I’ve been involved in a number of suite deployments and learning management has led the charge because of compliance. I agree with you; beyond compliance, LMS is very strategic to HR and business. I think you are partially correct on your comment about provable ROI. The training department just needs to get out of the pain of entering compliance information. There are correlations between improved safety training and lower incident rates. Every incident has a cost to it. Mostly, companies just want to make sure they pass an audit and avoid fines from a regulatory agency. It isn’t until companies become “self-actualized” in training that they make the leap from compliance to competence. Companies at this point are not thinking that learning provides a crucial function in succession planning for example.

You mention adoption rates below. Learning is by far the most used application in the talent suite. Employees now more than ever seek to be developed. You can certainly do performance reviews without creating development goals but why would you? Performance is the least adoptable module of the bunch and incorporating development goals into the performance process is a great way to get tacit permission from your manager to do go forward with training. Managers do not like doing performance appraisals. It doesn’t matter how good the technology is – a performance culture and executive sponsorship is required for a successful roll-out.

My point is that learning is a foundational component of talent management. Could you imagine implementing the other modules without it?

P.S. I liked your post on “formalized informal learning” – I think what you are driving at is that experiential learning is the most effective form of learning. And learning from someone else’s experiences is the next best thing.

First, of course, corporate learning is a very strategic part of HR and business itself. You cant really run any business function without an L&D role – and when “learning” is not owned by someone, it gets done anyway – by business managers and staff when they have time. The whole L&D industry is going through a major shift toward what we call “formalized informal learning” – more on that, http://www.bersin.com/blog/post/Informal-Learning-becomes-Formal.aspx . So the “LMS” market has its own rapidly-changing directions.

Second, I think that saying “Learning is the most provable” of all talent modules is just not how businesses work. When organizations buy an LMS, they doso to solve particular problems in L&D – implementing e-learning, managing channel training, certifying manufacturing specialists, etc. It has little to do with a general “talent management” strategy at its most fundamental level, because the LMS has to manage training correctly first. Integration with development planning, while important, plays a secondary role to making sure that the LMS actually does manage training well.

On the other hand, when companies buy a “Talent Management Suite” – they often focus on other problems initially – fixing a broken succession process, implementing better aligned performance management etc. and again, if these features are not widely adopted, the system goes unused.

It just so happens that these two worlds are very connected, of course, so in today’s software market most buyers are much better off buying an integrated solution if they can find one that meets their needs. In fact, the “standalone” LMS vendors are beginning to lose momentum for this precise reason. But I think it’s very important to understand that what an LMS does is important and often very different from what other elements of a TM suite do. We have felt for years that LMS vendors actually have some of the best opportunity to deliver end-to-end TM solutions, and the market is just beginning to bear that out.

Happy to discuss this at length. Grandma, are you going to expose your name, or did I miss it. :-)