Creating the International Training Management Web Site: A Corporate University Portal That Shares Best Practices

DISAM Journal, Spring, 2001 by Charles E. Collins

The DISAM international training functional experts prepared the new documents to be hosted on the DISAM web server. These documents were then linked from the SAN Main Training Menu. The disadvantage was that it still took several days to get the desired document on the internet because of the overall DISAM web master's workload and priorities of the SAN system manager. Thus, only a few documents were actually made available in this manner. And, even when this was accomplished, the documents so established were still only available to registered SAN users.

A New Web Page.

Now, only one step away from creating a new web page, the DISAM training functional expert was actually preparing the HTML documents. It also became obvious that the use of Adobe Acrobat to save and format documents for the internet was a good choice. Once a series of HTML and Adobe documents had evolved, it was only natural to link them together into a true web page. Thus, the International Training Management (ITM) web page was created.

It took several weeks of concentrated effort to research and collect all available written materials in electronic format. Then the next step was to identify the target audiences of the web page and tailor the presentation of the collected materials to suit those needs. We went through several complete revisions of the ITM web page before it began to settle down.

There still remained one more critical step in the complete evolvement of the ITM web page. The International Training Management web page truly existed at this point. The drawback came in how it was being maintained and updated. The DISAM training faculty was authoring the individual web pages but still having to go to the DISAM web master to have them published on the internet. And, others were setting priorities for his limited availability. The last step was about to take place establishing an independent web master for the ITM web page.

Finally, Our Own Web Page.

It took a few hours of work between the DISAM LAN manager and the DLSAM web master to set the required accesses so that the DISAM training functional web master could author and then publish the ITM web page on the internet. The rest is history. Today, when a new element of the ITM web page is identified, researched, and authored, the result is published on the internet in a matter of minutes. This work is accomplished entirely within the faculty group that is responsible for the conduct of international military training management education. Thus it is the training subject matter experts who are actually running the ITM web site. They, of course, are the ones who best know what is needed on the web site to enhance the educational process. And, they are the ones who are in Continuous contact with the worldwide U.S. security cooperation training community. Obviously, this has value well beyond the schoolhouse by the publishing of procedural information that is truly needed by training managers in the field. In fact, this may ultimately be the most significant value of the ITM web page, because many of these procedures have not been documented adequately or simply that good procedural instructions published conventionally have not reached managers in the field.