Today is International Happiness Day, and it feels like my birthday!
Ara Ohanian
CEO & Chief Happiness Officer
A few years ago, when I changed the title on my business card from CEO to Chief Happiness Officer, many colleagues and friends thought I was losing my mind. But today, they have come around and understand why it was an important business and personal decision.
Changing the middle part of my title from “executive” to “happiness” was similar to Richard Nixon convincing the world to move away from the gold standard and pegging all currencies and commodities to the Almighty Green Back: The Dollar!
Today, for me the new currency of business and personal success is happiness. Without it ideas can’t find a home, and synergies can’t develop among teams at work or on the field.
Today sees the beginning of a new era for CERTPOINT Systems and I wanted to share the news …
This morning we announced our intent to merge with Infor, the world’s the third-largest provider of enterprise applications and services.
Over the past 17 years we’ve built a company I’m incredibly proud of. We have seen it grow from a small start up, launched in 1996 when my father, Constantin Ohanian, and I were inspired by the way new technologies were changing the business landscape. It was our belief that large corporations would need to transform business critical knowledge into measurable results for competitive knowledge. We also believed that the solution had to be technologically advanced, yet simple enough to be operated by non-technical people. The result was our all-in-one software platform CERTPOINTVLS™ designed with one simple goal – to deliver business impact.
And now, thanks to the collective talent, drive and passion of the greatest team of people I have had the privilege to work with, we have grown to become an award-winning global learning technologies innovator and pioneers of world-class of social and mobile learning technologies.
Inevitably, we reached a tipping point – our business needed greater depth of resource to grow further, to fulfil its potential and become a true global powerhouse. So for some time we have been looking for a like-minded partner who shares our culture of passion and focus on innovation.
- Facebook reaches 76 percent of the smartphone market and accounts for 23 percent of total time spent using apps each month.
Ara Ohanian
- 2012: smartphone penetration crossed 50 percent for the first time in the US
- people spend 37 percent online on mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets
- mobile shopping accounted for 11 percent of e-commerce in the fourth quarter of 2012, up from 3 percent in the period two years earlier.
A recent report “2013 US digital future in focus” by ComScore, which tracks Web and mobile usage, firmly places mobile center stage of digital business, arguing that enterprise will have to scramble to stay ahead of consumers’ changing behavior.
What does this mean for learning and development?
Stephany Wilson and Ting-Yu Yang
More people in the world have access to mobile phone subscriptions than they do to water or toothbrushes…
More UK children aged 7-11 own a mobile phone rather than a book….
These facts set the stage for Stephany Wilson, E-Learning Manager of Sonic, America’s largest chain of drive in restaurants, who spoke on mobile learning at Europe’s Learning Technologies 2013 in London.
Stephany revealed her experiences on how she delivers current, timely, sensitive, relevant product and brand knowledge to Sonic managers across the USA. Sonic has over 3,500 drive-in coast to coast and serves approximately three million customers every day.
We asked Stephany to share her thoughts in a guest blog…..
Ara Ohanian predicts L&D trends for 2013
At Sonic, we have to disseminate information in the fastest, most effective way to all our store managers to help them do their jobs. When the people you need to find are more likely to be walking around a restaurant than sitting at a computer, reaching them can be tough. For me, the answer was simple: go mobile.
What is it good for?
My first step was to evaluate Sonic’s mobile delivery approach.
We knew managers were not finding all the information they wanted, fast enough, from their paper documentation and we had to avoid that happening on their mobile devices. So, we concentrated on key information needed – for example, new product changes, time-sensitive alerts and reference materials.
2012 saw the world gripped by a Korean artist-turned-global-phenomenon thanks to YouTube while Facebook registered its billionth user. Fast-changing innovative technologies have taken L&D to the tipping point of change and, with this in mind, I have gazed into my crystal ball to predict steps to success for 2013….
Ara Ohanian
CEO & Chief Happiness Officer
- Social learning will become must-have rather than nice-to-have as it moves to an integral part of knowledge learning
- L&D professionals evolve from teachers to curators to provide the context in which conversations are held and will filter and share the best with the organization.
- L&D moves from traditional lessons to contextual intelligence. Product innovation has simply become too fast for “prescribed” learning as people need rapid product knowledge beyond what a product is and does. Technologies today scale knowledge to bring thousands of relevant conversations at the right time.
