enterprise digital transformation

During LiveWorx we asked a number of attendees about the value based service organizations are currently receiving or expecting to receive over the next 12 
to 24 months with their digital transformation projects. Listen to Chris Wolff and Anthony Moffa discuss this topic, specifically about how to drive service value and what our LiveWorx attendees answered.

Read Anthony's perspective on the The Value of Digital Transformation for Field Service: http://ptc.co/Vz8z50QjTGz

Welcome to the Digital Adoption Show's latest episode, a deep dive into the fusion of Learning and Development (L&D) and Sales Enablement strategies for achieving business excellence. Our expert panel, featuring Bart Schutte and Tomissa Smittendorf, explores the dynamic business landscape's ever-evolving needs and the imperative for innovative approaches to stay competitive.

Bart Schutte, the Director for Digital Learning at Saint Gobain, and Tomissa Smittendorf, Director of Sales Enablement Training at Kellogg's, share their invaluable insights and practical tips for optimizing business performance. They emphasize the seamless integration of L&D and sales enablement as a pivotal driver for growth, empowering sales teams, and ensuring overall success.

• Bart underscores Saint Gobain's unique strengths, including its product diversity and a culture of trust and empowerment. He discusses artificial intelligence's (AI) role in change management, with a focus on the role of AI in Learning & Development (L&D) as well.
• Change management and the significance of senior leadership's involvement in driving digital transformation are key discussion points. Bart emphasizes that cultural alignment and digital transformation should originate at the top and cascade throughout the organization.
• The episode also underscores the importance of employee experience in successful digital transformation and highlights real-time, on-the-job support as a key component of L&D in this context.
• As the conversation turns to justifying learning technology investments, Bart notes that the return on investment (ROI) for learning lies in employee engagement, underscoring that these justifications are unique to each organization's circumstances.
• The talk with Bart concludes by emphasizing the need to engage business units in L&D, involving them in priority identification, focusing on behavioral change and outcomes, and adopting innovative solutions beyond traditional training programs. 

In the continuation of this Learning and Development podcast, we delve deeper into the world of organizational learning and the future of sales training with Tomissa Smittendorf, the Director of Sales Enablement Training at Kellogg's. With over three decades of experience at Kellogg's, she leads the Sales Learning and Development team, and her insights are invaluable.

• Tomissa shares her role at Kellogg's, emphasizing her diverse journey through various divisions within the company, from supply chain to HR, which provides her with a holistic perspective on Kellogg's operations. She expresses pride in working for Kellogg's, highlighting the exceptional brands and people associated with the company.
• As she discusses the challenges encountered, Tomissa emphasizes the rapid shift to virtual operations within a day, which required embracing new technology and even virtual reality training. The team's courage to adapt and learn from mistakes was crucial, ultimately leading to an engaging and immersive VR training simulator for sales teams.
• Tomissa shares a compelling example of how virtual reality can be used for sales training, offering new sales representatives a safe and interactive environment to practice and receive coaching.
• She reflects on her proudest achievements, including aligning the Sales Learning and Development value proposition with the company's strategy and the unwavering support of the executive leadership team. Her team's courage and agility in the face of change are also a source of pride.
• Regarding the future of sales training, Tomissa suggests staying attuned to industry developments and focusing on skill-building areas such as revenue growth management, financial acumen, and omnichannel leadership.

In conclusion, This episode offers a comprehensive view of how L&D and sales enablement integration is transforming digital business strategies for excellence.

Marco Dondi is the Future of Work Expert, Associate Partner, McKinsey & Company. He is the Author of ‘Outgrowing Capitalism’- Strategy consultant in economics, banking, labour and education.

The latest episode of the Digital Adoption Show features Saurabh Guru, Global Head, Customer Success, Whatfix and Marco Dondi on Discover the skills future employees will need from a McKinsey expert.

5:17 -In what ways are traditional skills no longer relevant in our organisations and why is there a need for change?

• If we think of the introduction of technology, and the pace at which technology is changing, many of these technical skills become obsolete in 12 to 18 months.
• Artificial intelligence has already been deployed and adapted. But if you take a step further and think about the speed of diffusion of these technologies and also as these technologies become better, what all types of activities that they could substitute, that will cause, a lot of change.
• The rapidity of change will likely force people to not have one job for all their life or even two or three jobs, many people are coming into the workforce today, and they'll have to go through possibly 10 different transitions, some minor, some a bit more significant. 
• Skills that weren't really the focus in the past, it was just focused on either capability, technical skills, the ability to do something, but once you learn it, you're good, you're good for maybe it happens once that you need to learn something else. 
• Whatever you learn, by the time you're 10 years in the labour force, is almost irrelevant, but it's a minor component of what you need, it means that all of these skills have continuously adapted, and continuously learn become much more important than they were the past.

12:04 -What is DELTAs approach? Why is it called DELTA?  How can people learn by using it?

• For Instance, if you go into chemistry, you need to know exactly what elements you're mixing, if you want to get the right compound
• One of the key use of this framework is really to structure much more systematically and consciously
• If you're a learning and development professional, or if you have an education system, or if you're a teacher, you can start using this to think of how you develop these different elements in my students, in my colleagues or in my organisation

21:29 -How DELTAs could help shape education and organisation training?

