Before you know it, the spring, Technology Services World (TSW) conference will be here.  So, it’s not too early to start thinking about the sessions you’d like to attend.  While you do have the liberty to attend any session at the conference, of course I think it would be foolhardy to miss a single session in the Education Services (ES) track.  The interest in speaking was so great within the ES membership that I had to go to the conference chair and ask for additional speaking slots.  I was able to secure only one more, so a couple of presentations have been deferred to the October TSW conference, in Las Vegas.  I love the enthusiasm of the education services community!!

We have a great agenda planned, with topics ranging from optimizing the cloud for ES delivery, to collaborating with other service-lines to bring value-added services to the marketplace.   So, if you want to; (1) leverage the cloud to scale education, globally, (2) improve course development productivity while decreasing costs, (3) get ES a seat at the executive table, (4) transition from a regional to global business model or, (5) enable product adoption via collaboration, then you won’t want to miss a single session.  My fellow researchers and I were asked for “top picks” within our service track.  Well, I think all of the ES sessions are top picks and here’s why…

• There’s a ton of buzz about the cloud and everyone wants to know what they can do NOW to use this promising technology.  Education in a Cloud World: Building a Global and Scalable Learning Community is an interactive, workout session, in which a facilitator(s) presents what he/she is doing in reference to the topic and then opens the floor for discussion and questions.  The workout format provides a great opportunity to learn from colleagues and ask any specific questions about using the cloud to provide education offerings.  Don’t miss the chance to learn how Robert Castaneda, at CustomWare, and others, are leveraging the cloud to extend their reach and scale education globally, using this often discussed, but within Education Services, vastly under-used, technology.
• There are a lot of nuts to crack in the education services world, but one that seems to be the hardest to crack is optimizing the content development process.  Many development personnel feel like hamsters running in a wheel, working hard, but getting nowhere.  Authoring Topic-Based Training Content outlines Parametric Technology Corporation’s (PTC’s) approach to the challenge of creating net new content on a timely basis, for multiple modalities, in several languages, while also maintaining vast amounts of existing content.  So jump off the spinning wheel, catch your breath, and come hear what Spencer Cutting has to say about how single-source authoring, or topic-based training, helped PTC improve its productivity, while decreasing costs.
• If there’s one, common, resounding theme that I hear consistently from the Education Services community it’s – How can ES get a seat at the table?  How can ES demonstrate its value to the company?  Well, wonder no more.   Get a Seat at the Executive Table: Accelerate Customer Success and Optimize Costs answers these questions.  Daniel West will present how expanding his education charter to include training for all members of the “value delivery system” (sales, presales, partners and customers) has enabled Informatica to optimize its cost base, by spreading processes, resources and infrastructure across both internal and external audiences.  The best news – this transformational change has opened the door for ES to participate in strategic, corporate-level conversations.  So, if you want to join your peers at the table, pull up a chair, because you won’t want to miss hearing the valuable information in this session.
• As the marketplace continues to expand, and more and more Education Services organizations establish a global presence, the age old debate of centralized versus decentralized management comes up for discussion.  Regions that often times have operated quite autonomously must now adhere to standard processes and procedures, and often feel like those “folks back at headquarters” don’t have a clue about how the regions really operate.  At the end of 2010, Tellabs made the decision to transition from a regional to global business model, in which decision making and all processes are identical, globally.  There is much to be said about learning from someone else’s experience, so capitalize on this opportunity and come listen to Tomi Urho as he shares lessons learned in The Long and Winding Road: Tellabs’ Journey from a Regional to Global Education Services Business Model.  
• There’s a lot of talk about collaboration between service-lines, but not a lot of action.  It’s surprising how minimal the partnering actually is between Education, Professional, Field and Support Services.  Partnering between these organizations may occur at a product level, in which some combination of services are packaged into a composite offering for the customer, or at an operational level, where infrastructure, tools, systems and information are shared between service-lines, or both.  A driving force behind service collaboration is to enable customers to use more of the product, more quickly, in other words, product adoption. Maria Manning-Chapman, Sr. Research Director at TSIA, will share research that illustrates some of the collaborative practices of its member-companies and the results they are achieving in Service Collaboration: Accelerating Time to Product Value.  So take action and start collaborating now!  Plan on bringing your PS, SS and FS counterparts with you to this informative session.

