“What are the most important attributes for an LMS for a medium/small sized organization?” mussed an ASTD member this morning. He went on wondering if the most important attributes were price, speed of implementation, or specific features that are “must haves” in a small or medium sized organization.

I thought I would share my answer with you in case you too have been wondering about this.

“What are the most important attributes for an LMS for a medium/small sized organization?”

A ‘free’ full function LMS can be obtained via open source…so it may not be price.

If a small or medium organization has not invested in content that needs to be loaded into the LMS the implementation of the LMS takes less than an hour…so it may not be implementation.

LMS systems are converging when it comes to features and functions. They all support AICC/SCORM, and there are many “Learning Off the Shelf” (LOTS) vendors that provide content that will load into any LMS system thanks to the industry standards…so it may not be course availability.

I suspect the biggest issue for the small and medium sized companies is the understanding of the benefits and organizational changes needed to really implement a learning culture–something that NO LMS system can do. Thus it is the change initiative that needs to happen before an LMS is selected and MUST continue until long after the LMS is up and running that is the biggest hurdle.

If you would like to see the original thread, just go to the ASTD Community Forums.