Organizations are increasingly trying to provide contextualized experiences to their employees, especially regarding learning. L&D teams want to create more personalized learning experiences to drive adoption and engagement, but they are often challenged by scale. Avoiding a “one-size-fits-all” feel in a large, complex, or extended enterprise can be difficult.
This is why Meridian Knowledge Solutions has built its LMS as a multi-tenancy platform. Multi-tenancy is an approach to software that allows several seemingly different instances of the application to originate from the original central platform.
There are many reasons this approach is so appealing for learning technology. If an organization wants its sales team to have a different look and feel to its learning environment than the support center, it may have purchased two separate systems in the past. This is expensive and presents a lot of duplicative effort for IT and the L&D team. Each group can have the portal they want with multi-tenancy, driven by the central LMS.
As organizations get larger and more complex, multi-tenancy becomes even more important. Different business units, geographies, and brands almost always need unique user experiences for their teams. Managing multiple platforms in a large organization can be chaotic. If the organization’s learning needs extend beyond internal employees to external audiences like partners, resellers, customers, or franchisees, those unique experiences become critical. Each of these audiences has needs vastly different from those of both employee audiences and each other. Meridian also works with several government-related entities leveraging multi-tenancy to create different learning portals for complex agencies at the local, state, and federal levels.
In any learning environment, organizations’ biggest challenge is reporting and analytics. In Brandon Hall Group’s research, it is the number one feature companies seek in new learning technology. It is also seen as the number one challenge with extended enterprise learning. This is because as organizations get more complex and deploy more disparate technology platforms, consolidating and analyzing all the data becomes nearly impossible. In a multi-tenancy environment, the data flows into one place and is far easier to manage.
If your organization is looking to create, deliver and manage multiple learning environments, it is important to consider a provider like Meridian Knowledge Solutions that has experience delivering multi-tenancy at a variety of scales and industries.