Before you buy… an e-learning system, think enterprise wide

T+D, July, 2002 by Paul Sparta

I sympathize with modern learning executives. In addition to handling traditional concerns such as recruitment and retention, they must incorporate into their working knowledge the technical expertise of a chief information officer, the long-term vision of a strategic planner, and a comprehensive understanding of every department in the organization.

Training is where those demands intersect. Due to the increase of e-learning as a tool for delivering training, training executives face difficult decisions: What e-learning system should the organization buy? What content should run on it? Which employees should use it for training? What systems can integrate with it? As if finding answers to those questions isn't hard enough, training purchasers also have to deal with hundreds of smiling, promise-making vendors.

If you're lucky enough to work at a company with a chief learning officer in charge of large-scale training efforts, maybe you can skip reading this article. But if not, I urge you to keep reading. I suggest that you think of e-learning as a powerful enterprise asset that you can weave throughout your organization. I assure you, your CEO thinks this way.

More to it than you think

E-learning analysts and trend spotters have of late rhapsodized about the powers of multimedia simulations and courseware. As they say, "Content is king." Content is definitely sexier than infrastructure, but instead of worrying about what's king, you'd better think about the welfare of the whole kingdom. The success or failure of your online training and learning management effort is embedded in its implementation plan. That plan should rise from a thorough understanding of your company needs. For that reason, consider the entire enterprise when making e-learning decisions.

Think about it: Who would want an HR information system, for example, that dealt only with payroll and not benefits? Or one that excluded employees from a particular department? By its nature, an HRIS is an enterprise-wide application with mandated participation, if not ownership, by the CIO. Companies buy such systems to provide an automated infrastructure that covers several functions and cuts across all corporate levels.

But too often, that cover-the-enterprise principle isn't applied to training or learning and knowledge management. Many organizations invest in a learning management system primarily to achieve their bread-and-butter organizational development goals: hone managers leadership skills, help new employees understand the company culture, and teach tools with corporate-wide appeal, such as spreadsheets, word processing, and email. Typically, those courses move to the forefront of an e-learning program when the companywide LMS is mistakenly thought to house companywide skills.

IT trainers, energized by the huge range of online courses dedicated to IT, ask to be included on the LMS. But that's where the "corporate-wide" participation ends. You end up with an LMS that trains on how to run Excel and Word and write performance reviews, and includes information on benefits and employee orientation. The only job-specific content deals with Oracle databases or Cisco routers. For a considerable sum of money, you've installed a centralized e-learning system that serves only about 20 percent of your company's training and learning management needs.

The specialized training trap

Other departments that can profit from an LMS include sales, customer service, manufacturing, quality control, regulatory compliance, and outside customers using an extranet. Those segments are thought of as "specialized"; therefore, they often fall off of training's corporate-wide radar.

Such errant implementation planning causes those in charge to aim the LMS at the wrong target. They haven't conceived of the LMS as an enterprise-wide infrastructure asset that can permeate every department and improve the performance of every employee.

When an LMS is designed and implemented with limited scope, that sets the stage for trouble:

* A training director in manufacturing can easily access management development courses from any branch office, but has no online training to offer his or her people. So, the training director procures a separate LMS to handle the required standard operating procedure documents for the department.

* The head of customer service decides to acquire a learning system that alerts call center employees for training when they drop too many customer calls. Unfortunately, the manufacturing system and the customer service system don't communicate with each other.

* A company's underpowered LMS meets the demands of a narrow, content-shallow platform adequately, but it explodes when retrofitted as a true enterprise system.

Such learning systems get built because it's shockingly easy to build an LMS that seems effective. With US$50,000, you can design a decent approximation of a Web-based learning system that handles registration, offers a course catalogue, and runs basic content over an ASP Internet connection. But when you need to manage thousands of employees simultaneously or integrate with other complex software applications (such as PeopleSoft www.peoplesoft.com or Documentum www. documentum.com), look out You'll end up writing the old LMS off as a loss and investing in a more holistic LMS approach.