Enterprise E-Learning

T+D, April, 2003 by Martha Gold

Interoperability? Infrastructure? What are those?

Here's how Braxton (formerly Deloitte Consulting) went from pilot to permanent in a sweeping e-learning effort that put all of the pieces together.

This article is part 1 of a five-part series of case studies on how some big organizations are using and measuring enterprise-wide e-learning.

The challenge: Train and certify 15,000 consultants, scattered among nearly three dozen countries, in e-business concepts and strategies. Wrap it up within nine months. Save money in the process.

That tall order, conceived in 1999 before e-learning had acquired that appellation, set Deloitte Consulting (recently renamed Braxton) on a path towards an aggressive embrace of digital learning. CEO Doug McCracken saw that Braxton's consulting staff needed to hone its business technology acumen so the firm could better avail itself of opportunities in the burgeoning field of e-business. More companies wanted guidance bringing their practices into the 21st century, and a growing number of competitors claiming expertise in e-business were whittling away at Braxton's potential growth.

At the time, 95 percent of training at Braxton was classroom-based. Getting 15,000 employees certified in an internally developed e-business curriculum under that approach would've cost about US$150 million and taken more than two years. McCracken's view was that technology, and the consulting opportunities it was creating, was advancing far too quickly to spend even a year getting the consultants up to speed. The program had to be up and running in six months. The solution was to create a training program based largely on e-learning content, sweetened with incentives for successful completion.

Nine months later, Braxton had achieved its goal. More important, the initiative, a first taste of e-learning for many of the firm's consultants and a crash course in enterprise e-learning for the company, catalyzed a number of shifts in the global consulting firm's training function. Chief among them were a move from numerous, semi-autonomous regional training departments into a cohesive, centralized training department and a shift from predominately classroom-based training to various combinations of e-learning and classroom training. Dozens of duplicate, underused classes were culled from the roster, and predominantly classroom-based courses were transformed into blended solutions of Web-delivered courses and traditional training approaches.

Those changes didn't come about quickly or easily. Getting executive buy-in and involving the IT department from the very beginning helped smooth the transition. Still, it took a lot of trial-and-error for Braxton to achieve mastery of enterprise e-learning, according to Kathy Scholz, leader of Learning Technologies and Infrastructures. Following are the milestones in the creation of what's now considered a sophisticated and far-reaching enterprise c-learning implementation.

Lobbying at C-level

Seeking to build on its initial experiment with e-learning to augment its e-business training initiative, Braxton's chief learning officer Nick van Darn, who helped devise that initiative, sought funding for e-learning infrastructure to extend and institutionalize Braxton's use of digital learning. That meant lobbying C-level executives for the needed funding. Van Dam, together with other e-learning strategists, approached the executives to pitch their idea of a responsive, centralized training function closely tied to organizational objectives.

"We talked to them about what we were doing with education and training and how to make it meet Braxton's business challenges," says van Dam. "That helped get their buy-in." So did his promise of another outcome favored by Braxton's CEO: a more centralized training function.

Among the business challenges the training task group discussed were expanding the company's consulting capabilities into promising growth areas such as financial services. Just as with the c-business certification program, Braxton wanted to be able to train employees quickly and efficiently, without having to remove them from assignments for the training.

After winning executive approval, a new centralized training and development department wasn't far behind. First dubbed Learning-Edge (now called Braxton Learning), it made training more efficient and incorporated a growing volume of computer-based learning. Van Dam's group set about developing e-learning courses in numerous areas such as SAP systems implementation, business ethics, and even instruction for employees on how to fill out a new timesheet. With less need for classroom instructors, the company let go half of its training staff and hired instructional designers, systems administrators, and other e-learning experts in their place. Today, virtually all training and education programs that aren't provided externally are developed by a group of 40 employees in the company's three global learning groups: Markets and Services, Design, and Learning Technologies and Infrastructures. The workflow in those groups is analogous to an agency model, in which Markets and Services employees works as "account manag ers" for internal industry and service area groups to create goals for particular courses.