Make sure to reserve May 7-9 on your calendar and I’ll see you in Santa Clara, at what promises to be another stellar Technology Services World conference.

Another new year is upon us and it seems that each new year brings with it the obligatory resolution.  I’ve never been a proponent of the type of resolution where I’m going to “stop” doing something, like eating ice-cream, for example.  To “stop” doing something sounds so negative, like it’s a bad habit and if it’s not stopped it’s somehow going to adversely impact my life.  While this may in fact be true, one can over-indulge in ice-cream, I have found that a more positive approach is to instead identify something I’m going to “start” doing.  Perhaps it’s just wishful thinking on my part, but my brain likes the thought of “starting” to do something more than it likes the thought of “stopping” to do something.  It gives me a sense of control.  So, this year I’m going to start reading a book a month – hey I know that’s not much, but I’ve got to start somewhere and if I’m holding a book, or an e-reader, then I can’t be holding a bowl of ice-cream too. 

 Resolutions are equally applicable to work life as they are to personal life.  For education services there are a number of things that organizations can “start” doing, even if it’s just to start thinking about doing it.  Below is a list of 10 things that I think are worth thinking about for this year and hopefully thinking about it will lead to “starting” to do something about it.  Just pick one thing…. 

1. Collaborative content development – simplify the process between developers and subject matter experts (SME).  For years content developers have been lone rangers, left largely to their own devices, lucky to snag a few hours of a SME’s time.  Wouldn’t it be much more productive to provide those with the design skills access to those with the product knowledge?  This is possible with collaborative content development tools.  While you may not want SMEs actually developing the content, you certainly do want them providing feedback and this is what a collaborative content develop platform provides.  SMEs can be assigned a content editor role and provide comments directly on the page(s) that require their feedback.  Often times developers and SMES are not co-located, so be a bridge builder and get the teams collaborating.
2. Crowdsourcing – crowdsource a content development project.  Crowdsourcing is the act of sourcing tasks, projects, and/or activities traditionally performed by specific individuals to a group of people or community (crowd) via an open call, or request for help.  While this may seem like an unconventional approach, I think it has merit in the arena of content development, particularly as it relates to content revision.  Why not let those who are the recipients of the content provide input?  After all, as users of the product they certainly have hands-on knowledge that goes beyond that of a content developer.  Clearly, approach and guidelines for crowdsourcing need to be established, but what a great way to get users engaged.  So join the ranks of Dell, Starbucks, Nike and others who have created digital platforms to enable customers to help create products via crowdsourcing.
3. Going mobile – while “going mobile” is nothing new for the general population, by-in-large it is for the education services community.  Results from TSIA’s Education Services benchmark reveal that fewer than 16% of education services organizations have made a foray into the mobile space relative to learning.  So go ahead, create an app, charge 99 cents for it and see what happens.   What have you got to lose?  It’s worked for the music industry.
4. Single-source authoring – consider single-source authoring, which allows the same content to be used in different documents (deliverables) such as e-learning, instructor-led training manuals, workbooks and DVDs, or in various formats – Word, PDF, HTML, and others.  This is achieved by creating information objects once and reusing them.  With a single source solution only the one source file for the content needs to be updated and that update is regenerated to other outputs, such as PDF, online help, a web page, and so forth.  While shifting to single-source authoring may initially be time consuming, its benefits are quickly realized in the form of improved content quality, increased author productivity, increased content re-use, and/or greater cost savings.  So save yourself some time and money and implement single-source authoring.
5. Adaptive learning – create a personalized learning scenario, also known as adaptive learning.   E-learning is particularly well disposed to adaptive learning, as it takes it a step further by adapting the presentation of educational material according to a student’s weaknesses, as indicated by their responses to a set of questions.  Adaptive learning is important because it enables learners to select modular components that they can piece together, to create their own learner-centric learning environments.  Think it’s too hard to do?  Talk to Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC), a TSIA Education Services member, or read the recent research article; Case Study – Parametric Technology Corporation: Best Practices in Education Services.
