m-Learning: The Next Evolution in Enterprise Training

"As the bell rings, the teacher reminds students that Podcasts of the lecture are available for download, and queries that come up during study review can be messaged to her number. "

Sound familiar? If you have school age children - K through college - you are probably getting well acquainted with the new way of learning. Teaching is no longer tied to the walls of the classroom or what's on the blackboard. This is more than just e-Learning. While the concept of e-Learning was a technological advance in the way teaching is done, it is still about being tethered to a computer. m-Learning is about on-demand content delivery anywhere.

Wikipedia defines m-learning as - Any sort of learning that happens when the learner is not at a fixed, predetermined location, or learning that happens when the learner takes advantage of the learning opportunities offered by mobile technologies. In other words, mobile learning decreases limitation of learning location with the mobility of general portable devices.

This is not just a concept relevant for the classroom. The enterprise should recognize m-learning as a powerful add-on tool to their learning strategy. With corporate culture moving more to toward the concept of the "deskless worker" and smartphones moving up the ranks from the "third screen" to the "primary screen" for end-users, the enterprise should re-think and refresh it's strategy for delivering training material. Here are some considerations and business drivers for taking your enterprise learning strategy mobile:

From Push to Pull Learning

m-Learning affords the benefit of contextual learning. The opportunity to get the learner in the environment they need that content. Making content available in a format and context that is most meaningful to the learner aids in absorbing and reinforcing the material.

Start with Sales Force

Looking for a pilot group to tactically test your m-learning strategy? Start with your sales force. The folks in the sales organization tend to be early technology adopters. These are the people that live outside the office, often on the road, and can be the most disconnected from what's happening inside the walls of the enterprise. They want relevant information when they need it and are sensitive to time. Time they spend training is time they aren't selling. Since individual compensation rides heavily on sales, finding time to train can be a low priority. Mobile affords your sales force with just in time training. And it shifts the perception of training from a "forced necessity" to "valuable information when I need it".

Make Mobile Part of a Blended Learning Approach

Mobile learning makes the most sense when it's part of a larger program. It supports and re-enforces the learning process and offers the learners not only the opportunity to learn both together and apart but also to learn in their optimal environment.

Build Your Business Case: Stats to Consider

Don't just take it from me that mobile is going to be the platform of choice. Industry trends are pointing in that direction already.

Mobile subscriptions are on track to hit 5 Billion worldwide this year. That means more people will have access to data through their mobile device than through TV and PCs combined.

Avoiding the Pitfalls

Deploying an m-learning strategy is as much about the people and technology as it is about the content. This feeds directly into the decisions the enterprise must make around supported mobile devices (smartphones, tablets) and the people required to maintain and build-out capabilities. Technology can be a huge competitive advantage but think before you build. Here are some challenges to address before you deploy:

• Connectivity, battery life, and bandwidth restrictions - know how your end-users will be connecting and device limitations before you build.
• Device requirements/restrictions - Screen size, key size, Multiple standards, multiple screen sizes, multiple operating systems. Mobile platform standardization is a precursor to deploying m-learning within the an enterprise.
• Number of file/assets' formats supported by a specific device - make sure your m-learning development team is aware of the technology requirements and limitations.
• Content security - don't forget about encryption for any content that will reside on a mobile device. An enterprise mobile policy should address content security requirements/standards.
• Reworking existing e-Learning materials for mobile platforms can be labor intensive - it's not a copy and paste exercise so plan for it upfront.

Is your company deploying training to mobile devices? Post comments and share your stories.

3 Great Resources Ready for Your Complex Projects

With so many new trends with mobility, agility, and the Cloud, there are a lot of questions on which emerging technology fits into your business needs. When it comes to making those tough decisions, having an expert with a long list of successes is the way to go. Meet our list of available experts who can solve any of your business problems and help get your from A to B faster.

Nina Jagannathan is a solid Project Manager and Senior Business Analyst with over ten years of professional IT experience, spanning from Electric Utilities, Direct Marketing Order Processing, Digital Data Mapping and Fleet Management. She is successfully wrapping up the enterprise Mobile project at a Fortune 500 financial institution.

