What You Need to Know About Optimizing Your Tech Stack w/ Rachel Horwitz (Learning Culture Partners)

How much learning technology do you actually need?

Rachel Horwitz joins ITK to discuss learning tech optimization. Rachel has managed HR and L&D practices at Mars, The Estée Lauder Companies and ConvaTec. Now her team at Learning Culture Partners helps organizations improve the utility, scalability and cost-effectiveness of their learning tech ecosystems. 

If you want expert tips on how to get maximum value and impact from your technology investments, join Rachel and JD for this spirited conversation! 

• Watch the full video of this episode on the Axonify YouTube Channel.
• Subscribe for ITK updates and show announcements at axonify.com/itk.
• Donate to SOS Children’s Villages at www.sosflorida.com. 
• Grab your ticket for AxoniCom 2023 in Nashville this October at axonify.com/axonicom. 
• Grab a copy of JD’s book - The Modern Learning Ecosystem  at jdwroteabook.com.

In The Know is brought to you by Axonify, the proven frontline enablement solution that gives employees everything they need to learn, connect and get things done. With an industry-leading 83% engagement rate, Axonify is used by companies to deliver next-level CX, higher sales, improved workplace safety and lower turnover. To learn more about how Axonify enables over 3.5 million frontline workers in 160-plus countries, in over 250 companies including Lowe’s, Kroger, Walmart and Citizens Bank, visit axonify.com.

Transcript

JD Dillon (00:12):

Hello friends, how are you doing today? It's great to see you. Welcome to the 34th episode of In The Know, your 25-minute deep dive into the modern employee experience and what we can do to make it better. I'm JD from Axonify, and today's show is all about technology. Specifically, we're going to talk about the kinds of technology that help people learn and perform in today's workplace. So if you have an LMS, an LXP, an LCMS, VR or AI, really any of the letters, this conversation is going to be right up your alley. Now, talking about learning technology can sometimes be a little bit squishy for me because I don't know if you know this, but I…am a technology provider.

(01:06):

I know. Shocking, right? But believe me, I know what it's like to be on both sides of the conversation to be told that this technology, this platform is the one and it's going to solve all of your problems. And then you can't get the help desk on the phone to solve a simple user provisioning problem a week later. So today we're going to give you the information that you need to make smart decisions in a crowded, confusing technology marketplace and help you architect a learning tech ecosystem that empowers everyone in your organization to do their best work every day. We're joined by Rachel Horwitz, CEO of Learning Culture Partners and an OG ITK fan who knows a thing or two about finding, implementing and measuring the value of learning tech thanks to her time with companies like Mars, Estée Lauder and ConvaTec. But before we welcome our special ITK guest, I have an important announcement.

(02:00):

Did you know that we're just 60 days away from AxoniCom? That's right. Axonify's annual community event is back in person for the first time since 2019. We're bringing together L&D, Operations, HR and Communications teams to have open, frank and practical conversations about the frontline workforce and how we can help them do their best work every day. So join us on October 22nd, 23rd and 24th at the JW Marriott in Nashville, Tennessee for an experience packed with awesome speakers like folks from Foot Locker, Dollar General, Marriott, Red Thread Research, American Tire, Members First Federal Credit Union, Eden Housing and so much more. Axonify customers, you also have until August 31st to send in your submissions for our AxoniCom awards. So get all the details and register today at Axonify.com/AxoniCom. I hope to see you in Nashville in just two months. Now, let's welcome our very special ITK guest, Rachel.

(02:59):

Rachel is a dynamic and innovative L&D leader with extensive experience developing enablement strategies that power priority initiatives and achieve business goals. Over the course of her career, Rachel has been a trusted partner successfully cultivating global cross-functional teams, collaborating with senior executives to identify performance issues and implementing proven business strategies to support associate development. Rachel previously held HR and L&D roles at Mars, Estée Lauder and ConvaTec before launching Learning Culture Partners, a consultancy that helps L&D leaders build their capabilities and make sure that learning is seen as an investment in the business and not a cost that can be cut. Rachel Horwitz, you're In The Know.

Rachel Horwitz (03:39):

Hi JD. Thank you so much for having me and I would love to meet that person that you just talked about.