6. Analytics – apply analytics, the study of business data to discover and understand historical patterns, with a goal of predicting and improving future business performance.  It’s kind of hard to predict the future if you don’t know what’s happened in the past.  Extensive use of the web and movement to the cloud has greatly enabled companies to use data that here-to-fore has been largely inaccessible.  Education services organizations stand to gain greatly from this.  Think about building content and curricula if you know what the most popular courses/modules/topics are or you have immediate knowledge of the most problematic product features, or the features that are used most often, or how rapidly a product is being adopted.  Analytics provide a catbird seat into human behavior and that is the holy grail.  So run now to your IT department and start leveraging all that data your company is collecting.
7. Content curation – create a content curation position.  Rohit Bhargava defines a content curator as someone who continually finds, groups, organizes and shares the best and most relevant content on a specific issue online.  As described in Content Curation: Bringing Order to Information Overload, by Christy Barksdale, April 2010, http://www.pr2020.com/page/content-curation-order-to-information-overload, “with the overwhelming amount of content available on the Internet today, it is difficult for professionals to efficiently manage their daily reading activities, as well as separate useful and accurate content from poor content. This is where content curation comes in; allowing individuals or businesses to provide a valuable service to their audiences by addressing their need for quality content and the lack of available time to find it.”  There is so much information “out there” today.  Why not steer your customers to information about your training and your company that is relevant, positions you as the “source” for information and demonstrates that your company is a leader in the marketplace? People are busy.  Help them out.  They’ll thank you for it.
8. Piazza - be the first on your block to innovate.  In the 1/6/12 issue of the San Jose Mercury News  Business Section, I read about a social media start-up called Piazza.  Developed by a woman named Pooja Sankar, “Piazza is a system of collective, Wiki-style documents in which students can post questions, then add to and amend one another’s solutions.  Today, any college or university professor can create a Piazza page for students in his or her courses.”  My immediate thought when I finished reading the article was, hey this is a concept that is just as applicable in the world of technical professional education as it is in academia.  Remote/distance learning is the perfect candidate for Piazza as it gives students and instructors a great way to connect and communicate.  Check it out – http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_19687785?IADID=Search-www.mercurynews.com-www.mercurynews.com.  Who wants to be the first to create a learning piazza for their course?
9. Embedded learning – embed learning in the workflow to bring learning and work processes into proximity.  Most learning today is still independent of the actual work task(s) being performed.  While “help” capability is built into most software these days, it is still uncommon to be able to serve-up learning material directly from the product.  I do know of one Education Services member-company that has built such capability into their products.  When a tool called LearningConnector is launched, e-learning topics and technical support knowledge base articles are recommended based on the user’s location within the software product.  When an e-learning topic is launched, it is to a specific topic within a larger e-learning course.  The user can decide whether to focus on just the topic or whether to go ahead and complete the entire course.  Why has it taken education services organizations so long to adopt this approach?  I found an article online about embedding content into the workflow, Learning in Context of Business Processes and Workflows, Eilif Trondsen, December 2004, http://www.e-learningcentre.co.uk/Resource/CMS/Assets/5c10130e-6a9f-102c-a0be-003005bbceb4/form_uploads/Workflow_Learning__SRIC_.pdf.  December 2004 – that’s almost eight years ago, and I can tell you from reading the article little has changed from then to now. So, be a change agent, do something different, pick one product and start embedding learning in it. 
10. Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) – DITA is a standard, or a template, more commonly used for technical publications and/or documentation and is slowly making its way into the content development arena.  DITA is a standard XML data model and its Open Toolkit publishing system features single-source publishing, inheritance, topic-based authoring and content reuse.   The” typing architecture” consists of three types; task, concept and reference.  As content development gets more and more complicated based on ever-growing numbers of course titles, multiple modalities and localization of content, using the DITA standard makes sense.   Go talk to your documentation department and ask if they are using DITA.  If so, have them tell you more about it.