Nina utilizes her strong math acumen that she acquired from her Masters degree in Electrical Engineering, as well as her past experience as a DBA to develop and analyze a variety of compelling metrics reports, which provided clients substantial savings. She is eager to continue her tradition of pinpointing issues and spotting trending that will help increase business efficiencies. Nina is highly skilled at eliciting both business and technical requirements and developing process flows and system use cases. Nina has excellent communication and presentation skills and is able to effectively communicate to both IT and business focused stakeholders.

How can Nina help your projects? Nina has expertise in:
- Business requirements gathering and use case documentation
- Business process re-engineering
- Facilitating team JAD sessions
- Application development project planning, resource allocation, and daily tracking/issue resolution
- Data analysis and metrics reporting to feed business decision making


Sathish Chittibabu is a seasoned Senior Java Developer/Architect and accomplished technology consultant with over ten years of experience developing mission critical applications using Java/ J2EE related technologies. Sathish has a a solid understanding of SDLC and Agile methodology. In Sathish's past projects, he has successfully architected and developed custom technology solutions for his clients in the areas of Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC). Sathish has implemented key Separation of Duties (SOD), SAS70, and SOX compliance technology controls for his clients. Sathish was also integral in both designing and implementing a highly customized Identity Management solution for a multi-phase IdM/RBAC program at a Fortune 500 bank located in Chicago. Sathish is well versed in both the Sun Identity Management and Sailpoint Identity IQ products. Sathish is currently wrapping up an enterprise mobile development project for a major financial institution which will enable existing application functionality to the Blackberry platform. From his past experiences and his desire to stay ahead of the technology curve, is a team player and is a must have for any of your complex projects.

How can Sathish help your projects? Sathish has expertise in:
- Java/ J2EE technical development
- Designing and Implementing Identity Management solutions
- Porting functionality from Sun's Identity Manager product to new technology
- Sailpoint Identity IQ product installation/configuration/customization
- Custom Application Development
- Mobile Application Development


Matt Bata is a Business Analyst who is an incredibly fast learner of all technical and business terminology. With a double major in Management Information Systems and Accounting, Matt has the knowledge to exceed at a variety of analytical tasks. Matt uses his strong business sense and critical thinking skills as well as his Operations Analyst experience to identify issues. On his past projects, Matt has leaned operations processes, performed data analysis on financial reports, and created metrics for future department reporting. Matt has top notch communication skills and is able to work on and lead a team.

How can Matt help your projects? Matt has expertise in:
- Financial reporting analysis
- Business requirements gathering and documentation
- Website management
- Multiple department support
- Manage and track project budgets

Contact me if you'd like to talk about any of these resources for your projects. As always, 1-2 hour project discovery sessions are complimentary.

Welcome to Facebook Gramps!

Read this article in the Tribune today about seniors getting on facebook. Some interesting data is suggesting that social networking use by seniors is growing faster than any other demographic. Senior use has doubled from 2009 to 201o.

What are your thoughts on how the growing adoption of social media by seniors will impact how that channel is used by businesses? Is there an opportunity being created by seniors getting bit by the Facebook bug? Add your thoughts and comments below.

3 Ways to Start Using the Cloud Today

The cloud is big right now but it's still a difficult transition for many companies to make. Cloud hesitation is mainly related to FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) rather than based in real-life experiences. Small businesses have embraced the cloud and SaaS offerings as a great democratizing offering. Through various cloud based applications, IT infrastructure and storage capabilities, and collaboration and productivity suites, the cloud has afforded the small guys with IT capabilities that would not have been possible on smaller budgets just 10 years ago. This is allowing more innovation, faster product development cycles, and overall more time to focus on the core business and less time worrying about supporting and administering an IT infrastructure or upgrading application capabilities.

Here are a few ways enterprises can start testing the waters to find the right balance between cloud based and traditional IT:

Email

This may sound like a big leap, but along with storage, email is quickly becoming one of the biggest commodity services. With names like Microsoft in the arena, and their hosted Exchange offering, the transition may not be as daunting. These services are cheaper for the provider to run and make a great enterprise business case for migrating more capabilities to cloud provider alternatives.

