The quarterly publication of the International Legal Technology Association
Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/21494
for pages and sites. Today, it is not uncommon to find organizations where intranet content is published through a collaborative network of employees distributed throughout the organization. Intranets have increasingly become the place employees go to conduct research and discover organizational information, i.e., to learn, making the intranet a learning and development platform of sorts. Businesses care about helping their employees discover learning opportunities; about promoting their internal training, instructors and leaders; and about promoting employee-to- employee relationships because these things contribute to growth and profitability. SharePoint Is the Learning Center of the Future Businesses often have another enterprise system for learning and talent management and that is the learning management system (LMS). The LMS is where formal learning opportunities live. Formal training encompasses instructor-led training, video recordings and e-learning programs. It is where compliance is managed, the effectiveness of talent development programs is evaluated and where on-demand performance support resources are published. This can create a problem in that having two disconnected learning systems creates an obstacle for employees to get a complete picture of the learning opportunities throughout the organization. Since employees are increasingly using the intranet for research, the learning opportunities that live within the LMS ought to be published in and throughout the intranet so that they can be easily discovered when needed and in the places where consumers expect to find them. Bryan Cave, a law firm with more than 1,000 attorneys, offers an example of how this can be achieved. CIO Magazine recently recognized Bryan Cave with a CIO 100 Award for its innovative use of SharePoint. Connie Hoffman, the firm’s CIO, sees SharePoint as the firm’s learning center: As we prepare for SharePoint 2010, we’re examining our department pages, practice area pages, local office pages, and our communities of interest and asking the question, “Are there learning opportunities that live within the LMS that would be appropriate and useful to advertise on this page?” You end up with a network of distributed learning and development content that’s centrally managed and tracked through the LMS but delivered throughout the intranet in all the right places. Bryan Cave sees the socialization of learning activity as a powerful motivator for learning and development. In addition to advertising the learning opportunities throughout SharePoint, the firm is rolling out learning activity feeds that report on the usefulness of the training and materials to 88 www.iltanet.org Peer to Peer West LegalEdcenter SEE THE LIGHT Consolidating your legal training and CLE through a single, comprehensive source like West LegalEdcenter keeps attorneys current and compliant while saving firms money. westlegaledcenter.com 1.800.241.0214 ' 2010 Thomson Reuters 12-10 Thomson Reuters and the Kinesis logo are trademarks of Thomson Reuters. colleagues. Publishing the names and faces of colleagues who are signing up for and completing training, who are watching video recordings and e-learning presentations, and who are accessing training resources, results in a healthy form of peer pressure and leverages interpersonal relationships to cultivate a corporate culture of lifelong learning. Transparency Is the New Black This kind of peer-based viral advertising is exactly what Apple created for music with Ping. Just as Ping is probably only the tip of the social network iceberg Apple has planned for iTunes promotion, using SharePoint to create a social network is just the tip of the iceberg for leveraging Enterprise 2.0 technology for learning and training. ILTA 4236 See the Light_V6 ILTA AD Dec..qxp 11/11/2010 2:01 PM P Michael Barshinger is the Founder and CEO of Profiscience Partners, a leading provider of performance management solutions to law firms. Profiscience’s flagship product is UniversitySite, a learning management system used by half of the top 200 law firms in the United States and around the world. The combination of UniversitySite and its SharePoint Learning Kit enables organizations to rapidly deploy social networks for learning in SharePoint. Michael can be reached at michael.barshinger@profiscience.com. - -