Critical Success Factor 4: Training

The importance of critical success factor number four, training, hit me right between the eyes this morning. Sometimes it's hard to see what's right in front of your face until it smacks you!

We were having our monthly enterprise-wide wiki advisory board meeting, and as each division presented their updates on their progress and challenges, I kept hearing about training that had been done and was being planned.

We're well beyond basic demos of how to use the software in most of our divisions. What's underway all over the company is advanced training, and that's very exciting. It also reinforces the importance that training has had and continues to have upon our success.

The social media software we use, Jive Clearspace (now renamed Jive SBS or Social Business Software), is easy to use. But training is still important. Training saves newbies time by teaching them tricks and tips as well as how why to use the tool. And the "why" is the most important. Without it, "how" has no purpose.

The advanced training we're doing covers some software features, but it's even more conceptually based. We're moving from how and why to proficiency and expertise and standardized practices. For example, staff in a division are taught where to look for the information they most need, as well as the finer points of creating content for others (effective titles for documents, descriptive and consistent tags, even SEO tips so it will be easy to find in the search results). Different teams are evolving their own strategies for using the wiki, and training is an essential part of their success.

It's true we rely to a very large degree on individuals to take initiative -- and they do -- but you can go a long way toward empowering those individuals through effective, strategic and creative training. It's certainly a critical success factor in our social media cultural evolution.