JD Dillon (03:46):

I just read the bios out of you, so it's all on you. So let's jump right in. Let's tackle a question that I'm pretty sure everyone that's watching and listening has top of mind, and that is: which learning platform is really the best one?

Rachel Horwitz (04:02):

The best? That is such a silly question. I mean, that's like asking, and I like to talk about fitness a lot in my likening from L&D to fitness, and that's like asking ‘what is the best exercise’? Ultimately, it depends on what you're trying to accomplish. And similarly with your business and your learners, what are you trying to accomplish that is the best platform that's going to work for you?

JD Dillon (04:30):

Completely agreed. And again, coming from the technology provider side of the world, I very much know that to be successful you have to find the right fit and not just assume that because something worked for one organization is going to work for another that's trying to solve different problems with people who do different kinds of work. Now, when I got into L&D, we talked about learning technology. We were pretty much talking about learning management systems, and nowadays we're talking about entire technology stacks and dynamic integrated ecosystems. So I'm curious to get your thoughts on how do you define what learning technology is nowadays? What fits into this category?

Rachel Horwitz (05:06):

Yeah, and you're absolutely right. I mean, there's no one definition to be able to say ‘this is a learning technology’. It's really anything that helps your employees do their jobs better. And we like to talk about technology, it doesn't even need to be a fancy whizzbang application system. It could be a piece of paper, but anything that enables your employees to be able to do their jobs better, meet the needs of the business and get it done when it needs to get done. That's what I would say.

JD Dillon (05:34):

Yeah, I think that's a great point to keep in mind because to be qualified as a ‘learning technology’ doesn't need to be something that's owned by the learning and development function or maybe necessarily something that delivers courses. So to your point, if it helps people get better at their job, whether that be from a performance support angle, whether that be from a learning and skill development, we have to think more broadly about the ecosystem so that we make better decisions about how we augment that ecosystem.

Rachel Horwitz (06:03):

Exactly, exactly. Very broadly.

JD Dillon (06:05):

I don't think I'm the only person who believes that in a lot of cases, L&D struggles to keep pace with innovation because we were late to the cloud, we were late  to mobile, we were late  to social. The reality is we have jobs to do, right? And we have problems to solve. So keeping up with the tech space usually doesn't maybe hit the top of our priority list. So how have you seen the learning tech conversation change over the course of your career, but especially the last couple of years as organizations struggled to enable frontline workers during the pandemic and now they're trying to reckon with corporate teams that are maybe partially in an office and partially remote. And of course now there's the entire AI conversation. So how would you compare learning technology of 10 years ago to learning technology today?

Rachel Horwitz (06:52):

Yeah, and to your point, we used to talk about it as our learning management system. How could we track the learning that our employees were able to get? And over the past 10 years, it's become a much more fragmented industry in that there's so many technologies that do one thing and that was more in the past. There was your technology that did this or your technology that did that. Now as we've continued to evolve, there's a lot of consolidation. A lot of our LMSs and LXPs do 1,000,001 things every whizzbang button that we can imagine. So then now you buy a big one and hope that it'll do everything, but just as you said, technology continues to evolve. So whether rightly or wrongly, I don't think we'll be able to escape this fragmented piece of the industry, but it continues to evolve along with every other piece of technology that we think about to do our jobs, whether it's learning or anything within our business really.

JD Dillon (07:50):

Yeah, that's another great point around the evolution of learning technology is not that much meaningfully different than the evolution of technology. So it's not necessarily entirely in a silo. And I think you see that in kind of the cyclical nature of how the industry evolves. If you're around long enough, you start to notice that we feel like we're repeating ourselves. And you kind of mentioned that there's this period of time where people go looking for the One Ring, the big platform that has a lot of different features and capabilities. This is going to solve all of our problems, but then either the problems change or technology evolves where now that platform doesn't do all of the things that exist out there, and you start to realise, well now there may be point solutions that augment that, and then slowly the big platforms start to evolve to include some of the, so it's just this kind of on-and-off-again, evolution that is just how technology works.

Rachel Horwitz (08:51):

Exactly, exactly. We can never just really catch up, but we often then at some point we find ourselves in this Frankenstein situation where this system plugs into this one and this into this one, and then they don't talk to each other. But it certainly then continues to evolve as we go.

