You know how the saying goes:
It takes a village to raise a child.
I don't know who was the first to figure this out, but boy was that a wise person! You just can't do it alone — raise a child or grow a business (which is just another type of baby, I'm sure every CEO will agree) — because the world is bigger than your home and there are people out there who know stuff that you don't.
Regardless of the type of baby you're trying to bring up, you need all the help you can get.
A company means more than its CEO. An established company becomes that way thanks to the breath, sweat and tears of everyone involved in its upbringing, not just the CEO's. The head of a company is like a parent: worrying about the future, planning how to overcome all obstacles and guiding the offspring in the right direction.
But the success of any company is based on the hard work and commitment of all employees, suppliers, partners, customers and any stakeholder involved in any way in the well-functioning and development of the business.
All these stakeholders come together under the umbrella commonly known as the extended enterprise.
The extended enterprise is for any business organization what the village is for any child that needs to be raised.
In more scholarly terms, the extended enterprise is defined as the wider organization representing all associated entities — customers, employees, suppliers, distributors, etc — who directly or indirectly, formally or informally, collaborate in the design development, productions, and delivery of a product the end user.
The output always depends on the input. If the villagers are wise and knowledgeable, the child will learn from them. If not, the child will still learn from them. So it is in the interest of any parent/CEO to be part of a wise and knowledgeable village/extended enterprise.
More often than not, some sort of training must be involved in this wisdom and knowledge sharing — be it face-to-face, online, or blended. Either way, a business LMS can be a valuable tool for those considering creating and managing training courses for the network of organizations that can influence the success of their company.
So we all agree that providing some training to all the people that can affect how a company is perceived by the big business world is not such a bad idea. But who exactly should be trained, and how?
Let's start with the WHO part:
And now let’s move on to the HOW part.
How can you train your extended enterprise? With an LMS, of course!
A learning management system makes it possible for you to create as many courses that you want to train as many different people that you want. Because suppliers are different than resellers, which are different than customers, and so on. And there are not two customers exactly the same, no two volunteers exactly the same, and so on. Each course can be adapted to a certain target learner.
Basically, you can reap all the benefits of a cloud-based LMS, multiplied by whatever the number of actors of your extended enterprise you need to train.
What’s more, by creating different portals for the different types of learners you can ensure everyone gets the right pieces of information. Any confidential data that only employees should know will only be available for employees to access. Resellers or suppliers will be able to see only the training information you add to their respective learning portals.
Every company should consider offering training to all members of the extended enterprise, whether we’re talking about employees, suppliers, resellers, volunteers and even customers. This will help them save a lot of time and money, all while organically growing the business.
After all, the wiser the village, the more successful the child.