Business Value

A Learning Technologies Framework

How does information technology improve management education: through improving pedagogical processes tied to teaching and learning or through enhancing the interactions between individuals in private and professional networks? How can your institution “learn” from implementations of learning technologies in other organizations and other markets? A Learning Technologies Framework can be applied to help faculty and administration alike understand how learning technologies can potentially enhance their institution’s value proposition in management education.

The Ivory Tower

Higher education has been linked through the centuries to an almost mystical image of the Ivory Tower. As early as 60 BC, Lucretius, in De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things), wrote, "But this is the greatest joy of all: to stand aloof in a quiet citadel, stoutly fortified by the teaching of the wise." Over the years, definitions of the Ivory Tower have evolved in mixing the beauty of seclusion with a more negative image of something aloof, out of touch with reality. Susan Holten cites the current Webster definition as a “secluded place that affords the means of treating practical issues with an impractical often escapist attitude; especially: a place of learning.” What issues in management education today are forcing higher education to reconsider the solace of their quiet citadel?

Learning networks

Learning perhaps isn’t a question of process, but of networks. This conceptualization of learning places the individual, rather than the institution, at the centre of efforts to improve corporate education models. In this perspective, learning is seen as a consequence of an individual’s interactions with a multitude of social systems. Peter Drucker has stressed that that management education involves communicating knowledge rather than aptitudes; the learning agenda for knowledge workers differs from that of industrial workers both in its scope and its duration. Individual careers can now be expected to span several jobs, industries and decades, an economic reality that tests the relevancy of formal education. If the pertinence of management education today can be measured in its ability to accompany a manager throughout his career, the value of information technology is in enhancing this value proposition.

Is what you measure what you get?

How can we evaluate the value proposition of information technology in management education? Although learning technologies are often sold as sources of cost savings, can it be demonstrated that corporate clients buy into these technologies because they are more productive? Although few topics related to IT in recent years have been more largely discussed than the effectiveness of e-education, the question is still open to debate. To address the larger question of learning efficacy we must gauge both what students are trying to learn through management education, and how different delivery strategies influence learning content.    This raises a new twist in the productivity paradox: learning technologies won’t contribute to management education until we understand what exactly we trying to learn.

Learning through paradox

In our contributions over the last three weeks, we have suggested that the learning matrix can help us develop learning strategies to deal with the diversity of specific contexts and objectives. Three dimensions of the matrix can be drawn around what we need to learn, the extent to which their can be a precise answer to our business challenges, and the degree to which learning is a social process. This week’s contribution explores the third axe of the matrix: the extent to which to which learning is either an individual challenge or embedded in our perceptions of our social networks.

From order to chaos

In our contribution last week, we suggested that our learning matrix can help you discover strategies to deal with the diversity of learning contexts and objectives. Three dimensions of the matrix can be drawn around what we need to learn, the extent to which their can be a precise answer to our business challenges, and the degree to which learning is a social process. In analyzing a specific business challenge along each these three continuums, we can make reasonable assumptions about what we need to learn, in what context learning can be optimized, and to what extent technology can assist the learning process.

This week’s contribution explores the extent to which there exist precise answers to our business challenges.

The learning matrix

Given the diversity of learning contexts and objectives, how can we chart out a valid learning strategy adapted to our professional needs and challenges? The relative failure of a myriad of books, articles and conferences to provide time proven answers over the years demonstrates the difficulty of the task at hand. Several factors need to be taken into consideration. What skills and competencies need to be learned? To what extent can technology support the learning process? Should learning be embedded in the workplace, dispensed in the classroom, or assimilated from the comfort of your home?

In dealing with the complexity of the management education, a learning matrix can help you discover strategies that are appropriate for you at any one point in your career.

The Art of Management

One of the oldest debates in management education concerns its very nature: is management an art or a science? Proponents of management science quote a long line of illustrated authors who see the firm as a potentially well oiled machine and insist upon both the necessary division of labour and the empirical nature of best practice. Proponents of the art of management compare business to a social system, and argue that effective management must deal with people who have both strengths and weaknesses, take irrational choices, and can’t always implement what good sense would imply.

This seemingly theoretical debate none-the-less goes a long way to explaining the way we think, and our latitude to learn.

Our own education is often the biggest obstacle to understanding what the future may hold

We are currently running a series of workshops through out Europe for IT suppliers on business value. In these sessions we present customer evidence that business value is in the relationship that clients maintain with their suppliers rather than in any one product or company. We suggest that the process of value creation isn’t the set of linear activities they may have learned in school but a set of relationships that focus on the quality of interactions in client stories. We propose for discussion a series of postcards and anecdotes to contest an almost universal practice of selling features as solutions.

Learning about business value often begins by dismissing a number of fundamental truths that we’ve been taught.

Learning by association

The Intercontinental Hotel in Berlin was once again host of the Online educa conference on e-learning. This year 335 speakers interacted with 1700 delegates from 66 counties in one of larger events of this kind. I arrived on Thursday midday - my initial impressions were of chaos, too many rooms, too many speakers, too much conversation. Yet as the day rolled on, I began to see patterns of interaction that defined how this community functions: networks and nodes that have distributed information, fostered ideas, bred collaboration and defined influence in this community for the last ten years.

What can communities teach us about our own business?