Over the last few years, there has been a growing chorus of voices proclaiming the "Death of the LMS."  In most cases, these voices suggest social learning or social media solutions can replace LMS offerings, yet they provide very little in the way of proof points and even less recognition of the vital role that LMS plays in today’s business world.  I think it’s time to bring a fresh perspective to this debate.  This is a long post, but is easily summarized into four main points:

• The LMS is most assuredly not dead, nor is formal learning.
• LMS solutions provide real business value to organizations, and it’s a value that is not easily replicated by other systems.
• "Traditional" LMS and social media / social learning are not mutually exclusive and are in fact, complementary.
• LMS solutions also directly complement Talent Management offerings in ways that deeply extend their value, even absent any social capabilities.

The "Death of the LMS” and Formal Learning are Greatly Exaggerated…
Formal learning and traditional LMS are not "dead" — they are not even on the decline.  According the 2011 Corporate Learning Systems (CLS) Magic Quadrant, “A recovery is under way in the corporate learning system market, as demand for systems has picked up.”  SaaS LMS providers are growing at roughly 20% per year — some more than that — and formal learning practices continue pretty much unabated within corporations of all sizes.  Josh Bersin of Bersin & Associates refers to an LMS is a "bread and butter" business application.  It’s easy to understand why he feels this way — for any company that has to onboard new hires, train people in job-role specific skills, develop leaders, help employees overcome skill gaps, schedule and manage instructor-led training, or adhere to regulatory and legal mandates, an LMS provides functionality that can’t be found in other business systems.

Recognition of LMS as a business solution can also be found in the CLS Magic Quadrant: Gartner notes that the number one reason companies implement an LMS is to “improve business performance.”  Since the LMS industry is now over 20 years old, it’s safe to assume that an LMS is a “well-understood” IT buy and thus the rationale for buying solutions in this category should be a reasonably proxy for their expected benefit.  Given the above, I’d humbly suggest that talk about the demise of the LMS is not only premature, it’s directly contrary to the data.
 
I’d also suggest that while there is significant value in social learning, the idea that we no longer need to codify best practices into learning or structure long-term skill or knowledge acquisition into curriculum is fundamentally flawed.  In a world where the average employee tenure at a company is just over 4 years, we still need to do a lot of blocking and tackling with regard to onboarding and new hire training.  And most of this blocking and tackling is around communicating known best practices — something that is best done with formal learning.  It’s also worth noting that certain kinds of training — onboarding, job-role skills, company-specific training, regulatory stuff, or anything involving a progression from neophyte to master — are not well-served by social or crowd-sourced learning alone.    We’re never going to train doctors via social learning alone, any more than we will train them with formal, asynchronous events alone.  Mastery and high-levels of proficiency have always and will always require a mix of formal, informal, and social learning approaches. 
 
LMS Business Value
One essential data point that is often lost in the debate about the future of learning and the role of LMS is the proven ROI and business impact of LMS solutions.  Here are a few examples of ROI / business impact that our clients have shared about Taleo Learn™:

• Fastenal – Fastenal cut new hire training time in half, increased revenue per employee by 32% and increased retention by 5%.  These are hard-core, bottom-line results that any CEO would be thrilled to see for any enterprise system.
• CKE Restaurants – CKE reduced turnover by 42% while simultaneously reducing onboarding time by four hours per employee and reducing workers compensation costs and incidents.
• Vi (formerly Classic Residence by Hyatt) – Vi dramatically improved employee engagement and now boast engagement scores that are 21% higher than even high-performing companies.  No surprise then that Vi has been listed among the Learning Elite by CLO magazine, Top 125 Training companies by Training Magazine, and a Learning! 100 company by eLearning! magazine.
• Michelin – Michelin saw full ROI in just six months.  Not many enterprise systems can make claims like that…
• Linksys – Linksys call centers center cut agent training from 30 days to 7 days, while simultaneously increasing process adherence by 25%.  Think about the business impact from 23 more days on the job per new hire – better customer support, less cost to pay for overtime, higher revenue per employee…  Can social deliver similar business impact in this scenario?  I think the honest is “no.” 
• Extra Space Storage – Extra Space saves over $130,000 a year from process automation and has reduced turnover by 15%.  Extra Space also saw an increase in revenue from better training around cross-selling services and products.

While social solutions most certainly also deliver ROI and business impact, there is no reason to abandon the business impact of the LMS.  Nor is there any reason to assume that social practices would deliver the same ROI on the issues above.  In fact, it’s unlikely that social alone can address core challenges around new hire training, onboarding, job-role specific training, process adherence in manual or process-related jobs, or process automation around the delivery of traditional training.  Given that more than 50% of the training within the enterprise is delivered via instructor-led training, the full ROI and business justification for an LMS can often be tied to process automation savings around instructor-led training (ILT) alone, and once again, these are benefits that are not readily delivered by social solutions.
 
Social Learning and LMS: It’s an "AND" Join, not an "OR" Join
LMS solutions already support social learning.  The main barrier to using social learning through the LMS is not typically the LMS; it’s culture, change readiness, and the lack of "social" maturity within the org.  In other words, the same inertia that prevents companies from adopting Microsoft Sharepoint, buying Jive, or allowing employees to access Facebook and YouTube from work.  Many LMS implementations now support a pretty good mix of social media within the platform. Some also support RSS feeds and embedding of external social media. Some even enable communities of practice, video sharing, and wiki-like page editing.  Taleo Learn, not surprisingly, does all of the above.
 
