Excerpt from a new IBM white paper entitled Learning: A vital ingredient for successful business transformation

Making the case for learning

Imagine a cereal maker telling workers to fill every box only halfway to the top because it needs to cut costs. The situation is absurd because it would come back to haunt the company in short order.

Now, imagine a senior executive telling her transformation team to chop back on training because she’s got to cut costs. That’s clearly viewing learning as an expense rather than an essential business component to help ensure the success of the transformation. Yet it happens all too frequently. Why?

Training is easy to overlook or short-change if it’s viewed as just a number. But the consequences of cutting it become apparent when you think about what you’re proposing to eliminate.

Which of the three areas that we’ve illustrated would you be prepared
to do without?

• People who believe (“heart”) in your company’s transformation and embrace the change; project managers who automatically do the right thing because they have internalized the new business vision
  
  
• Workers who understand (“head”) the project and know what to do
  
  
• People who can operate (“hands”) the new system to support your business with ease

Chances are, you can’t afford to give up any of these key elements. Learning is a vital ingredient to optimizing the success of your transformation. Learning will support the initial transformation and long-term, sustained innovation from your efforts. Learning will help ensure that people have the right skills, tools and mindset to propel your transformation forward. Furthermore, effective learning accelerates the adoption of new technology and processes—getting your employees up to speed faster, and speeding ROI. And learning helps foster the culture change required for successful transformation, and it is an integral component of effective human capital management.