Democratization of learning Enterprise applications

I've been working on ERP applications for a very long time. I was trained on the job at Deloitte and most of my learning's been hands-on. The entry barriers to start a career in any ERP application were and still are pretty high. It's a party that you get invited to. You just can't decide to join the party yourself. If you decided to do it yourself, training is not cheap and not a lot of information is freely available. Ever since my exposure to Salesforce.com a few years ago I've been wondering about a few things. Salesforce's approach to training and learning is quite different. It's much more democratic. It's like a drive thru at a fast food joint. You want to eat here, you just drive up to the window and spend your time and money. In this post I'm musing about how such disparate avenues of learning in enterprise software impact the overall industry, resource pool, and the careers of the professionals.

Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away - learning enterprise software

A few decades ago enterprise software like SAP, Oracle, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft etc., showed up and dazzled the corporations with their wizardry and expertise in automating business processes. The only way you could learn these software applications was to be a part of the original development team itself, be a part of the implementation team at the client, or you knew someone, who knew someone who was implementing this application, and they let you be a part of it. Training and learning slowly evolved, but training itself was not adequate. You had to put in insane amounts of time learning the application hands-on to gather expertise.

This kind of total control on learning and training made the enterprise software companies and their partners the only source of expertise. Consulting became another source of revenue. Since expertise and knowledge was scarce, it was also expensive. Demand for talented consultants was high, and their availability was low, which justified the high fees.

Fast forward to the current day, things have changed, but not that much. Knowledge and learning is still highly controlled. The number of consultants has definitely increased with the more and more partner firms joining in the implementation and maintenance business of enterprise software. Even with a large resource pool the implementation cost, fees, and consulting fees is still high.

Enter cloud based ERP applications.

The rise of the cloud based ERP solutions

The 21st century brings us faster, better, and reliable internet speeds, making the internet the driving force behind a new wave of innovation. People get used to searching on Google, shopping on Amazon, and putting their lives on the web. With advances in technology hardware, software and storage also become more efficient and cheaper. Cloud based offerings starting popping up, and so do cloud based ERP solutions. Businesses start paying attention to these cloud systems primarily motivated by cost savings, but there's still some reluctance in terms of security.

Thence comes the iPhone, which changed the way people interact with systems and tools. Their expectations of a user interface completely changed. People wanted their systems to be easy to use and intuitive. Mobile user interface experience started seeping into users' expectations from other systems including ERP software. But, the ERP behemoths were still not great looking or  modern-ish. The cloud based systems, which were the new kids on the block, looked sleek, cool and modern in comparison to them.

With social media becoming a part of everybody's life, people become more comfortable with hosting their personal lives online. Users who've become used to intuitive mobile interfaces, and the comfortable navigation of their social media applications, are now drawn to the ease of use of these new breed of cloud based ERP systems. They become advocates and evangelists for adoption of these applications at work. Better user experience becomes another strong reason in addition to low overheads, faster implementation, and cheaper fees, for businesses to embrace cloud based systems.

The learning revolution

Today we have a sizable number of cloud based ERP solutions. They are not as comprehensive as the full blown ERP systems like SAP and Oracle, but they do what they do really well, and they are getting better at it every day. But, how do you support a growing demand for expertise and experience? How do you attract and keep good resources interested in your platform? It's a challenge that each of these companies address differently. All offer classroom and virtual training, some offer free and subscription based training, some offer training through portals, or through partners, and some like Salesforce.com offer free implementation guides, trailheads, communities and online help portals.

If anyone's got democratization of learning right, it's Salesforce.com. They looked at what the traditional ERP systems did, they understood the pain points businesses had with implementation and maintenance of such systems, and came up with a revolutionary way to address these issues. They realized early on that for their platform to be successful they needed a ton of professionals who would sell, implement, maintain and train in Salesforce.com. So they took away a lot of barriers for learning. They made their system easy to configure, easy to learn, and opened up multiple avenues of learning. They offer classroom training that anyone can take. But, they also encourage people to train on their own with Trailheads. You can ask 2 million of their Success Community members if you are having trouble with something, and I bet you, you will get an answer. Salesforce even provides you step by step implementation guides for their solutions. To put all this learning to practice you can easily signup for a Developer Edition of Salesforce and learn at your own pace.

With so many ways to learn, practice and gain experience on Salesforce.com, there is basically no barriers for anyone to pursue a career in the Salesforce eco system. There is a great demand for resources and the supply is equally good. So, in the long run the amount of money a practitioner makes will never be astronomical. There will be a lot of professionals who will make good money, but not insane amounts of money, as professionals in other proprietary ERP systems. Such a model will create opportunities for more people instead of a few. So, how does one climb higher, aim for greater things in the Salesforce platform - experience, implementations, industry knowledge, depth of knowledge, and integration with other ERP systems. Professionals will need to specialize in areas within Salesforce. They have to put in a lot of work to become really good at them. And as the cloud era expands, they may even need to understand how Salesforce will interact and integrate with other systems. It's not easy, but with such vast amounts of free learning resources available,  how much you learn is only limited by your appetite for learning.

Based on the success that Salesforce.com has had, I won't be surprised if all the other ERP systems (cloud or otherwise) will soon start their own form of democratic learning systems.