JD Dillon (09:07):

That's why I think this conversation's important, but not just having a one-off conversation around learning technology, but making sure that this topic is pegged at the top of our list of priorities because it is always changing. You can't make a technology decision today and say, I'm good for the next 10 years. That's just not the reality of how the workplace functions alone, how technology functions. So why do you think it's so important for L&D to get tech right?

Rachel Horwitz (09:36):

It's so important because, and exactly as I talk about with my consulting, is that we don't want to be seen as a cost to the business as something that is a standalone piece of the business. How often in learning do we talk about learning in the flow of work and meeting our learners and our employees where they are? So it is important for us to be in tune with ‘what are the business goals and objectives?’. What are the priorities that IT and procurement are doing, and how do we leverage technology to weave within how the business is going so that it doesn't become another place for our employees to go, or another thing for them to think about while they already have so many priorities and they're already trying to implement system after system after system, it has to be something that is really comprehensive and part of the overall strategy within the organization.

JD Dillon (10:25):

Yeah, there's definitely an exhaustion factor that can take place when you just either ask people to keep adopting or changing or taking a look at new tools or introducing so many tools that I need to understand and use every day to do my job. How do you architect an ecosystem that makes it not just easy for the administrative side and easy on the wallet and all those types of things, but also easy on the employee so they understand they don't necessarily need one system to do their jobs. I often relate our technology story to your own smartphone. You have more than one app on your phone, you don't use 300 apps every day. You figure out which ones are particularly meaningful to help you live your life and solve problems, and you properly navigate across them. And some of them do talk to one another and share information.

(11:13):

Some of them don't. Some of 'em do very specific things, some of them do a bunch of different things. But the difference I often find is that I get to make that decision because it's my phone. So I can figure out how many different task apps do I want to try out before I find the one that I like, and then I don't like it anymore. So I keep trying different ones and go back to the one I was using six months ago, which is what always happens with me. But in the workplace, I don't get to make those decisions, especially if I'm a frontline worker. I have almost no say in the company's technology decision making. So I think it's then on people like us who do have influence over not just what we acquire, but how we implement and apply technology to make sure that it makes sense to the person who just needs to do their job using these tools versus having to teach people how the technology works and how to use it to do their jobs. So what I want to do is I want to walk through a couple of situations so that our viewers and listeners kind of get a sense of how they can make informed decisions when it comes to implementing and applying learning technology. So I'm going to give you some scenarios where L&D is going to have to make that smart, informed forward-thinking decision. And if you could give us the steps that you would suggest people take to make sure they're getting the most value out of their tech investment.

Rachel Horwitz (12:30):

Sounds like a plan. I'm ready. 

JD Dillon (12:32):

Alright, let's dive in. So in our first situation, your organization, it's early days. So you don't have a learning management system or you don't have that kind of formal learning technology yet, but you know that you need to make an investment to handle the skill development and the compliance needs of your scaling business. So from your perspective, how do you make that first move into learning tech and not make a decision that's going to haunt you for the rest of the time that you're with that company?

Rachel Horwitz (13:00):

Yes, JD, that is such an important question because haunt it will if you make a wrong decision at the beginning, and I would say you really should start small. You do not want to underestimate the change management that is involved with implementing any sort of learning technology or any technology. So it's going to be big and you probably don't need a Cadillac right out the gate. You probably would be fine with a Kia. Nothing wrong with Kias at all, but you want to take some small steps and get something that is going to start to work for the curriculum and the business and meet them where they are because otherwise you're going to go out with something that's going to be, as we talked about, so overwhelming, hard to manage, hard to administrate, you're going to keep your IT people very busy because they're going to be focusing their support on you. So you really want to start with something that is going to make sense for the curriculum that you have or the place where you are today. You may want to invest in something that may has some features that you might want to consider down the road, but you definitely don't need to go whizzbang huge with everything all at once. So that's what I would consider.

JD Dillon (14:10):

Yeah, and I'm with you. I think that the two things I would add are one, making sure that especially if you're working in a small but growing business or you're really thinking about scaling is how are you making decisions now that are going to work for where you're intending to go, not get ahead of yourself or jump ahead of your skis, but make sure that you're not making investments around a thousand people that won't work for 6,000 people if you're headed in that direction. So I think that's a big consideration. And then the other one for me as someone who's implemented different types of tools in a learning technology ecosystem is to make sure that you've proved the concept works before you make that initial investment. Let's say it's a knowledge management conversation we're having. We want to have a good repository for people to share and access information.