Collaboration/Idea Generation/Brainstorming

All 3 of these equal innovation. Give employees quicker ways to capture and share ideas. The Google apps platform and Microsoft BPOS are examples. With remote and distributed workforce becoming the norm, these platforms let you quickly co-create and share information. Easier collaboration and co-creation can lead to more innovation faster. A great example is using Google Apps to quickly create a shared spreadsheet to capture ideas that can be shared with remote participants - no conferencing technology or screen sharing technology needed.

Knowledge Management

Let your staff organize and share what they know, what's important, and what they are working on. Sharepoint is a common example but I'm a huge fan of Google Sites. Google Sites provides simple, easy to use, pre-defined templates to get you started. Starting a project? Create a site. I've used Google Sites to manage the execution of projects as well as a repository for final deliverables. These tools provide a quick consistent way to allow staff the self-service capability to make information accessible.

What is your company doing in the cloud? Is it embracing the cloud? As always I welcome your thoughts on the topic. Please share below.

A Product Managers Guide to Designing an iPhone App

One of the biggest questions facing my clients is "What should we mobilize?". The nuts and bolts of HOW to mobilize are actually a lot simpler than figuring out WHAT to mobilize. The mobile environment creates both an opportunity and a challenge for the Product Owner - we now need to get reacquainted with our end-users, learn their behaviors in the mobile context, and what's important to them on-the-go. The opportunity is in discovering a new facet of your target customer and discovering a new way to connect with them and fill a need. (If you don't fill the customer need....... someone else will).

The Golden Rule

The Golden Rule of Mobile application design: your mobile customers WANT TO FIND and DON'T WANT TO BROWSE. You want to create that eureka moment for your end-user as soon as the app loads, without requiring a lot of end-user interaction to get them there. Here's one of my favorite examples:

QVC is a large direct to consumer retailer with mainly a television based business. But they translated their TV sales approach into a highly functional and product rich online e-Commerce site. The website has a wealth of navigation options for refining the browsing experience and arriving at exactly the product you are looking for. Navigation is organized by product category, brand, type, etc... When translating the website experience to the mobile context they stepped away from navigation and just present the most relevant products based on -

• what's on air now
• items other customers have indicated as "top rated",
• the special value of the day.

A very simple, uncluttered, page design presents the most current information most prominently with a secondary focus on searching for something more specific. QVC is an example of a company that "gets it". As tempting as it might be to display a traditional homepage with a window into the tens of thousands of products available to purchase they successfully translated the TV equivalent of "what's on sale now" to the mobile app experience. And if you want to watch TV from your mobile device... you can do that too.

Use Existing Analytics to Drive Mobile App Approach

Anticipate the end-users need, use existing website analytics info to drive this. If you have a desktop browser based site, then chances are you already have some great insight into what your visitors find most useful on the site. Use existing website analytics to determine what also might be most useful in the mobile context. Not only what features are useful but also what OS and browsers are your visitors coming from.

Make it Useful, Useable, and Delightful

It needs to be relevant and fill a need now be easy and fun to use. The example I think of is Shazam.

• It answers that question "What song is that" in the moment (useful).
• Simple to use(useable).
• And who doesn't love watching that icon spin before spitting out the song you are listening to? And how DOES it work? How DOES it know what song I am listening to? (delightful).

There are a lot of ways to skin a cat but to make your app sticky it has to be fun to use, in addition to filling an immediate need. As described in the book Tapworthy most people use their mobile apps when they:

• are micro-tasking,
• want to know what's near me now,
• or are bored.

Keeping these simple ideas in mind when designing your app will help give your app and your brand the contextual relevance needed to make it sticky.

Creating a Culture of Innovation: 3 Lessons on Innovation from Pixar

CNBC aired a great biography recently on the story of Pixar. I was expecting the typical rags to riches story but instead, this was a story of building a culture of innovation. I learned how a few people with a passion for their craft and the confidence and willingness to push the limits of technology can not only, win the infusion of $10 million in investor dollars (from Mr. Steve Jobs) , but also win the hearts of millions of Americans -young and old - by blazing new trails while doing what they LOVE. Now, we can't all be blessed to have careers that bring pure joy to the young and young at heart, but we can take a lesson in how to foster innovation and push people to use their talent to the fullest. So what did Pixar do that we can apply? Here's what I learned:

Create a space that encourages unplanned collaboration

Even if you are bound by the limits of traditional cube-farm style office space, there can be ways to create a more open feel. Place team tables in central places. Centrally located white boards and easels are great ways to signify that this is a space where thoughts can be developed. Give the space a feeling of having a place to "squat" when the need arises instead of relying on planned meetings and pre-arranged meeting space. Keeping open collaborative space provides the canvas for impromptu idea generation and problem solving.

