User-led Innovation - IT Training

We don't need IT training to use www.amazon.com site to purchase books. The application is simple enough to use. Also, one can easily purchase airline tickets on the web without need for an intensive IT training. However, same is not true for corporate business applications.

Until IT application vendors can come out with Amazon-like "ease of use" in their applications, there is always going to be a need for IT training for end users. With shrinking IT budgets and resources for IT training activities, how can one cope up with this challenge. We all know that without appropriate training, companies can't get total benefits out of their investments (in systems & applications).

IT always get challenged with this problem (training) and good news is that the latest web 2.0 technologies now offer new hope (and solutions).

Why not involve users in their own training? "Train the trainer" approach needs to be replaced by "user trains the user" and here is how.

Using the Wikipedia approach, companies can develop their own collaborative Wiki sites (internal) that can be used as training platforms. This approach requires end-users who are "willing and able" and ready to share and train (assuming initial baseline training/documentation has been completed).

As users might have very limited time (and sometimes lack of interest), companies should find innovative ways of encouraging this new collaborative training approach. This form of user-led innovation (IT training) is open to all the users of the systems and can be further expanded to improve process efficiencies and ensure that companies can reap the "promised" ROIs.