by Site Staff
December 20, 2005
Aligning learning activity to the strategic goals of the business is one of the most critical necessities when creating effective learning and development opportunities for an organization. IBM Vice President of Learning Ted Hoff has mastered methods to create that integral link between business needs and learning solutions that ultimately will deliver value to the customer. Working within the on-demand business world, Hoff not only has recognized the importance of creating learning that keeps up with the fast-paced changes that occur industry-wide, but also has scaled down that overarching goal into manageable, executable steps that detail exactly how the IBM learning team can share knowledge across business units and lead development of core e-learning modules.
IBM’s On Demand Business Lighthouse Initiative is crossbusiness and global in scope and focuses on strengthening the entire IBM learning system. The initiative supports the company’s On Demand Business execution strategy, and has learning programs for sellers, partners, designers, consultants and other client-facing and non-clientfacing audiences. Hoff identified goals for the Lighthouse Initiative, such as to provide a comprehensive learning measurement strategy, provide tailored access to employees so they can focus on the most relevant learning for them, and develop a set of core and common Web-based modules that can be leveraged globally. These goals are met via multiple integrated Lighthouse Work Streams, which address the Lighthouse Team Structure, Learning Framework and on-demand business learning.
Strategically aligned learning creates impact or quantifiable results, and after measuring the number of On Demand Lighthouse learning modules successfully completed by 180 sales cluster teams since October 2004, IBM calculated that the top 50 clusters—approximately 550 sellers in the High Learning Coverage group—had taken an average of 19 modules, which has a translated revenue value of approximately $550 million.