(14:58):

That's less a technology decision. It's more of a behaviour conversation about how the organization captures and shares information. So do you understand how information flows through the business and have you tried some things maybe with simpler technologies to see what will and won't play within your organization to then help you justify investing in something new because you've either tried your existing tools and it doesn't work, or you've proven that these behaviours or the use of these types of systems be beneficial in very concrete ways. Okay, now I've got a good business case for moving forward in that regard.

Rachel Horwitz (15:34):

Exactly. That's what I always say. It's not the technology and then the process. It's got to be the process, the behaviours, and then the technology that's going to work into that to make it work.

JD Dillon (15:46):

So much of it. People love to talk about SharePoint. People often vilify SharePoint and my retort often back is it's usually not SharePoint. It's usually how SharePoint is being run within an organization in terms of what administratively is available and the fact that people like to try to build their own websites in SharePoint and things sometimes go a little bit sideways when one department has one version of SharePoint and then another department has another version, and you've got the employee going, the navigation's different and all these different websites. So I think we can maximise different types of tools if we look at it strategically. So let's jump into our next scenario. So now you're working in an organization has a learning management system, but it's just not fulfilling your needs as we kind of talked about a little bit earlier. So you don't want to punt your existing l m s, you're a fan, it does what it needs to do, but you know, need more capability to properly support every segment of your workforce. So this is going to mean that you need more budget for more technology. So what tips would you share for getting buy-in from critical stakeholders, especially the types of people who might say, just use what we have if they're thinking about consolidating or maybe saving on budget. So how do you make sure that you can demonstrate the value of that investment for the business?

Rachel Horwitz (17:00):

That's a really good question. And again, it goes down to really understanding your target audience and their needs so specifically and how it's going to really impact their ability to impact the business. So a couple of weeks ago you had, for example, Diane Elkins talking about accessibility. You may need a platform that is focused on accessibility or has specific compliance needs for your specific target audiences. You really need to be very clear as to the business case that you're trying to solve and how this investment or the investment that you currently have is not going to be able to do it, but this one will. And maybe you have a plan in mind for how it will at one point of time be integrated into the more regular ways of doing something rather than being a standalone. But it's very clear to really understand and be very clear about your target audience. Rarely, if you're making another investment in something, rarely is it going to be this is going to be for everybody and there has to be then that buy-in with it, with procurement, with finance to understand why that this is important and how it's going to really drive change that we're expecting to see.

JD Dillon (18:11):

Yeah, absolutely. Being loaded up with an argument basically so that you bring facts to the party facts and you say, this is why, and this is the value we're going to get. And it's not just a lark for the learning and development team, I want this. It's not, this is good for learning. This is good for the organization. And I had one instance of that in a previous organization where I was going down the knowledge management path and I found that a lot of the struggles that we had were based on just information access, not formal training needs. And we had a fragmented knowledge management structure. So I went after a particular tool that was going to help me consolidate and simplify the experience, and the IT department pushed back on me and they said, well, can't you just do this with Google Docs? And my reply was, no, and if you think I can show me, and they tried and they failed, and they said, oh yeah, no, you can't do this with Google Docs. They just didn't feel the scale and complexity of the problem I was trying to solve. So sometimes you just need to immerse people in what you're actually trying to accomplish versus making it a superficial story about just buying technology. It's a real, you're trying to solve a problem, not buy technology

Rachel Horwitz (19:24):

Basically. It always starts with the problem. It really does. And don't underestimate that.

JD Dillon (19:29):

Yeah. So now we're jumping forward. We're in the RFP process. So we've got budget, we've got approval, and now all of the vendors in your RFP process are just expertly checking all of the boxes in your Excel spreadsheet because they're really good at that and they're basically saying, we can do anything and everything that you need. So how do you make sure that what you see is actually what you get during a procurement process?

