What follows is about half of a thought. I hope it is better than none.

During an excellent two days at Learning Technologies this week the notion of two speed IT kept bubbling up in my mind. I am in the foothills of writing a book on the impact of digital transformation on organisations and how they work (and need to work). One theme of my notes, conversation and reading is “Two Speed IT”. I reckon this is what L&D needs to embrace. It’s already happening all over the place but I reckon it’s time to come out or to plan for it more deliberately.

Two speed IT typically refers to businesses adopting faster digital products and tools for customer facing purposes. Faced with large, slow and inflexible corporate systems, many digital teams started to use lightweight and cloud based tools to solve customer problems quickly and simply in way that the legacy monoliths could not support. Frequently, this is borne from the need to respond the the pace and accuracy of digital only competitors with infrastructure built to operate quickly and with flexibility as a basic principle. Things like cloud based content management systems, infrastructure as a service and analytics tools become very useful in trying to service ever more demanding customers without the pain of a massive IT programme. There are multiple systems to work with but that is better than lost customers.

This is how I saw much of my #LT17uk experience. There were many vendors (with some *very* large stands) espousing the virtues of an integrated system, configured to meet all needs. There is merit here, probably, bit you need to contend with HR, Procurement, IT and L&D in some combination. You might also end up with a product experience where every feature is a bolt on to something else.

There were, equally case studies of excellent implementations of these systems both in the free seminars and the conference. As I said, there is merit here.

Research – define the problem – come up with an idea – prototype or test a solution – refine and iterate.

There was a less deliberate thread though running through the conference sessions and the conversations between them. Tugging on the thread reveals stories of teams and individuals giving some things a small scale try with smaller, lighter and simpler tools. These tend to be cloud based products designed to enable a quick project to start and test its mettle. Teams were talking about piloting and testing an approach to see if there thinking is right, to see what their colleagues make of it and to test the direction before setting out on a longer journey. Research – define the problem – come up with an idea – prototype or test a solution – refine and iterate. Design thinking. (I really hope I banged on about that a lot in my own session. Apologies to anyone who was there if I didn’t).

James Tyer and Mark Britz gave some great accounts of this in their talk on finding, helping and supporting communities and collaboration groups. They have some excellent principles to follow as well if you are facing similar tasks. A clear theme was: start small, solve a real problem, make it easy and use what you have. In some cases this was two speed IT (a new, lighter, quicker tool), in some cases it was Sharepoint, which is rarely described as any of those things.

Slack was mentioned a couple of times too, which is a fashionable (and very effective) second speed IT tool. Easy to implement and easy to learn to use, it has seen rapid adoption amongst teams who need to communicate and collaborate directly and frequently.

Jane Hart’s Top 100 learning tools is full of two speed IT recommendations (for both speeds). L&D is already happily operating at both speeds but seems to be absorbed much more with delivery in the organisation at the traditional infrastructure pace. Traditional tracking needs (gosh I dislike that word) draw one to traditional systems and the impulse to control the experience draw us even further. Despite this, there were many conversations about testing new approaches, trying new tools and trusting users to work sensibly. This is to be commended.

So many of us live and work with these tools anyway. Fighting the tide seems like hard work. We learn with these tools naturally as well, without even considering it. IT’s time to adopt two speed IT internally and purposefully, I think. We are already making great progress with it, even if incidentally.