Treat individual office space as an empty canvas

If you've seen any stories in the news about the Zappos company culture, you'll understand this. Zappos allows employs to decorate cubicles and offices with as much style and individual flair required to inspire them. Just the fact that employees have that freedom to personalize their space is empowering to the employee. That feeling of empowerment and individuality helps create a culture where people feel safe to be themselves. When the guard is down that's when some of the best unedited ideas start flowing.

Embed frequent candid, critical feedback loops as part of your product development process

Pixar does this by having daily meetings where editing teams meet to present the movie segment they worked on to peers. The peers give candid and critical feedback. It's not sugar coated. But in an environment where people feel safe, they don't take feedback personal. This free flowing feedback early and often can help turn something that is good into something great quickly.

Innovation is not just a buzz word but is something that good companies truly work at. Apple as the poster child for innovation. Companies that see everyday things differently and create a culture where people are empowered, feel safe, and have the freedom to be themselves are the ones the others are trying to catch up to.

What does your company do to support idea generation, creative thinking, and innovation?

4 Enterprise Barriers to Agile Transformation

Delivering projects (both business process and technology focused) for the bulk of my career, I have found these themes to ring true as barriers to agile transformation within the enterprise:

Resource Management

While resources are cross-functional often wearing many hats, they are often part of a matrix organization and deployed to simultaneous projects at once. This creates conflicting priorities, lack of visibility, and the inability to fully participate in the day to day needs of any one project team. The Agile solution - dedicate resources to a single team. Allow resources to fully participate in the daily team interactions, forge relationships, and share accountability for the overall project goal. Dedicated participation will speed the overall delivery and ease communication barriers. Freeing the resources to move onto the next priority rather than working on several at once.

Physical Location

Large corporations (even the not-so-large) have always been fond of cubicles. Building physical walls between people for privacy. What suffers is team communication. So meetings become the main way for talking with each other. Instead, break down the walls and allow the team members instant communication anytime it's needed. Co-located team members is also a huge issue. The business often lives in one building and the technical in another. Again, creating physical barriers to communication and collaboration. Keep project teams together and break down the physical wall for the duration of the project.

Requirements

Requirements are a huge stumbling block in large enterprises. Not only the requirements themselves but the politics surrounding them. Politics such as - who had input? who signed off? when were they signed-off? are they in scope? when is a change request required? The traditional assumption around requirements is that the business knows exactly what it wants and that it won't change for the duration. Any changes are considered risks to project delivery. The agile mindset says - keep requirements light, keep them just-in-time, allow them to evolve with the needs of the business. This works because the cross-functional team is in constant communication. As requirements evolve real-time business decisions can be made based on the current state of the product. Together, the team takes input from a product owner to help craft ultimately how the product meets the goal. The product owner isn't expected to give detailed how-to requirements. Only to know what the business needs and, through a series of product demos, collaborate with the team to make the product just right. Traditionally the enterprise has encouraged a long very detailed upfront requirements gathering phase in which everything is written in documentation prior to building. This produces nice documentation that can quickly become outdated as business needs change (and business needs ALWAYS change). The project starts swirling around creating change requests before one line of code has even been developed. Stop the madness, document what's necessary to give the team a running start, evolve the documented requirements as the product evolves, not vice-versa.

Compliance Requirements

Agile promotes just enough process to get the job done. Sometimes in larger enterprises the "just-enough" becomes too heavy weight and prescriptive in the name of compliance. This is a huge misfortune and one of the largest barriers to starting and being successful at Agile. The key to compliance is a keen understanding of what controls need to be in place and what the purpose of the control is. The enterprise must provide the tools, resources, and guidance necessary for teams to be successful in meeting the controls NOT provide a detailed how-to for doing something. Education and shared accountability with actionable recourse are keys to compliance.

What are your experiences and barriers encountered when bringing Agile principles to your projects?