eLearning has been a relatively bright light in the economic downturn, particularly in essential vertical markets such as education, government and health care. When travel dollars gets cut, when services are needed but there are fewer people to provide them, when it's time to get serious about developing new job skills, it is no longer a hard sell to get decision-makers to see that elearning offers solutions for getting smarter faster in a variety of different technology-mediated ways.
Even so, it's a relatively difficult environment to get business decision-makers interested in doing work differently if there isn't a good business case for implementing changes. Many of the IDs I know have not had much experience working with line of business operations, annual plans, budgets and forecasts, revenue and expenses, so we lack the language and the skills to effectively communicate with business owners.
It's hard to change a business owner's mind when we talk about learning, change or professional improvement. For better or worse, if one can speak intelligently about year-on-year growth or opportunities for new customer segments, it's a whole different conversation.
From my perspective, IDs owe it to ourselves to be more effective at flexing our business muscles. For all of the conversations, and books, and lists and surveys describing all the things that IDs do - content analysis and storyboarding and web production and video production and assessments and the like - one of the things that IDs rarely address is developing any business acumen. It never really entered my mind that I would need to know financials until I found myself running a growing ID company and spending a lot more time on things like pricing and cost analysis, building bottoms up budgets and revenue forecasts, worrying about pipelines and lead conversion. It made me come to realize that questions really need to be answered before diving into the middle of an audience analysis -- such as "How many people out there are likely to care about this?", and "what other alternatives exist" and "What are the problems that my innovation can solve, and how much is it worth it for me to solve it?"
To repeat the point I used to close the last post - An innovation without much likelihood of adoption may be a great intellectual curiousity, a worthy candidate for a research project. But during times when "just the right app" may be just the right thing to spark new business success stories, we need to know how to figure out "who cares" and "how much" right along with "what if". Metaphorically speaking, it's all part of learning to skate to be in just the right place at just the right time.
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