THE PULSE: LMS Use Is Expanding To Extended Enterprise

While 84% of respondents to a summer Elearning! survey report that they use their learning or talent management system to support employees, the LMS is being deployed more on an “extended enterprise”basis than ever before.

Until the last few years, LMSs were being used solely to train and educate employees. But e-learning and corporate managers have begun to find other uses for their LMS investments. Fully 53% of respondents said that they use their LMS to support reseller/channel partners,customer audiences and other supplychain partners. That compares to just 46% who had used their LMSs for  extended enterprise purposes the previous year.

One of the many reasons why this change is occurring is to eliminate excess employee, sales, customer,partner and channel network training costs while accelerating time-to-market.

This “next-gen” of extended enterprise systems offer feature sets that set them apart, because their components are truly geared towards the channel/distributors space.And this function is also one that can serve as a separate profit center for the corporation.

In the Elearning! research,the category of “Training to the Extended Enterprise” — which includes customers,partners and a host of other external stakeholders — is an extremely important initiative in the corporate sector,as 24% reported initiatives to that extended audience.Among potential LMS buyers, 20% say that their preferred system must have e-commerce support for the extended enterprise.

 

—More info: www.2elearning.com/index.php=http://www.2elearning.com/www/resources/researchwhite-papers/singlenews-item/article/elearning-userstudy-corporatesegment-1.html

---