Organizations are increasingly trying to provide contextualized experiences to their employees, especially when it comes to learning. To drive adoption and engagement, L&D teams want to create more personalized learning experiences, but they are often challenged by scale. It can be difficult to avoid a “one-size-fits-all” feel in a large, complex or extended enterprise.
This is why Meridian Knowledge Solutions has built its LMS as a multi-tenancy platform. Multi-tenancy is an approach to software that allows there to be several, seemingly different instances of the application that all originate from the original, central platform.
There are many reasons this approach is so appealing for learning technology. If an organization wants their sales team to have a different look and feel to their learning environment than the support center, in the past they may have purchased two separate systems. This is expensive and presents a lot of duplicative effort for both IT and the L&D team. With multi-tenancy, each group can have the portal they want, driven by the central LMS.
As organizations get larger and more complex, multi-tenancy becomes even more important. Different business units, geographies, and brands almost always need to have unique user experiences for their teams. Managing multiple platforms in a large organization can be chaotic. If the organization’s learning needs extend beyond internal employees to external audiences like partners, resellers, customers, or franchisees, those unique experiences become critical. Each of these audiences has needs that are vastly different from both employee audiences and each other. Meridian also works with several government-related entities leveraging multi-tenancy to create different learning portals for complex agencies at the local, state and federal levels.
In any learning environment, the biggest challenge organizations face is reporting and analytics. In Brandon Hall Group’s research, it is the number one feature companies say they are looking for in new learning technology. It is also seen as the number one challenge with extended enterprise learning. This is because as organizations get more complex and deploy more disparate technology platforms, it becomes nearly impossible to consolidate and analyze all the data. In a multi-tenancy environment, the data is all flowing into one place and is far easier to manage.If your organization is looking to create, deliver and manage multiple learning environments, it is important to consider a provider like Meridian that has experience delivering multi-tenancy at a variety of scales and industries.
– David Wentworth, Principal Analyst, Brandon Hall Group