One of the least constructive aspects of the social learning vs. LMS debate thus far is the "either / or" nature of the discussion.  Just about every organization needs an LMS for all the reasons mentioned above.  It’s equally true that organizations should be pursuing social strategies.  The real debate should be about how these solutions can best complement each other.  For example, for some kinds of social learning experiences, it can be argued that you actually want the experience in the LMS, even if you have an enterprise social platform.  Why?  Because contextually relevant social experiences are best served up alongside the content that triggered them.
 
Consider your social experiences on Amazon.com: these experiences can basically be described as "meta-discourse" or "I didn’t write the book, but I can still discuss it, rate it, and recommend it, and I can see and interact with others who also read it."  This same model is equally valid in the LMS world.  Students may not write the course, class, document, or WBT, but there is tremendous value in related discussions, ratings, and reviews of the content and in networking with others around a shared experience.
 
In short, even in the presence of an enterprise social platform, there are many kinds of social interactions that you might want in the LMS.  And in the absence of an enterprise social platform, many modern LMS implementations can serve both roles with the added benefit of a full-blown LMS in the mix given the continuing investment in social features.  This might be why, according to the 2011 CLS Magic Quadrant report, “34% of LMS customers said they planned to implement wikis, blogs and other collaboration tools from their CLS [Corporate Learning Systems] vendor within the next two years” and “25% stated they plan to invest in social profiles from their CLS vendor before the end of 2012.”  Given this, a more productive discussion about social learning would be one that focused on strategies: when to use formal learning, when to use social learning, when that social learning should be in the LMS and when it should be in an enterprise-level social platform. 
 
LMS and Talent Management
Another key aspect of this discussion which has seen relatively little discussion is the benefit of an LMS inside the talent management suite.  For many of those who strongly favor social approaches over traditional LMS models, the "management" aspects of LMS are the foundation of many key objections and points of frustration.  Yet it’s these same management and process automation features that also make LMS so very attractive in the larger talent management suite.  LMS automation and management features enable closer connections between learning and other talent management applications.  Here are some of the cool things you can do when you have a full-blown LMS in the talent management suite:

• Expose your LMS to external audiences to grow and continually develop your own external talent pools.  Increasingly, organizations are relying on contractors, temp workers, and consultants to augment core organizational competencies and skills.  Many companies also rely on an extended enterprise of suppliers, partners, and resellers as key drivers of their core business.  With an LMS, you can continually develop these various extended talent pools to increase engagement, foster loyalty, and improve their skills – basically extending the talent management value proposition to include “talent development for the extended enterprise.”
• Expose your LMS to external audiences to grow your own candidate pools.  Many industries face critical skills shortages.  Others are suffering from a lack of bench strength in critical roles – CDL drives, nurses, oil and gas engineers to name just a few.  By providing training to the public, companies can up-skill future or current candidates to grow their own talent pipelines in industries where there is otherwise a shortage.  You can even link LMS courses to assessment questions during the candidate evaluation phase.
• Link the LMS to your onboarding application to automatically provision mandatory training, and then upon completion, trigger the assignment of job-role specific training.  You can even auto-assign new hires to discussion forums based on their new hire status or job role.
• Connect the LMS to development capabilities to enable employees to tap into professionally developed courses from internationally recognized content producers.  With the right LMS, you can also enable managers to guide and support employees in their professional and career development.
• Closely link the LMS with performance so that you can connect skills, competencies and training.  When the employees have skill or competency gaps, this enables them to find training opportunities to overcome that gap.  Or if they have specific career aspirations, they can identify the required skills and competencies and then register for the related training.  Similarly, if the organization is looking to develop bench strength in a given area, they can make the training for that area available to the company.
• Tie the LMS data into talent management analytics and manager data set.  We call this Talent Intelligence — the idea of getting the whole picture on organizational talent and the talent processes.  LMS data is another critical data set in this story.  External certifications, internal certifications, compliance-related information, employee-initiated training, courses in support of critical skills and competencies – these data points help paint an even clearer picture of the organizational talent and the success of internal talent initiatives.

 
One final point: while all of this social stuff is incredibly transformative, for now, it’s largely benefitting companies or professionals with a heavy focus on knowledge work.  For companies, business units, or workers who focus on more manual or codified tasks, there is comparatively less value.  If the key task is how to make widgets faster using known best practices, social learning and social interactions may actually impede performance.  If the key task is deciding what to make instead of widgets or how to collaborate better with our widget supply chain, then social media is not only a nice to have, it’s essential.

While it would be very convenient if companies fit cleanly into these “follow known best practices” and  “invent and coordinate new best practices” buckets, the reality is that even the most execution-focused companies have collaborative and emergent needs, and even the most innovative companies must ultimately execute.  Thus, the real crux of the issue is that we need to tailor the mix of social, informal, and formal learning practices to meet the unique needs of not just the larger organization, but often of specific business units and functional units as well.  In short, it’s time to move beyond the "either / or" in this debate and focus on how the combined value of social learning and LMS can improve organizational performance, both on their own and as part of the larger talent management suite.

Related Thinking
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Social Performance 
Three Missing HR Capabilities  
Unified Talent Management – A Global View