Allison Anderson Learning Together at Intel at Corporate U Week

My live blogged notes from CU Week. @allisonanderson

Learning Together: How Intel’s Learning Community of Practice Role Models “New” Learning with Allison Anderson

50+learning orgs at Intel – well over 650 people taking care of learning…Most people don’t have learning or training in their titles…hard to say exactly how many.

Highly diverse population – lots of people with lots of different needs.

No CLO – completely decentralized. We like having learning orgs distributed close to the business. (do have senior managers in learning positions)

And very global.

With such a decentralized model, the rely heavily on Communities of Practice (a comm of people who are working on something similiar, similar work tasks…)

Why a COP?  “overcome the inherent problems of a slow-moving traditional hierarchy in a fast-moving virtual economy.”

LCOP (Learning Community of Practice) is their COP of learning people from around the org. In 1999 there were three people…today over 400 people involved.

Keys to success (what has helped this community thrive?)

• Purpose & Identity having a very specific purpose will help you.
  
  Today’s Learning Community at Intel – to increase our own performance to have a greater impact on employees at Intel.
  Have a clear mission and goals and review it regularly.
  
• Articulate Business Value
  “my metric is people are engaged and participate” – do I track this back to a metric? Nope…not to say that you can’t find relevant metrics.
• Content  & Engagement
  LCOP meets once a month – do peer presentations. Hear what happens in other learning groups across Intel. These are virtual/online.  Maybe 35 people for these meetings – people can decide what topics appeal to them?
  Internal conferences. Usually F2F but sometimes virtual.
  Like to bring in external speakers – internal people don’t get to get out too much – they enjoy hearing from outside colleagues.
  Do lots of synch and asych dialog.
  The use a social computing tool – called planet blue
  People are more than robots who go to work every day – we’re people – it’s ok to have fun, too!
  What does engagement look like? (She shows a screenshot of a whiteboard from a webinar session) – 35 people online at the same time typing on the screen at once.  It even engages the introverts—you get a lot more dialog going.
  
• Leadership & Support Needs a good community leader – someone who’s dedicated and passionate.  You need to have a thoughtful guide, beacon, evangelist—this helps to build and maintain a successful online presence.