John Leh

It is foolish to pay more than you have to and get nothing in return but it is impossible to know if you are overpaying if you first don't define your LMS requirements. 

Making sure your LMS selection team is on the same page in regards to implementation/configuration needs will allow a buying organization to quickly disqualify many vendor options without the labor of investing a ton of time.

Associations, training companies, corporate channel, customer and other extended enterprise buyers can create any number – hundreds of thousands even – of active ongoing accounts but a buying organization only pays for active usage.

 Common logic was flawed -- assuming training professionals and subject matter experts (SMEs) would regularly visit these social "spaces" and interact, keeping content fresh and learner engagement high.

The behemoth TM providers such as Oracle or SuccessFactors devalued the LMS when they incorporated their LMSs into broader HR software suites and took their foot off the innovation accelerator.

I concluded that it will take too long to teach 600+ LMS vendors the new anti-acronym trick and the easiest path would be to create a living, non-techie dictionary that decodes common acronyms for LMS buyers.

At Talented Learning, an independent learning tech market research and consulting firm, we recently compiled an obnoxious 85 question survey detailing over 450 points of LMS business, market and functional data.  We collected statistically significant hard data about the global LMS market providing us unparalleled and unique insight into what LMS buyers are buying today. [...]

Learning management systems didn’t die.  They evolved, and today we recognize them. Brief LMS History Corporate LMSs were invented almost 30 years ago to manage and report on the training and compliance of their employees and contractors.  They were expensive to purchase, implement, maintain, host, upgrade and replace.  Much of the investment was upfront and [...]

My best recommendation is to fully develop your business model, LMS use case scenarios and resulting requirements before engaging LMS vendors so you can find the best-qualified options to drive your online learning business.

Integrating training workflows and data with customer and sales-related data elevates training from a cost center to a profit center, because it helps prove the business value of learning.