Rachel Horwitz (19:51):

Well, that's where it really gets fun because then you're in it trying to pick it apart and really dig deep and get under what they're actually trying to say. A couple of things that I would do is I would ask to talk to their customers and learn from their customers and their instance of the application and find out what's working for them, what are their pain points? What does it really look like from the user, from the admin, from the manager? And really just see it. And obviously I know you're going to get a positive customer who's happy with it, but you really want to dig deep. The other thing, and I've actually seen this done is have them show you a demo, not the demo with all the bells and whistles that the salespeople are going to give, but the demo behind the scenes. I actually had a colleague who had the company test from an admin perspective, the length of time and the amount of clicks it took to actually input content into the system and sat there with a timer and she made sure that whatever they were saying in the RFP, if they said it was five clicks and then it's in, she really made sure and tested that. So don't be afraid to push the boundaries and really get, pick behind the scenes, get a peek under the hood and see really what it looks like

JD Dillon (21:03):

For those Brooklyn Nine-Nine fans out there. I think you specifically nailed a Bingpot! when it comes to talking to existing users of a technology because that's where things get real because these folks have implemented, they're using it, they're actually hopefully seeing value from it and they will be real. And I think the other key consideration is that if you go to any technology website on the planet, they're all kind of the same in the fact that there's a row of logos on the homepage somewhere. And I would say take into account those organizations, but also go deeper and look for organizations that maybe aren't exactly like you. Maybe they're not in the exact same industry as you are, but they're struggling with similar challenges and maybe implemented the technology to address those types of issues in a way that you would. So really digging into what the user base looks like today and have those very frank, practical conversations.

(22:04):

And I mean, in my experience, I've even seen some folks who are interested in technology just kind of walk into a location that they know the employees who work there use this application. I just want to talk to the people who use it, not necessarily just the admin or not just the buyer. I want to see what the employees think about using these systems because their perspective is critically important as well, because they're the people we're trying to help solve problems through technology and learning and development, not just the people who are on the backend administrative side, important for everybody, but especially the people that are doing their jobs every day. So great point there with talking to people. Really use the system already, not just the people trying to sell the system. Yes. So our next one, now we're working within a tech stack.

(22:45):

We've got multiple tools, and you believe that integrating those tools is going to make the experience better for both the employees as well as the administrators, but that means getting support from the organization, especially from IT who might need to build some tech and some connectors to create those integration opportunities. So with so many different options and kind of such a vague word, the word integration, it can mean a bunch of different things. How do you prioritise the right integrations to improve your tech stack? But when you don't have the resources to build and maintain this really complex infrastructure,

Rachel Horwitz (23:19):

And as we talked about earlier, I would hesitate to even build a really complex integration, especially if you're in an organization that's planning on growing and changing, because then very quickly that technology is not going to work for you. So you really want to define what is integration for your organization? Again, what is the problem that you're trying to solve? Will it be a simple plugin that works great and that will solve your problem if it has to be something more complex and complicated, you need to think about the money, the support, the resources. It's going to take the time and effort to actually integrate. And ultimately, what are you trying to get out of the integration and is it clear reporting? And therefore even is the amount of mapping that you have to do compared to other integrations within other systems, something that's of utmost priority. So really getting very clear on what you're trying to integrate. What is the end goal and purpose of that integration? Because integration sounds great, but if it doesn't really need to be integrated or if it only lightly needs to touch, there you go. That solves your problem.

JD Dillon (24:26):

And what's the value add from this experience in terms of the effort and investment required to create and maintain? That's the other thing. Maintain an integration. What are you actually getting out of it in terms of time saved, efficiencies, improved experience. And here comes in my book, the Modern Learning Ecosystem. Shameless plug, I have a technology chapter. One of the things that I outline is I look at integration from two perspectives. There's technical integrations, which is where literally technologies touch and share data and content are built in using developer applications. So maybe different experiences appear in different apps, and then there's a strategic side of integration where maybe the applications don't talk to one another, but they make sense alongside each other. Right? And again, to the employee, I understand why I'm using these different tools and the experiences integrated well, or maybe there's links between systems, but it's not necessarily something we have to do a heavy lift on to maintain the technical side of it. So it's making the investments in the right places to get the right types of integrations to get the value you're trying to get out of your tech.

Rachel Horwitz (25:31):

Yes, exactly.

JD Dillon (25:32):

All right, we got one more scenario before we get out of here. So now you're at a conference, you're walking through the expo hall, lots of technology providers in this case, every booth is covered with the letters A and I. And you know that this is an important moment of technology, but you also struggle to figure out what's real and what's hype, especially for the latest trend. So from your perspective, how can people get the information that they need to keep up and make smart decisions in a constantly changing, noisy, complicated tech marketplace, especially for trendy things like AI is right now?

