REEEEEEEE!

I was in a teams meeting last week going over a new (to us) learning platform.

During the whole thing (which was an overview and hard sell), I was wondering just who was behind this. We have a methodology, we have authoring tools, we have a portal of sorts and are planning migration to a new one (which will be glorious if and when it happens) we’ve chosen a cloud provider, all that’s waiting now is money and a migration plan.

So I was struggling to understand this meetings purpose.

A little bit after the meeting they sent a link to a video. It was then I realized that two of the people on the meeting were from a large company that we bought but weren’t as yet…assimilated. I was actually honored to be at the meeting considering the only other two from my shop were my boss and another director I really like. There were one or two others invited that didn’t post. In my case, I figured it was that eLearning is my thing.

Which I confirmed on a later call with the boss. Also found that the other company is using this platform now, and it’s really spendy. Whoa…that brings back memories.

Then, this showed up…

I’d have never sent such a message. Ever.

I puzzled over a reply….

Things are all f*cked up. You’ll get used to it

What a Lucent engineer told a colleague of mine at Ascend when they were assimilated

..Then, there gonna get it up the ass…STIFF AND DRYYYYY!

A boss of mine back in the day about a company we were pillaging

It’s not my place to say anything and I won’t. If the person winds up in my group, which is doubtful, we may have that conversation on a voice call. But I’ll be more diplomatic.

Something like…

In July, the start of the new FY, you will be assimilated. You’ll get a rainbowcorp.com email, your O365 will be migrated, your laptop will be under control of our IT. You’ll see programs go missing. Also missing will be your local admin abilities. Plan on contacting IT with a reason that needs to be restored.

You will meet the migration/integration team. It’s all these folks do. The engineers I dealt with to migrate our world were exceptional. But think of everything you need and put it in the plan. It was during this process that I discovered that the whole live training gig my one employee said was vital, why he resisted eLearning tooth and nail, was mostly given away for free. What he thought was ‘Crucial’ (like here) was, in fact, a needless expense.

By December, they’ll be done. Or October. In January your stuff will be migrated for real and it’ll go away. By next June, assimilation will be mostly complete. The body count will have risen a dozen or more. (Try not to be one)

They planned this before the sale. Trust me. They sized up every nickel your company spends and decided where and if it fits in the endgame. Your operation may be dead, you just don’t know it yet. The one exec on that email has probably made up her mind already, no doubt whatsoever. She was my boss at one time. She misses nothing. She also has a vision and plan. It’s why she was hired. You may not like the plan. You may not agree with it. But it’s hers, and she’s gone to the mattresses with those above her to get it. You have to know that going in.

The other thing you’ll learn is that under our VP, I think there’s only one group (Mine) that doesn’t require a 30% nut. And even then, we have to do live classes to lessen the expense. You or your content will have that or it will die on the vine. And as far as publishing packages go, one director on the call, my boss, flat out told me we are an adobe shop, period. So, I now use Captivate. It’s a great package. The other director is an Articulate guy. I love that too, as it’s also my thing. We use that for customers that purchase custom courses and to maintain courses in existence now. A new tool is an uphill climb. Trust me.

When my company was bought and assimilated we had a far more sophisticated LMS (learning portal), a vimeo channel full of end user and technical tutorials, and were working to unify all this with our new support portal.

It’s all gone, gone, gone.

I still have customers and partners emailing me asking where they can find the content. Tutorials don’t generate dough ray meee.. so they are gone, gone, gone.

From what I understand, that package, while cool, costs 10X per user what they spend on all my authoring tools combined.

Yeah…Per.User.

There isn’t one VP around here that I know of that wants that coming off their bottom line. Not. One.

My advice is to learn what we are doing, and where we’re going. Set your plans that way. Also, find out if your product is even staying or growing. You can tell by how fast the sales org assimilates and sells it, especially if partners are involved.

You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile

The Borg

BTW – I love to bag on RainbowCorp. Like any tech company, they are woke as can be. I think a lot of their pronouncements are dumb, and impossible to quantify (prolly why they say them). But I like the people I work with. They literally are some of the nicest and most talented I’ve worked with.

If I understand this guy’s product right, it falls under a couple directors here that have a really good certification bidness (ratwheel) going that rivals Cisco and Microsoft. Their customer base insists on a certain amount of continuing education, of a certain type, mostly live and expensive, which is nice. The technical term for that is called ‘recurring revenue’. They are generally reticent to spend tens of thousands of dollars to create eLearning that will poach from their action. I get it. At the end of the day, it’s all about the Benjamins.