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Industry Standards The Year in During the recent HRO Today Summit Europe, we invited more than 30,000 HRO professionals to nominate their "Top Game Changers of the 2011." The results were presented at the summit, and the detail of each category appears below. The audience then voted on three categories and picked the best of each. — The Editors Five From Within 1. Technologies that enable the democratisation of strategy—e.g. IBM Jam Process IBM's Jam Process forms part of the shift towards workforce engagement processes aimed at understanding the "wisdom of the crowds." It is a combination of social computing techniques that enable online conversation, dispersed and large-scale collaboration, and massively parallel conferencing around focussed transformation interventions. It comes under the banner of "many-to-many dialogues." Why is it game changing? When combined with appropriate transformation and management of change skills, it enables the pursuit of large-scale (organisation-wide or team-wide) learning events. They are nonhierarchical (equal access for all), semi-structured (based on predefined goals and discussion themes), immediate, and intensive (the conversation takes place during a finite period of time)—with the transcripts recorded for post-event analysis 2. Technologies that enable the better use of social media in employee research—e.g. Opinion Space Social media refers to technologies that allow people to connect with each other to create and share information over the Internet. Silverman Research has been using a new approach, called Opinion Space, for conducting employee research using the latest social media technology and data visualisation tools. Why is this game changing? The approach has won an award from the Chartered Institute on Personnel Development, the judges having been impressed with the level of innovation. The technology harnesses a new way of thinking and conceptualising employee research, and helps facilitate both higher levels of user engagement and more diverse opinions. Game Changing A crowdsourced look at innovation leaders. By Faye Holland and Paul Sparrow 3. Technologies that enable the greater access to learning and development—e.g. virtual instructor-led training (VLT) services from Raytheon Professional Services. Virtual instructor-led training services (live instructor-led sessions) are enabling programs for web-based training, virtual workshops, and e-learning through which learners connect to a virtual classroom via their own computer and Internet. Note that NelsonHall's Q4 2010 Learning BPO market analysis estimated that traditional instructor- led classroom training (ILT), which was 50 per cent of all training delivery in 2010, would decrease to 40 per cent by 2012 due to the increase in VLT. Raytheon Professional Services (RPS) is the first provider in the United Kingdom to launch accredited qualifications delivered through virtual classroom training. Qualifications are accredited by the Institute of Leadership and Management. The virtual collaborative learning technology (VCT) allows for interaction between trainers, students, and their peers. RPS claims a series of capabilities in support of VCT sessions, including content development and conversion, instructor training, user technical support, real-time broadcast monitoring, and the tagging and streamlining of recorded VCT sessions as performance support tools Why is this game changing? The provider argues for many benefits: reduced cost for travel and meeting venues; less time away from the office (used for more productive work time and to alleviate employee stress from work piling up while out of the office); faster deployment of learning; the ability to achieve collaborative benefits of learning as in a traditional classroom, where some learners are more apt to be more social virtually than in person; and the removal of some of the barriers of traditional e-learning where lack of participant focus is of concern as well as the ability to actively participate in the learning. In general, contracts for VLT are increasingly being awarded due to quick deployment of learning, lower cost, and functionality of embedded learning web 2.0 social learning. 4. Building big data capability and the use of predictive analytics Predictive analytics is a business intelligence technology that uses a variety of statistical techniques (regression, choice models, time series, duration analysis, and classification) to make predictions through the use of modeling, data mining, and game theory. [24] HRO TODAY GLOBAL | WINTER 2012