Today 95% of the organizations surveyed have some type of extended enterprise training program and 92% of the program managers believe their programs are having a positive impact on their organizations. The debate on whether to train business partners (i.e. the extended enterprise) is settled. The answer is YES.
Extended enterprise learning has come a long way in the past decade. It wasn’t that long ago that many organizations didn’t feel it worth their while to train their extended enterprise (e.g. resellers, distributors, suppliers, customers, etc.).
When it comes to measuring training effectiveness, most organizations are measuring activity, not impact. Less than a third of organizations bring performance metrics into the equation. Despite most companies saying their efforts are effective, saying they want better reporting and analytics indicates that they are probably unable to measure impact.
Managing a training program without incorporating performance metrics is like flying blind. You can move in a general direction but it’s hard to get where you want to go (and convince others to come with you) without accurate instrumentation.
Therein lies the great opportunity for extended enterprise learning; to evolve training programs to incorporate performance metrics that enable them to dramatically improve the training’s impact.