Business Intelligence

Published June 2009

Perspectives on the State of Governance

Grant Ricketts and Rob Pannoni

Given the current economic climate, the time is now for learning and development professionals to establish proper governance. A survey of the state of learning governance reveals interest and potential — and room for improvement.

Ongoing pressure to deliver shareholder value, coupled with highly publicized management failures at companies such as Enron and AIG have generated a virtual tsunami of interest in corporate governance. A recent search on Amazon.com yielded 15,390 books on the subject — with more than 100 released in the past 90 days alone.

Given the increasing recognition that employee development and talent management are critical factors in long-term growth and profitability, it is a bit surprising there has not been a corresponding wave of attention around learning governance. As the economy starts to recover, learning and development professionals may be missing opportunities to raise visibility and increase the investment profile for learning.

To raise awareness around these opportunities, we conducted surveys with 130 learning organizations to get a snapshot of the state of learning governance today. Like its big brother corporate governance, learning governance is about:
• Establishing objectives and priorities.
• Allocating and managing resources to assure achievement of these objectives.
• Aligning organizational efforts to maximize effectiveness and increase operational efficiency and scalability.
• Building consensus and balancing stakeholder interests.
• Managing risk and holding leaders accountable.

About the Survey
The survey was designed to measure where organizations are making progress and where they are struggling. Questions included:
• How well is your learning organization able to cross organizational boundaries and serve multiple learning interests?
• Are different learning stakeholders aligned in your organization?
• Do they agree on learning priorities, how outcomes are evaluated and the way resources are deployed?

The surveys were distributed to three different learning peer-level organizations — groups whose members were directors, senior managers or CLOs. There was strong representation among larger organizations, with more than half (55 percent) coming from companies serving more than 20,000 learners. A wide range of industries, both commercial and public sector, were represented.

The survey was kept deliberately short at 11 key questions, and was grouped into three general sections: learning operations, organizational alignment and measurement and evaluation. There also were four questions to capture company profile and industry information.

Key Findings
The findings suggest governance is still a work in progress for most organizations. Some of the most notable results are:
• More than 80 percent of organizations do not have an enterprise-wide plan for learning. Most planning activities get fragmented in different business units, divisions or regional operating groups.
• While 70 percent of organizations have established a shared services role for learning (an emerging best practice), more than two-thirds said learning roles and responsibilities are not optimally aligned across the organization.
• More than 80 percent reported only low to moderate consensus on how to evaluate the learning function and its contribution to organizational results, suggesting there are still gaps in expectations about what measures are needed.

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Executive Search

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