So, here’s your new year’s challenge.  Be a trailblazer.  Dare to be different.  Resolve to do just one thing on this list.  It’s time to pick up a book and put down the ice-cream.

Think you’re doing some stellar things in Education Services?  Why wonder?  TSIA’s Star Award program is a great way for your education organization to be acknowledged for the star it is.  The award recognizes exceptional leadership, innovation and commitment within the education services function.  There are three award categories for which members of TSIA’s Education Services discipline may apply:

1) Star Award for Small Company Excellence in Education Services

2) Star Award for Innovation in Education Services

3) Star Award for Education Services Excellence in Enabling Customer Success

Participation is easy.  First complete the nomination form and indicate in which of the three award categories you wish to participate.  You may place a nomination for just one category, two, or all three.  Upon acceptance of your nomination(s) you will receive a Star Award application for each award category specified.  Each application consists of 7-8 questions along with Overview and Summary sections.

What I like about the Star Award process is that judging is conducted by members of TSIA’s Education Services discipline.  So the folks who do what you do day-to-day, who understand the challenges you face and who experience the same difficulty of trying to excel in a – discount or give it away for free - environment, will review each application using pre-defined judging criteria and guidelines.

Whether participating as an applicant or a judge, I have been told by many what a valuable experience it is.  Applicants receive feedback both on the clarity of the application, as well as the quality of the content – is it truly innovative, unique, exceptional?  Judges have the opportunity to read about all the great things that others are doing and evaluate ideas side-by-side.

The deadline for submitting a Spring 2012 nomination is November 10.  For further detail regarding the Star Award program, please see the Star Award webpage.  Don’t miss this opportunity to show others how brightly you shine!!

Are you using mobile or social technology to deploy snippets of content to customers?  If your answer to this question is no, you’re not alone.  A question in the Education Services Benchmark Survey reveals that only 22% of education services organizations deploy any kind of content using mobile technology and slightly more, at 30%, use Web 2.0 technologies, with blogs and wikis being the most common elements used.

This lack of technology adoption by education services organizations proved challenging when recruiting panelists for “The Future is Now,” the final education services session conducted Wednesday, at Technology Services World.  Ultimately, I was able to round up three trailblazers who shared how they’re using these new technologies in their ES organizations; Jennifer Edwards, Training Program Manager, Motorola Mobility, Danielle Tomlinson, Sr. Director, Training, Red Hat and Kurt Bauer, VP, SAP Education, SAP AG.

Some of the take-aways from Jennifer’s presentation were – JUST GET STARTED and remember that the solutions you deploy using mobile or Web 2.0 technologies have to solve a business problem.  As there are not many ES organizations out there to follow, you have to lead by just trying something, seeing what the results are and making changes along the way.  Some of the things Motorola Mobility is doing is pushing new services, via an application, to the sales team.  This push also includes PDFs for customers.  Additionally, they’ve launched a troubleshooting app for field technicians.  Currently, they’re developing a sales curriculum to be deployed by smartphone.  To quote Jennifer, “Don’t be afraid.”

Danielle shared what Red Hat has been working on over the past several months in the world of Web 2.0.  They’ve created an interactive community for their Certified Engineers.  The purpose is not only to build community, but to also reinforce the brand and continue to build customer loyalty.  The approach that Danielle and her team took was to “make it personal.”  In other words, make the community feel like they’re interacting with a personality and ask a question such as, “How do you use your Red Hat certification?”  Red Hat has integrated the website, Facebook, Twitter, Linked-In and they’re adding Google + to the list.  Way to go Danielle and team!!

