 54 million employees
worldwide, yadda yadda...
(Okay, Epic is a SAP partner and I'm not going to say anything
negative about the organisation)
What has to be of interest here, though, for any e-learning-watcher,
is SAP's view of the LMS market.
Bear in mind that SAP is about four hundred times the size
of Snowdrop. A big fish. At the time when LMS vendors began
to appear on the scene, SAP had an existing module for training
management, but one which, like Fountain, was classroom-based.
Having woken up to this new species of 'competitors selling
into our space' (translation: pondlife syphoning off our nutrients)
the company wasn't going to retreat under its ornamental bridge
and sit blowing bubbles.
SAP researched the LMS market looking to acquire, but didn't
find anything they could integrate into their solution. So
they decide to build their own.
The upshot is that O'Dowd now predicts many of the players
in the LMS space will not exist in 12 months. There is room,
he opined, for a couple of best-of-breed players at most.
With the benificent indulgence that big fish accord to krill,
he conceded that there was a place for niche vendors: they
can evolve their products very quickly; it's mildly stimulating
to have them around. But with a figure of close to a billion
euros being poured into R&D by SAP… He smiled slightly regretfully
and shook his head.
We got the picture.
I won't go into the details of SAP's e-HR solution or learning
portal here except to say that I liked the language a lot
more than some of what I had heard earlier. Instead of an
'end-to-end learning solution', we had integration of learning
within the employee lifecycle - with a very important loop
added in between deployment and development.
The SAP vision for HR was neither short-sighted nor fuzzy
when it came to e-learning. There was integration with knowledge
management, there were nods towards collaborative learning
- and yes, madam, the training event management module is
still in there if you want to go blended. There was even travel
management (presumably this was where the e-learning ROI came
in, at least).
O'Dowd gave some useful reflections, besides, on the importance
of time management when integrating learning into the workplace
- as well as ten good reasons for investing in integrated
learning, which unfortunately went by too quickly for me to
scribble down. I'm sure they're on SAP's pleasingly designed
website.
So how long did it take to implement? asked a voice from
the stalls, mindful no doubt of Mark Doughty's earlier injunction
to show an ROI before end of quarter four. 'If your data and
records are in good order - two to three months,' replied
O'Dowd.
It was an important qualifier. Data quality, as we had earlier
been informed by James Markham, is very often not good.
Next>>>
Introduction
Hopkins and Markham: e-HR and change
Mark Doherty plays buzzword bingo
Case study: On the bus with the Co-op
SAP: What is the return on training investment
Conclusion
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