- Leadership understanding becomes critical mass. Social technologies will become the norm for general business use and there will be an escalation in organizations using rapid knowledge transfer to improve performance.
- The true L&D professional emerges as the role expands to embrace creative thinking, business collaboration, and focus on speed and delivery against business objectives.
I invite you to read more and share your thoughts in Training magazine
Best wishes for the year ahead.
Ara Ohanian
Chief Happiness Officer & CEO, CERTPOINT Systems
In October 2012 Facebook hit one billion users while Forbes estimated Zuckerberg’s personal wealth to be approximately $14 billion. Mark Zuckerger’s view from the onset was that success would rest on the platform’s authenticity.
Maria van Vlodrop
General Manager
EMEA
Zukerberg’s belief in authenticity got me thinking and I believe this to be the next big role for learning and development….
Other hot topics for L&D in 2013? Shaping judgement, nurturing communication skills, social learning and collaboration via mobile, ownership of social media connections..
My take is that these issues all offer new opportunities to prove business impact of L&D…. please click here for the full article published by Training Journal.
Warm wishes for 2013
Maria van Vlodrop
It’s difficult to describe innovation in a few words but you know it when you see it. 
At CERTPOINT Systems we’re delighted that the innovation behind our CERTPOINTVLS 8.0 ™ global enterprise platform has been recognized this week by the Brandon Hall Group. Winning Gold for Best Advance in Learning Management Technology in the 2012 Excellence in Technology Awards crowns a year of advances of technological innovation for CERTPOINT Systems.
McKinsey’s recent study Education to Employment throws up challenges for everyone involved in education. It examines 100 education-to-employment initiatives from 25 countries trying to find the cause of what McKinsey calls “the twin crises of a shortage of jobs and a shortage of skills”.
Ara Ohanian
CEO & Chief Happiness Officer
The results are both fascinating and disturbing.
Here are two facts the report highlights: half of youth is not sure that post-secondary education has improved chances of finding a job; almost 40 percent of employers say a lack of skills is the main reason for entry-level vacancies.
The research examines the differing perceptions of employers, education providers and the young. And tries to establish how to, in the words of the report, design a system that works.
Maria van Vlodrop
General Manager
EMEA
Can social learning and enterprise learning systems ever comfortably co-exist?
According to a recent McKinsey study – The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies (July 2012)– social technologies stand to unlock from $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in value. Two-thirds of the value unlocked by social media rests in improved communications and collaboration within and across enterprises. Far from a distraction, social media proves a surprising blessing to productivity.
The latest in our series of thought-leadership white papers, “Can social learning succeed alongside an LMS?” produced in collaboration with Johanna Sadoudi, founder and CEO VITAMINDS and former Learning Development International Director at L’Oréal, [link to L’Oréal] reveals how to exploit the power of social learning while retaining the existing strengths of organizational learning and development (L&D) and technologies such as learning management systems. It reports that a new generation of learning management systems has evolved to include collaboration and mobile delivery in a bid to grow increasingly learner-centric.
Johanna Sadoudi
CEO, VITAMINDS
Johanna commented that our world is increasingly socially connected and if L&D does not adapt to, and fully exploit, social technologies, it runs the risk of being sidelined as other parts of the organization put them to good use for learning. Changes are forcing L&D to ask how can we use social approaches to learning with our existing learning infrastructure, particularly learning platforms?
Maria van Vlodrop
General Manager
EMEA
Towards Maturity’s excellent annual benchmark study, just published, reveals the real business impact of learning technologies: of 700 enterprises benchmarked between 2011 and 2012, the average company was able to roll out new products, services and IT systems over 20% faster.
In addition, 23% achieved improvement in study time, 24% faster delivery time, 22% reduction in cost of training, 26% improvement in learning reach and 16% improvement in time to competency.
Social learning is on the rise with 63% of the companies allowing access to external social media sites.
The study goes on to report that 68% are using social learning to build networks inside the organisations; 55% to support learning generation and sharing of user generated content; 54 % for individuals to communicate in real time; 51% to reinforce formal learning and 49% to support personal professional development.
About CERTPOINT
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International Happiness Day
03-20-2013 -
CERTPOINT gears up for growth with Infor
03-4-2013 -
Tech Predictions for 2013: It’s Al
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How smart mobility puts knowledge at you
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