Our third panelist, Kurt, discussed the SAP courseware production challenge – lots of content, in multi-modalities, in many languages, overlaid with the variables of cost, timing, quality and maintenance.  It makes my head spin just thinking about it.  SAP has worked out a solution in which a workflow-based collaboration process is used.  All content developers us a single-source infrastructure and automated publishing.  In this scenario, each developer works on a job task and then the tasks are assembled to create an ILT course, or perhaps the tasks are re-assembled to create a job aide, or a virtual offering, or…….. All modality formats share the same processes, tools and content.  SAP has had such great success with this approach that they are considering it as an education services offering for their customers.  A key point that Kurt made is that at the end of the day the purpose of all this content is to drive product adoption.  He couldn’t be more right.

So, what are you going to do?  Whatever your answer, let the trailblazer in you follow the iconic words of Nike and “Just Do It.”

Do you subscribe to subscribe?

Sub-scribe

1) to feel favorably disposed

2) to receive a periodical or service regularly on order  (e.g. e-Learning)

These two definitions of “subscribe” fit perfectly for Tuesday afternoon’s Education Services sessions at Technology Services World; Training Subscriptions: Crafting a “Win/Win,” presented by Jesse Finn, VP , Global Education Services, Taleo and Best Practices in e-Learning Retention Rates: The Four Year Journey of Knowledge Pass, presented by Peter Broderick, VP, Education And Service Business Development and LeAnne Gaudio, Manager, Education Operations and Programs, Kronos.  Both sessions were action packed with lots of questions, lively discussion and open sharing of subscription-based practices.

While the subscription model is applicable to most forms of training, it is most popularly used for e-Learning.  The recently conducted Education Services Global Pricing Survey reveals that 75% of education services organizations use some type of subscription model for e-Learning, with the two most common subscription types being; 1) an individual subscription to all e-Learning content and 2) a company subscription to a single e-Learning course/module.

A key theme in both presentations was the easy buy-easy sell concept.  Keep the subscription offering and process simple so that it’s a “no-brainer” for the customer to buy and probably more importantly, a “no-brainer” for the sales rep to sell.  Some key considerations that Jesse spoke about for establishing a subscription offering are:

1)   Who benefits from the offering, an individual or a group?

2)   What content will be available, accessed or used by the individual or group?

3)   What is the term of the subscription, six months, a year, two years?

4)   How is the subscription paid?

A best practice that Peter talked about was tying the renewal of the e-Learning subscription to the renewal of the support maintenance contract.  Prior to implementing this practice, Kronos’s e-Learning subscription renewal rates were running about 50% and now they are at about 78%.  Not bad!!  It wasn’t as simple as that though.  When there was a downturn in the economy, the Education Services (ES) organization noticed that the e-Learning portion of the renewal was starting to be pulled from the maintenance contract so that the overall cost to the customer could be lowered.  ES wasted no time in taking control and quickly assigned a dedicated resource to manage the renewal program.  Now, if e-Learning is removed from the maintenance contract renewal, or if a customer asks for it to be removed, a call is made to the customer to position the value and benefit of maintaining the e-Learning subscription.

As more product offerings move to the cloud and customers subscribe to subscribe, it only make sense that education services organizations do the same.

Reporting live from the Technology Services World conference at  Las Vegas, I am excited to say that this is TSIA’s largest conference yet; more than 1000 attendees, more than 26 countries represented, more Expo partners, more Education Services participants, well - just more…

The day started with two thought provoking keynote presentations.  The first  presentation, by J.B. Wood, TSIA’s President and CEO, discussed concepts from a brand new book by the TSIA leadership team, Consumption Economics.  J.B. highlighted some of the changes underway to the current services business model as a result of three trends; 1) cloud computing, 2) managed services and 3) the rise of consumer technology.  One of the key messages is the shift that companies need to make from Masters of Complexity to Masters of Consumption.  The good news for services organizations is that they play a leading role in the mastery of consumption.

