Have You Outgrown Your LMS?

By Margery Weinstein Have You Outgrown Your LMS? "Training is no longer a back-office function. It’s now at the front line of addressing strategic business challenges when trying to outsmart, outmaneuver, and outperform your competition," says Ben Carstens, marketing, for learning vendor GeoLearning. "Your learning management system (LMS) of the past may not be what your organization requires today and into the future." Carstens says when re-evaluating your system for 2011, it’s important to make sure you’re delivering training to all of the audiences you need to reach, internally and externally. Key questions? Does your system have the flexibility to deploy courses from multiple online providers, as well as the custom content you create? Can you report data and share it across the LMS? Scalability of your system is important, says Carstens. So, as your audience’s requirements change, so should your LMS. "When competing in a global market, you need to have a simple way for all of your users to access the same system. Delivering content via a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform is an easy and flexible solution," he says. "The system is continually being perfected and is never out of date." Carstens says having a feature-rich, best-of-breed solution allows smaller companies the same functionality enhancements as larger organizations with the services and support to back it up. Carstens offers five red flags that you’ve outgrown your LMS:

1. You can’t deliver critical training to multiple audiences in and outside your organization.
2. As your users are becoming more sophisticated, your LMS doesn’t have the robust functionality you need (i.e., talent management, analytics, or social learning).
3. Your LMS is static and out of date—your learning audiences are hindered by not having access to new learning technologies.
4. Your end-users need more support than what can be handled internally, and your provider doesn’t provide adequate hours for administrative and end-user support.
5. Your LMS isn’t scalable. It’s unable to grow and change along with the needs and requirements of your organization.

HAVE OTHER INPUT OR TIPS on this topic? If so, send them our way in an e-mail to lorri@trainingmag.com with the subject line "Outgrown LMS," and we'll try to include your advice in an upcoming issue of our Training Tech Talk e-newsletter.