• Our education system has been developed, especially the higher education system and the high school system, they are really being designed, mainly focusing on the content and the knowledge, all the assessments are assessing people based on what they know, and what they can conjure up on a test, which means that most of the focus is really going into the subjects and into what you might be asked in a test
• But how do I also develop all of these arguably more important traits that will be the ones that future-proof citizens enable them to learn whatever they want in the future? How am I actually doing this? I think many education organisations have been very open to saying, many of these things, I simply haven't prioritised, and that's a chance that even if I say that they are important, we might not be developing in schools because, we're not ration training teachers on them, we are not suggesting specific approaches and modalities develop these different skills
• If you believe that these skills are such an important part of the future and of your life and success, then saying soft skills just seems not to end yes

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Michelle Parry-Slater is the Learning & Development Director at Kairos Modern Learning and the Author of the L&D practitioner's toolkit, The Learning and Development Handbook. Her mission is to support L&D professionals to improve the impact of their profession by taking a strategic, holistic approach to people and workplace development. 

The latest episode of the Digital Adoption Show features Kriti Arya, Team Lead Business Development, Whatfix and Michelle Parry-Slater on the secret to the success of The L&D Handbook.

6:45 -Do you think learning techniques should be changed for different people/ groups/regions? Does the one shoe fits all approach work?

• Learning and development are actually wearing very comfortable shoes. If you got your comfortable shoes on to move to a new set of shoes, they're new, they're not worn in yet, they can feel different and uncomfortable but we need to perhaps go through that uncomfortableness, ourselves as a profession
• Learners don't necessarily embrace uncomfortableness, but the people who are learning or need to learn for their jobs deserve the best opportunity to learn
• We need to look forward to solving learning challenges with modern ways of working and that's what our learners will be expecting. Therefore we need to figure out a way by which we can provide learning in a way that suits the individuals concerned

12:36 -Should the learning approach reflect real life? What advantages does this learning approach offer L&D professionals, and how can they implement it?

• To buy a car or choose our life partner, we don't do courses for these, we ask our network, friends, and family, we look at magazines, online and YouTube videos and do our own research. So we've got these skills innately, so learning and development professionals really do need to harness the skills of our learners and should focus on giving them what they need when it comes to content or paving the learning pathways
• It's actually lazy not to help our learners with the right content and learning pathway or force people to go on a course, to force people to wait six weeks to learn something that they need for their jobs right now
• Create communities of practice networks for people to talk to each other about their work and learning to create social interaction, people are loving face to face learning activities but what are they loving? Are they actually loving sitting in a room getting the knowledge dump? or are they loving chatting with their colleagues?

17:57 -What would you like to suggest to the young L&D professionals to build the right future?

• It's always been networking. Some people just hate even the word networking, because it just fills them with dread speaking to strangers and so on. Pushing yourself to meet other people, and engage in community is really what will open your eyes to new ideas, and new opportunities
• Focus on empowerment, if you give young people a voice, they will really come up with some fantastic ideas. So it's not a cliche to say, young people are the future, but sometimes they're not met where they are. They're met with criticism and judgement
• If we can reframe, and invite the people who are the future of our profession, into the community of a fully networked invited open space, then I highly recommend that young people push their way in, but I also recommend that everyone else put their hand once probably had and pay it forward

Reach out to Michelle Parry-Slater

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Read Chris MacDonald´s perspective on predictive maintenance in this related interview.

Digital transformation and application of IoT and advanced analytics technology are no longer something to be delivered in the future.  They are well established in industry, delivering value to a large number of enterprises of varying sizes and in multiple industries. 

Chris MacDonald, Head of AI and Analytics and Joe Biron, General Manager, Strategic Missions Products at Microsoft discuss the adoption of connected products strategies, the use that connected products data stream and underlying data strategies that enable delivering business value. 

Bart Schutte is a Director of Digital Learning at Saint Gobain. He is focused on Organizational Learning, and specifically, how enterprises need to adapt to create a real culture of learning leveraging public MOOCs, Personal Knowledge Management, and the abundance of knowledge and learning on the Internet.

The latest episode of the Digital Adoption Show features Bart Schutte, sharing insights with Arijeet Das Diengdoh, Associate Director of Sales - EMEA at Whatfix, on Transform not train your way to a better business strategy.

03:26 - Is there fear or scepticism regarding artificial intelligence in training? 

• Software vendors continually talk about AI in their products and their ability to recommend learning to people personally, amongst l&d people
• In Saint Gobain, we use Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, for detecting patterns from data in the past so that they can make predictions and we try to implement it in our manufacturing plants, sales & marketing and supply chain
• The first step that companies can take around machine learning for the masses, is visualisation. If you can make data visual so that people can see it, and it expresses the insights people can make much better decisions. Visualisation is a lot easier than machine learning

09:47 - The biggest challenges confronted by L&D leaders and companies

• Critical thinking, problem identification and problem-solving skills are critical. There's been a lot of talk about this becoming increasingly critical but the real challenge is to build those skills inside the people in organizations. It's not just about training, but transforming the company, in terms of skill and culture
• In Saint Gobain, Data Analytics Academy was launched in 2019. We recognise the opportunity, the need to upskill engineers and our plants, to be able to use machine learning on themselves to get insights out of the data they have every day to continually improve production
• What matters is, what are they able to do with the training and guidance provided. With a good learning experience, we're could see people reduce the energy consumption on a line of production by over 10%. But with traditional techniques, they've never been able to get more than a 1% reduction

15:44 - How do you get people to change?

• Organisational structure plays a very crucial role in transformation. The organisation has to support employees and make it easier for them to do the new thing than the old ones
• If data and data analytics are really important, it has to be something that senior leaders should be talking about all the time. Also making sure, that they're walking the talk when they make decisions. They're basing it on data and not on intuition. So that's the most important thing that has to happen if you want to get individuals to change

20:54 - What is the significance of employee experience in driving successful digital transformation?

• People approach the employee experience from many different dimensions. What's important is that the learning should be as close to the moment of need on the job. It is imperative to design all of their programmes to be about real things that people have to get done on the ground
• As L&D practitioners, we should focus on creating an environment that promotes collaboration and encourage employees to take up different things

Bart Schutte's LinkedIn

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