The second presentation, by Thomas Lah, Executive Director, TSIA, outlined tactics for how services organizations can “protect, defend and transform their service lines, while moving from the current-state business model to the mastery of consumption model.  While it’s hard to say just when the inevitable changes from cloud computing, managed services and consumer technology will occur, the reality is, they are already underway and it behooves services organizations to start thinking now, about the future.

After the keynote presentations, each Research Director delivered his/her Power Hour session.  My presentation, The Price is Right: Winning at the Pricing Game, discussed data gleaned from the first ever Education Services Global Pricing Survey, conducted April-June of this year.  Data was collected for 18 locales, for classroom, virtual and onsite training, custom content development, certification and e-Learning and included list price and realized price for both customers and partners.  Some factoids from the presentation:

• Of all the geographies, EMEA discounts the most
• From a pricing perspective, Brazil isn’t really an “emerging market” as its average price for classroom, virtual and onsite training is higher than the average for each of these, for Latin America overall
• 50% of small education services organizations (generate <$10M in ES revenue) discount >20%, while large education organizations (generate >$30M in ES revenue) rarely discount more than 15%
• Using a zone-based pricing approach is a best-practice for Education Services organizations

For more detail be sure to download the presentation from the Technology Services World website.  Well I’m off to the Services Executive dinner and hope to see you tomorrow at the following Education Services sessions:

•  Educating the Non-Education Professional about Education, presented by Bonnie Becker, Worldwide Training Director, Bytemobile, in Tinidad B
• Training Subscriptions: Crafting the Win/Win, presented by Jesse Finn, VP Global Education Services, Taleo, in Trinidad B

More presentations, more keynotes, more to see on the Expo floor – more than enough to keep you busy while at Technology Services World.

There’s a song by the Black-Eyed Peas, Let’s Get it Started (one of my personal favorites), whose title embodies the essence of the message for the upcoming Technology Services World conference, commencing October 24, in Las Vegas.  This conference will announce the release of Consumption Economics: The New Rules of Tech,  a seminal book written by TSIA’s leadership team.

In this publication, the impact of moving to the cloud for customer, supplier and everyone in between is discussed. The implications are far-reaching and technology services are not exempt from the inevitable changes that the cloud brings to the conventional way of doing business.

J.B. Wood and Thomas Lah, CEO and Executive Director of TSIA, respectively, will be delivering keynote presentations on Monday, 10/24, at the Mirage Convention Center, highlighting the shifts that are occurring, the impact on technology services, and what service organizations need to be thinking about and doing now, to successfully make the transition to the world of consumption economics.

Some of the key themes in the book are:

• Risk moves from the customer to the supplier
• Revenue will be based on micro-transactions (high volume, low margin)
• Driving consumption/usage is the enabler of profitable growth (no usage – no money)
• Power shifts from IT to the end-user
• Analytics enable; 1) understanding customers’ usage & consumption patterns, 2) marketing at an individual level
• The Consumption Roadmap outlines customers’ preferred paths for using the product and product design mimics the preferred path
• Services drive adoption and usage, and become the focal point for the “up-sell” (think Amazon.com – “Customers who purchase this book also purchased that book.”)

The Research Directors for each discipline, Education Services, Field Services, Professional Services, Support Services and Services Revenue Generation, have written a white paper, for their respective discipline, describing the foreseeable impacts of consumption economics.  The article I’ve written for Education Services, entitled, Understanding the Impact of Consumption Economics on Education Services, identifies four key impacts and outlines five steps for getting started now. I highly recommend reading the article to get a better understanding of what consumption economics means to education services.  Articles can be obtained at the TSIA booth, located in the Tech Expo area of the Mirage Convention Center.

Things are changing. One only needs to look around to see the cloud-based wars between Oracle and salesforce.com, Microsoft and Google, and any other number of high tech companies, to realize that a shift is underway. So, like the song says, “Let’s Get it Started.”  Trust me, you can’t afford to wait.

Safe travels and see you at the conference.