How One Learning Function Sees the Future of L&D

Perhaps the phrase "NextGen LMS" is a misnomer, at least in the eyes of Chris Rosso, global manager for learning platforms at Nike. "I almost want to rephrase it into: 'What is the next generation of learning technology?'" Rosso said. "What does it mean to us to manage learning in the future, as opposed to constraining ourselves to the concept of a learning management system?" Thinking in this out-of-the-box manner has been part of a paradigmatic shift in learning and development at Nike.

Check out our video interview above (or the text version of the Q&A below) to learn what Rosso sees as the role of the future learning organization.

What does NextGen LMS mean to you?

For me, it's almost a misnomer to be quite honest. I'll address this in my keynote, but I guess I have a big question around: What is the next generation of the LMS, and is there a future for the LMS?

I think there's a lot of great learning technologies out there and we'll delve into that more. I almost want to rephrase it into 'What is the next generation of learning technology?' What does it mean to us to manage learning in the future, as opposed to constraining ourselves to the concept of a learning management system.

Can you talk a little more about that at Nike? It sounds like your approach to the LMS is changing or thinking about things more broadly as learning technology, so can you talk about how that practically implicates a company like Nike?

Right now, we still have an LMS. I think most corporations do—either something hand rolled or something standards compliant; something that's launching SCORM or AICC content one way or another.

For us, we're starting to see the LMS as a legacy product. It's housing the well-established SCORM and AICC that we've got. Right now, it's doing course registrations. We don't' necessarily feel confined to that. And we're looking at a lot of stuff in the future.

Right now, we're doing a pilot on Tin Can/Experience API and coming up with the realization that a lot of our groups, especially within Nike—Nike as a lifestyle and design company—and as a result, we find that a lot of these groups want their own custom look and feel. And maybe they want to release an app or maybe they want to have a micro-site off of Nike.com or our intranet.

There may come a time in the fairly close future where we can say: You know what, you can have whatever experience you want. Here's how you connect to us.

We continue to be a system of record. We continue to manage learning for the global functions, but maybe we're no longer constrained to a particular look and feel and approach. It's about curating and being the central repository for reporting and less about saying, okay, you go to this website and on this website you launch this piece of content.And it also allows us to scale a lot better.

We've got certain initiatives that are going out to 200 people and we've got certain initiatives that are going out to 100,000 people. One size fits all doesn't always work for that.

When we do resource planning and when we do our enterprise resource planning, I look at, not really the least common denominator, but I don't want to build a system that has availability for 50,000 people consistently. That doesn't make good financial sense for us.

Nor do I necessarily want to go through all of the work of let's say, the way we're hosted, like most folks, we're on load balanced virtual servers.

It doesn't make sense to spin up a 100 VMs for one project. But what if we could work with that business unit and say, okay, you've got an initiative that's going out to 100,000 people for 6 weeks. Let's work with a rack space or with somebody who can do that really well, really quickly.

Maybe it's an internal resource, but I think realistically, it's something that's public facing and makes more sense to leave that hosting with someone who does it really well. And say, go up and spin up your 100 servers and here's the address and credentials to get into our LMS.

We'll capture that for you and we'll report against it. We'll do those pretty graphs that the stakeholders like to see, but it doesn't necessarily make sense for me to bolster our corporate learning system to do that.

And there's also security concerns. Let's say they do want to open something to the public. Maybe we're training a new set of stores or franchises or whatever it might be out in the field. Now, I don't have to worry about necessarily the access control or that. I don't have to spin up a thousand or two thousand or 50,000 accounts for folks. I'm able to say, let's be the repository rather than the front end.

It sounds like there's this paradigmatic shift happening, both from your perspective as a learning professional and then how people are consuming learning in general at Nike. How does that change how you think about your role in helping facilitate learning and development?

Even in the three years I've been in this role, the role has certainly matured, or even morphed into something different.

When I got hired, the idea was, we're centralizing learning at Nike for the first time with this number of employees and this set of resources and we really want to make a concerted effort to build the best experience for our internal customer. So I basically got hired to build the LMS. But we never really called it an LMS. We always called it a development platform because it was always going to do more than an LMS.

It was about contextualization. It was about really using our merchandising principle—Nike's internal merchandising principles—to create custom assortments of learning and content for our employees. So there was always this sense of curation. It wasn't just, let's throw a bunch of courses on an LMS.

I think if anything, our role has gone more from almost an IT role where we were doing system admin and designing ERP resources to moving into more of a curation role, and being a great consultant against these businesses.

They want, especially fast-moving businesses like Nike, they really want that custom thing that is going to blow the minds of the people they're trying to get to. So I think it's really changed and it's changed even more.

We're moving more from administration and content building to consulting, curation and really editing. One of the things we do want to make sure of is that there's still a Nike look and feel to what we do. Something I often say around the office is, even if you took the swoosh off of everything, you would still know it was Nike.

There's a presence we have in the market that it's not about the swoosh. It's about the whole ethos of our ecosystem. So whether you're doing business with us on Twitter or Nike.com or in a factory store or an in-line store, you know it's Nike. And I think this is true for a lot of iconic brands.

Coca-Cola for instance. You don't need the little, whatever they call that thing, to know you're drinking a Coke. Maybe it's their color red or its the polar bears. Apple goes without saying. You could take the Apple off the device, but you would still know it's an iPhone.

So we want to maintain that look and feel of what is learning at Nike or in Nike—maintain the brand integrity, maintain the style, but also give people a whole lot of freedom around it. And we're going to see more and more of that as our roles mature here.