Rachel Horwitz (26:08):

Right? So trendy. And you can imagine probably on every RFP, it probably also says, do you have AI? Which is something that is today is the vogue thing to do. But again, what do you need? Where are you with your business? Where are your employees? Where is the business goals that you're trying to accomplish? AI is also a term that means a lot of different things. It could be the latest language generation that we're trying to do right now, or it could just mean that you're creating adaptive learning. So really what are you trying to accomplish when you think about, not ai, but the latest trend that is out there right now? Do you need it today? Do you need it tomorrow? Do you need it? Maybe never. It's easy to seize on these shiny silver pennies and really jump on the latest and greatest trends, but if it doesn't make its sense for your business, it's going to fall flat very quickly and then so will you.

JD Dillon (27:04):

Yeah, FOMO doesn't tend to drive the greatest decision making, especially when it comes to long-term investments for a business. But great point, especially around challenge providers to say, what do you mean by that? Because the same was true of micro learning when that was the biggest word. And then skills, the biggest word now AI is the biggest term around the learning tech space is, okay, I get what the concept is, but what are you actually doing? What problems are you solving through the application of your system or through the application of this particularly trendy topic? Because I know for a fact that AI for one system may mean, oh, we're talking about content authoring and generative ai and building courses or building questions faster in another system may be about digital assistance and helping people find information. And another one might be about translations, some might be about multiple things. So it's really digging in to understand, okay, how are you using this concept, this trend, to elevate the experience? And ultimately, I think where our entire conversation comes back to is solve meaningful problems for the people I'm trying to help in the organization that I work for.

Rachel Horwitz (28:10):

Exactly. That's the bottom line is really what it is.

JD Dillon (28:14):

It's about problems, it's not about technology. Great points to start to wrap up on. So again, Rachel, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your insights into learning technology. As a thank you for appearing on our show, we'd like to make a small donation to one of your favourite causes. So can you tell us a bit about the organization that you selected?

Rachel Horwitz (28:30):

Yes. So for this organization, I chose SOS Florida, which is a village of foster children. There are 500 locations globally, but only two in the US and one happens to be very close to me and my family and I often volunteer with the foster kids. The purpose is to keep siblings together so they all live together in homes and go through the foster system as a group. It's really meaningful.

JD Dillon (28:55):

Outstanding cause Indeed. So be sure to check out the link on screen or the link in the show notes so you can find out more about SOS Florida, and of course Rachel. How can people connect with you and follow the work that you're doing at Learning Culture Partners?

Rachel Horwitz (29:08):

Yes. Well, you can certainly find me on LinkedIn and I had a recent article posted in CLO Magazine. I will be attending DevLearn, which is quickly coming. And of course if you'd like me to come and speak with any of your teams, I'm more than happy to do that too.

JD Dillon (29:24):

Awesome. Thank you again so much to Rachel Horwitz for sharing her insights and helping us break down the complexities of the learning technology marketplace. If you add a good time, be sure to subscribe to ITK. Head over to Axonify.com/ITK to sign up for show announcements and reminders. You can also check out the entire ITK collection on the Axonify YouTube channel or listen to In The Know on your favourite podcast app. Speaking of that nonstop AI conversation we just mentioned, our next episode is about that Juan Naranjo will be here to continue the AI conversation we started way back in March. Juan is a next-generation learning professional who applies AI and his work with a Canadian telecommunications company. So we're going to dig into the practical side of AI-enabled work, including how you can apply AI to boost your creativity and make work even more human. So tune in on Wednesday, September 6th at 11:30 AM Eastern for an AI- powered discussion with Juan Naranjo. I've been JD, now you're In The Know. And always remember to ask yourself the important questions, like how many programmers does it take to change a light bulb?

(30:30):

None. That's a hardware problem. I'll see you next time. In The Know is produced by Sam Trieu. Visual design by Mark Anderson. Additional production support by Richia McCutcheon, Andrea Miller, Maliyah Bernard, Tuong La and Meaghan Kay. The show is written and hosted by JD Dillon. ITK is an Axonify production. For more information on how axonify helps frontline workers learn, connect and get things done, visit Axonify com.