Cornerstone: Driving Workforce Agility through Innovation
Cornerstone, founded in 1999, began with a bold vision to democratise education through online learning. Over the years, Cornerstone has continuously innovated to become a leading cloud-based workforce agility platform.
Today, it empowers organisations worldwide to identify and address skills gaps, cultivate development opportunities, retain top talent, and deliver multi-modal learning experiences tailored to the evolving needs of the modern workforce.
With a thriving global community, Cornerstone supports more than 7,000 customers and 125 million users in 180 countries. Every three seconds a course is taken on the Cornerstone platform somewhere around the world. Its solutions are offered in more than 50 languages, underscoring a commitment to accessibility and inclusivity.
Cornerstone prides itself on a diverse team of 4,000 talent experts—affectionately known as Cornerstars—who bring passion and expertise to every customer and meet them where they are on their journey.
Innovative solutions and strategic growth
Cornerstone’s transformative journey has been marked by strategic acquisitions of industry leaders, each adding unique strengths to their platform. The acquisition of Saba Software (Cornerstone Saba) enhanced its capabilities in performance management, learning management, and succession planning.
SumTotal (Cornerstone SumTotal) expanded their offerings in learning and talent management, while EdCast (Cornerstone Guide) bolstered their digital learning capabilities, enabling personalised learning journeys and fostering social learning.
Talespin (Cornerstone Immerse) introduced cutting-edge virtual and augmented reality training solutions, revolutionising their approach to immersive learning. The most recent acquisition of SkyHive has also helped integrate advanced skills management capabilities and social learning, significantly enhancing peer-to-peer learning and knowledge sharing, thanks to its daily intake of terabytes of global workforce benchmark data.
These acquisitions enhance the power of “Cornerstone Galaxy” to be the complete workforce agility platform for building and transforming high-performing and future-ready organisations. As Cornerstone CEO, Himanshu Palsule, rightly says, Organisations are their best when their people are at their best.
The NorthStar Programme: A Testament to Transformation
Equipping sales teams with the right tools to engage digitally and capitalise on new offerings in a swift manner was crucial, but fragmented processes and systems impeded customer experience and revenue growth. In response to this challenge, Cornerstone launched the NorthStar programme.
Deepika Rayala, Chief Digital and Transformation Officer, led this initiative, in close partnership with key business partners, which aimed to unify Cornerstone’s core internal systems landscape. Integrating these acquisitions into the existing ecosystem was not simply a matter of ‘lift and shift’, but rather a substantial digital transformation initiative.
More so, considering that the first three integrations were executed in a year – far lower than the industry average. Each entity brought its own systems, processes, organisational structures, analytics, and most importantly ways of working. One of them was a public carve out integration. Harmonising these into a standardised set of processes was key to enabling a single business vernacular for the whole company.
Reflecting on the journey, Deepika Rayala says: “The challenging aspects of the transformation were also the most rewarding.”
Cornerstone had to redesign and build a singular platform to ensure their go-to-market teams executed in a consistent and effective manner resulting in simplicity and velocity for their end-customers. This meant creating a new system with all the connective tissue required for frictionless execution and one set of master data and transactional flows including the re-engineering of 78 end-to-end business processes.
The programme integrated six distinct entities into a single platform in a phased manner, significantly reducing a decade’s worth of technological debt and resulting in improved transaction flows, better customer analytics, and enhanced operational efficiency. Additionally, manual activities such as order-form validation are now being automated using AI and related digital tools, to further improve operational efficiencies.
Deepika Rayala notes: “Our vision to further digitise and automate our business workflows will enable us to focus on value-added activities that make a significant impact. Every hour our users don’t spend in the system is an hour they can dedicate to driving the business forward.”
Cornerstone’s digital adoption journey: drinking their own champagne
As any company undergoing a transformation knows, bringing your people along on the journey and helping them embrace change can be difficult. The new system brought complexities around deal processing, data integration, and workflow automation. Users were used to a set of steps that they did in the legacy systems for 10-15 years.
As Deepika Rayala explains: “One of the other key aspects of the program was ensuring that a large, globally dispersed team could work in tandem and stay aligned with the execution rhythm under tight timelines.
“It called for the right balance of meeting cadences versus informational updates and making every programme team member feel included. There’s no point in running at 100 miles an hour only to look back and discover there’s no one behind you.”
With different personas, tenure and competency levels, getting everyone on board with the new way of working was a significant milestone. In response to this challenge, Cornerstone leveraged its own Cornerstone Guide and Cornerstone Learn modules to accelerate adoption of the new system. The programme needed to ensure that the sales teams and customer support teams became proficient with the new NorthStar CRM system very quickly.
By utilising Cornerstone Guide, it decreased training time by facilitating training in the flow of work, increased application adoption and lowered the demand on the supporting teams.
Cornerstone Guide provided in-app tours, how-to guides, assisted automations, courses, and cue-based instructions, enabling a personalised and connected learning experience for every situation in the flow of work.
In addition to Cornerstone Guide, it utilised Cornerstone Learn (Digital Learning Academy) to define specialised learning pathways and content tailored to each persona and with the desired learning outcomes. This enabled reporting on course completion rates, understanding where gaps existed, and identifying areas for improvement in an easy self-service manner.
Strategic Partnerships
The success of the NorthStar programme was also attributed to strategic partnerships with industry leaders such as Deloitte and Grazitti. Deloitte provided global expertise in designing and implementing the new systems, while Grazitti’s specialisation in Salesforce data migration complemented this by ensuring seamless integration and helping optimise overall costs. This collaboration allowed Cornerstone to manage the transformation effectively and execute an effective cutover and post-go-live support.
Results and Future-Ready Workforce
The detailed planning and user-centric approach of the NorthStar programme enabled this large transition to go-live with less than a 1% variance in overall revenue between old and new systems on day one.
Today, Cornerstone operates under a single, standardised platform, paving the way for future growth and innovation. This transformation continues to evolve with a focus on enhancing operational efficiency, enabling faster reporting, and improved user experience for both internal and external customers.
Cornerstone’s evolving digital journey is a testament to its strategic vision with unwavering commitment to take on challenges that are key differentiators, with a flair for resilience and a focus on meticulous execution. By leveraging innovative technologies and fostering a culture of continuous learning, Cornerstars are future-ready, and poised to navigate the ever-changing landscape of work.
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