Bluewater’s Center of Excellence: Technology

Technology was created to help us do our jobs more effectively and efficiently. Sometimes, however, it comes with too many bells and whistles and can hinder our progress rather than aid it.

In this video, I talk about ‘turning off’ unnecessary applications in order to simplify the technology in your Learning or Talent Management System.

Technology is why we’re here together talking at all. We’re using technology to be able to communicate with you and you’ve got a real interest in your technology. Whether it’s a learning or a talent, or a human capital management system.

So technology is really the foundation for everything that we’re doing. That’s why it’s at the bottom of our wheel because it’s the base, it’s what really makes everything work.

However, technology and licenses don’t necessarily solve business problems.

The focus has got to be on really the other six elements interacting and working with technology in order to be able to facilitate real business processes and solutions to problems.

Inside technology, there are a couple of key areas that we really try to focus on to help organizations look at. So, if you’re on a SaaS platform, that release management becomes a thing, vendors have between three or four releases per year. How does that impact me, what do I need to look at?

What about all of my integrations? My single sign-on may be changing. Those technological components become really important.

Another thing and kind of the last topic I want to talk about here is the configuration of that application. We include configuration inside technology because we have to be constantly adapting and being adept at making sure the configuration of the system is where we are today.

We have got a number of people that we work with that implemented a learning and management system ten years ago and they’ve never changed the configuration. And they’re curious as to why things are not working. Well, upgrades have happened, releases have happened on SaaS but we haven’t changed configuration models. We’ve always got to go back and look at that.

Paying attention and caring for your technology becomes really important.

So in future videos, look for us to talk about release management. In some of the cases, we’re going to talk about specific vendors and release management around vendors, what to do, and some updates there.

We’ll also dive deeper and talk about integration because the entire idea of a learning ecosystem really comes together when you begin to talk about integrating multiple technologies, ideas, and processes.