by Site Staff
December 19, 2005
Ted Hoff, IBM’s vice president of learning and Chief Learning Officer magazine’s 2005 CLO of the Year, established a vision and implemented a strategy of transformation and innovation to enable learning to drive value and business performance. Part of Hoff’s success at IBM has been driven by his ability to create different ways to leverage on-demand technology to deliver client and stakeholder value. Since he first took the helm of IBM’s learning function four years ago, Hoff has paid special attention to all levels of the sales function with that goal in mind.
For example, the On Demand Strategy Learning Lighthouse, a global team of subject-matter experts and learning professionals, was formed to promote sharing and learning efforts across IBM’s business units and lead development of core e-learning modules that are promoted to all IBM salespeople.
As another example, the Software University is an annual live sales learning event with an attendee list of more than 17,000 sales professionals who are all interested in learning about the company’s different brands, specialties and certification test opportunities.
In addition, the Seller’s Connection allows IBM sellers to access knowledge and experts, and the high-priority Major Deal Maker Initiative increased IBM sellers’ close rates from 6.5 percent in the first quarter of 2004 to 10.5 percent in the first quarter of 2005. More importantly, this initiative increased the total value of closed sales opportunities from nearly $37.2 million to more than $471.3 million in the same time period.
IBM’s On Demand Learning and the On Demand Workplace, which Hoff fleshed out and plugged in, all take advantage of the basic and important fact that employees learn best at work. “All of us who are in the learning field know that the vast majority of how people learn is through their actual work—through their job,” Hoff said. “There’s a lot of evidence that about 80 percent of what people learn is learned through actual work experience, but so much of what we do in the learning field up until now has been focused on that other 20 percent— around how we design, develop and deliver courses. That 20 percent is critical, and I am an absolute believer in the need for formal education, particularly at critical points in a person’s career or at critical points in a company when you need to make sure that people understand the direction we’re facing. But if 80 percent of how we learn is through work—through our experience— then we need to ensure that we are organizing ourselves to emphasize, to strengthen and to accelerate the way people can actually learn through their work experience.”
Hoff acknowledges that this type of learning is complicated to execute and deliver. Before solutions can be deployed, determinations must be made about the nature of work different employees are engaged in. To answer that question, Hoff and his team have classified work by specific roles, and used these roles to begin the massive effort necessary to make the promise of workembedded on-demand learning a reality. “We have built an on-demand workplace that is organized by the role a person has and the work that people in that role do,” Hoff said. “We have defined 488 specific roles at IBM, not 10,000. We’re a huge company of 330,000 doing a lot of different things, but for all that we do and all the complexities of our business, we wanted to keep the number of roles to a contained number, and for each one of those 488 roles, we have in fact identified and defined the workflow that people in those roles engage in. We have done that in concert with the executives in the business who lead the groups that are in each role. We organized the workflow in the On Demand Workplace, which is IBM’s collaborative tools based upon our middleware technology, to enable us to present what people are engaged in and then have learning delivered to the individual. The learning on the screen literally changes based upon who the person is, and the screen also changes based upon the work that’s actually being done by the person.
We’ve built all that intelligence into our various applications. This is something that you might expect IBM to want to tackle—complicated technology work is what we do for a living— but we’ve also done the hard work in each group so that leaders of these populations and these roles really think about what is the work and what are the moments of learning that people can engage in?”
IBM’s On Demand Workplace provides learning to people not only through technology, but also by helping to organize how they work with one another. For instance, a key work moment for salespeople occurs when a client’s account team members meet to share with one another what they understand about the client’s needs and how IBM can craft and deliver solutions to meet those needs. “We’ve changed the account planning process to ensure that people come more effectively prepared for the account planning meeting,” Hoff said. “They come prepared by engaging in some learning before they get to the meeting. That’s one example where we have emphasized work embedded learning, but in this case it’s not so much leveraging the technology as it is changing the way such critical meeting actually happens.”
Hoff’s work to create sales learning that will deliver real value to IBM and improve sales effectiveness was the first place the company implemented work-embedded learning, because sales is one of the quickest areas in which to create long-lasting bottom-line impact. “One of the first things we did was conclude that the company needs to move across all of our various product lines toward one integrated sales methodology,” Hoff explained. “The sales transformation team actually led the effort to create a single common shared sales methodology across all of IBM’s product lines and across the globe. We then integrated learning into the sales methodology: how the members of the account team at IBM understand what the clients are looking for, how we define it and write it down, how we identify our opportunities to deliver value to clients. We’ve codified all that and built the processes that people can use to make sure they’re doing their work with discipline. We’ve baked learning moments and opportunities into the workflow all the way along. We did that even before we got to the complicated technologies of the On Demand Workplace. We started doing that years ago in how we were working to ensure that learning happens at every step of the way as the sellers individually or the account teams together were identifying opportunities for how we could actually serve our client. I think that this is one of the reasons that we’ve had such success in sales learning. We have delivered some superb formal courses for new sellers and so forth, but in addition to that we have worked very hard to ensure that learning happens all along the way in which sellers actually work to create and deliver value to our clients.
“(IBM’s Sales Transformation Learning Initiative) around work-embedded and on-demand learning is filled with promise and with complexity, but I do believe that it is the future of learning, and we at IBM are in a unique position to make that future of learning real because we have a major need ourselves to make it real,” Hoff added. “We have a very complex global business with rapidly changing business models, so we have a need to have learning be more than just courses. We also have a huge amount of talent in the company focused on how to build these applications for work-embedded learning, how to organize the databases necessary to ensure that the right learning opportunity is positioned for the right roles based upon the right work.”
Hoff wasn’t sure if the audience for the Learning In Practice Awards at the Fall 2005 CLO Symposium in Huntington Beach, Calif., caught on to his emotional reaction after being named CLO of the Year, but he was eager to thank his team for their contributions to IBM’s learning success. “I was thrilled and I was deeply emotionally touched beyond what I expected because I thought about what my teammates had done to nominate me and when I was on stage I choked up a little bit,” Hoff said. “But I specifically said, ‘I want to thank everybody and to accept this award on behalf of the IBM learning team’ because they are really the ones who won this award because of their enormous creativity and the success of their work. I choked up because I am deeply appreciative of the tremendous creative work that the team does and very proud. We’re a very close team. I think we are quite dedicated to each other and to delivering value for IBM through learning. I also was very proud for IBM. This is a big award, and CLO magazine has really created something special here. I was very proud that we were able to win the award on behalf of our company.”
Having created the structure for on-demand learning and the approach for sales transformation, there are more roles in which IBM plans to implement work-embedded learning. Hoff is quick to point out that his work in the on-demand learning arena is far from complete, and is not likely to ever be finished. He has new ambitions to create solutions to support sellers that will enable intensive collaboration, create greater insight into clients needs and encourage IBM consultants to think of new ways to create and deliver value.
“We at IBM have really been determined to be on the very cutting edge of creating the future of learning, and we have very definitely and purposefully looked to implement it first among our selling population at IBM because it’s of such importance to the business and because the selling population at IBM is hungry for anything that will allow them to improve their sales performance,” Hoff said. “We are definitely very proud of what we’ve accomplished to date and very ambitious about what more work we intend to pursue in learning. The work will never be done. There will always be more ways in which we can enable people to learn through work and enable people to achieve higher levels of performance through learning.”