Page 184 - Managing the Mobile Workforce

hiring and preparing great mobile talent � 163

of SAS headquarters and other impressive corporate giants. From the
early days of Nortel, Doug earned the responsibility to lead as a global
manager responsible for tens of thousands of employees on a global
scale, including the early formation of mobile business units and dis-
persed employees. He is the founder of TrainingIndustry.com and the
Learning Content Network.
When I (coauthor David Clemons) met Doug, we had face-to-face
meetings that were facilitated through Greg Kaiser of the Interna-
tional Speakers Bureau. The two-hour meeting with Doug and Greg
was with two of the sharpest and most creative minds I’ve met. They
know how to take ideas to fruition. I was sitting in Doug’s office lis-
tening to these two talking about business strategy while I was just
trying to focus and keep up! Things move fast around thought leaders
within this industry.
Doug brought up a big idea for the enterprise training manager:
“When we think about the distribution of information to a mobile de-
vice, I’m really trying to study the difference between push/pull. For
me to push content to somebody on a mobile device, it is 100 percent
about opt-in because of the invasiveness people would perceive. In an
enterprise world, I don’t have to worry about it, because they are my
employees and I’m going to tell them what information I want them
to have. In the public world, the B-to-C [business-to-customer] mar-
ket, we’ve got a whole different set of implications. I think about the
societal implications of using mobile devices we haven’t even learned
very much about yet. I push about two million e-mails a month to our
members. I can’t do that to a mobile device unless they tell me they
want it.”
Being mobile and using mobile technology are two legs of a three-
legged chair, he told us; the third leg represents the users and how they
want the content pushed to them. This notion of “opt-in,” in a rede-
fined way, will most likely play an important part in employee training
in the near future. Employees will select the Centers of Excellence
that are being pushed to them by their company. Some information
will be obvious requirements, but some will be selected by the topics