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JENNY DEARBORN, CHIEF LEARNING OFFICER, SAP

Learning at the

Speed of Business:
SAP Leads in the Cloud

BY JENNY DEARBORN

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hen a company undergoes profound

change, its critical that the workforce is ready, willing, and enabled
to execute on that change. SAP leadership
knew this, and last year hired me as the companys first chief learning officer.
I am someone whos motivated by a meaningful mission, so having this role and helping
the company, a provider of enterprise application software, complete its transition
to number one in the cloud is gratifying. Its
a privilege to partner with our clients in the
business in proving that learning and development (L&D) is essential to so fundamental a
business change.

New approaches to
established philosophies
To be clear, SAP always has valued talent development and learning. Two of our mantras
bear this out. The first, Everyone is a teacher
and everyone is a learner, recognizes that we
all have a responsibility to help each other grow
regardless of rank or role, and that learning is a
continuous way of life, not a one-time event.
And Everyone is a talent means that each
individual employee has value to contribute
and deserves the chance to be fully enabled to
grow a meaningful career at SAP. As described
below, developing amazing talent is one of
three core SAP leadership expectations.

PHOTO: BRAD TRENT

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at c level
podcast

The award-winning learning

professionals at SAP are
using the cloud to advance
the companys talent
development
initiatives.

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IF LEARNING
DOESNT HAVE
A MEASURABLE
BUSINESS
IMPACT, WE
SHOULDNT BE
DOING IT.
PERIOD.

What needed changing was how these philosophies were brought to life. For a company
that has doubled in the past 4.5 years to a
67,000-person workforce with 263,000 customers in 190 countries, L&D was not exactly
serving employees as a single, well-oiled machine. Now, with the full trust and support
of the SAP managing board, my team of innovative, dedicated, award-winning learning
professionals is leading the way.
The change is happening in different arenas, key among which is structuralsuch
as centralizing funding for strategic crosscorporate programs, aligning on a new
governance structure, and implementing our
cloud-based SuccessFactors LMS. Were currently going through a massive exercise to
move multiple separate learning groups to
one branded name, logo, learning technology
experience, content taxonomy, instructional
design philosophy, and employee messaging,
even though these teams report to their respective business units.
There is so much tremendous will (and
goodwill) to make learning at SAP run simple
as our new corporate tagline readsthat these
changes have been passionately embraced
and fairly easy to implement. Thats how
committed our learning professionals are to
excellence and how seriously we take CEO Bill
McDermotts simplicity call to arms.

Living by our leadership principles

Any learning leader will go nowhere fast if
shes not building programs that drive business
results. At SAP, this starts by being true to our
three leadership principles.
Leadership principle 1: Drive simplicity. To
help the world run simple in radically dynamic
times, we must truly embrace simplicity.
The learning function is modeling this for
the rest of SAP by streamlining our efforts,
drawing clear connections between strategic
business priorities and learning initiatives, and
leveraging simple, intuitive, and user-centric
approaches to our interactions with internal
stakeholders and all learners.
One of our simplest and yet most powerful
guiding principle is: If learning doesnt have a
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measurable business impact, we shouldnt be

doing it. Period. This frees up resources while
positioning us to deliver far more value. For
example, we reduced 90 percent of existing
courses prior to switching from an on-premise
to our cloud-based LMS.

Leadership principle 2: Develop amazing talent. SAP executives get it. They get learning.

They get what the role of L&D should be. And

they give us the autonomy and support to do
our job, which is to enable the workforces execution of corporate strategy.
We do this by creating learning that is
highly engaging, social, and collaborative. We
leverage learning that is virtual, with digital
performance support on-the-job and mobile
learning apps to drive scale, reach, and speed.
And when the audience and topic are right, we
develop learning that is gamified and fun.
More than that, though, we aim to develop
learning thats about eliciting passion, helping people to love their work, tackling the
worlds greatest challenges, making the world
a better place, and experiencing the pure joy
of learning and growing and exceeding our
own expectations. Far too often, its easy for
us as learning professionals to get caught up
in everything thats less important than these
outcomes. At SAP were trying to always keep
these goals within our sights.

Leadership principle 3: Ensure customer success. By driving simplicity and developing our

talent, we will achieve success for our customers. Well architect smarter technologies,
devise more effective solutions, and connect
our customers with integrated offerings that
solve increasingly complex challenges.
Learning has a direct role in ensuring customer success as well, through SAP Educations
award-winning cloud-based enterprise Learning Hub, and openSAP, SAPs free learning
platform, which leads enterprise massive open
online courses in innovation.

Leading learning in the cloud

Few companies are as well-positioned
to take full advantage of learning in the
cloud as SAP. Because I joined SAP from
SuccessFactors, I know how powerful these

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cloud-based learning tools are. Its never been

easier to learn from anyone at any time, collaborate with fellow learners, share critical
information in any format, learn by doing, and
mentor and be mentored.
Here are a few more ways SAP is leading
learning in the cloud. We are:
attracting Millennial talent with social
learning and collaboration that mirrors
the best consumer apps and with engaging
mobile and gaming initiatives
increasing financial resources for learning
by moving expensive, nonscalable training
from the classroom to the cloud, where
we can reach many more employees for
much less
using inherent tracking capabilities to
hold employees and managers accountable for learning
leveraging cloud-generated data and analytics to measure learning activity, impact,
and business results (in other words, holding us learning professionals accountable).
And of course, data and analytics are just
as important to learning as every other part of
the business. When you do the right training
for the right people based on the right defined objectives, especially when you do it in
the cloud, measuring impact should be easy.
Its like any other must in training at SAP, and
should be for every L&D team, everywhere.
Lastly, the cloud symbolizes the spreadinglike-wildfire democratization of L&D. Lets face
it: Gone are the days when the training department controlled what employees learn. At SAP,
democratized L&D has long been in our DNA;
were just advancing it with the cloud.
Case in point, I was blown away when I took
this role to learn that more than 300 SAP employees around the world across all functional
areas have gained external coaching certification from the International Coach Federation
just so they can volunteer (on top of their
regular job) to help peers work through career choices and goals through the SAP global
coaching practice. This is truly a culture that has
learning and supporting one another at its core.
The learning functions of the future, like
ours at SAP today, will be about governance

and measurable business impact, not command and control.

Advice so far
In addition to a great learning culture, supportive board and executives, business alignment,
SAP learning professionals who strive for excellence, and wonderful goodwill, other factors
that have led to our success include:
Focusing on a key early winleadership
developmentwhich was a terrific opportunity for enhancement and also the most
visible. Creating a huge win and delivering something truly transformational for a
constituency that wields power generates
tremendous momentum.
Delivering quality solutions and getting and
publishing measurable business impact results quickly, which builds credibility.
Unleashing everything youve got. Leave
fear at the door.
Do all of that well and youll get the platform to have a bigger voice and achieve what
you came for.

Winning through learning

Companies such as SAP that make big investments in learning culture have employees who
spend their time thinking about and preparing for whats next. Companies that dont do so
have employees wondering what just happened,
and spend excessively on acquiring external
talent because their own people arent ready to
come off the bench and get into the game.
Our goal is for SAP to be known in the business world as learning thought leaders and
the place to work to have the best and most
impactful opportunities to learn and be developed. Just like anyone who spent years at
GE or Unilever is understood to have undergone rigorous training, SAP employees will be
the best trained, the most innovative and effective, and as a result the most fulfilled and
rewarded. In addition, we will have increased
their value as contributors not just to SAP, but
to the world.
Jenny Dearborn is chief learning officer at SAP;
jenny.dearborn@sap.com.
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