Banking on enterprise e-learning: Part 5 in this series tells how PNC Bank made the most of its learning management system to up-skill employees through a competence manager application. The summary follows

T+D, August, 2003 by Martha Gold

"The system has materials that it will send by request, hosts discussion workshops on the material, and offers access to learning objects," says Hellman.

"The learning objects are available through a leadership development link to people interested in advancing."

Choosing the right LMS

Rather than add another e-learning program to train branch employees, the bank chose to centralize training into one system. That required purchasing an LMS that would work with the company's registration and tracking system to monitor registrations and course completions, as well as disperse courseware. As it turned out, Pathlore had just merged with the company that designed PNC's registration and tracking system, Silton Bookman Systems, when the bank began its search.

"We didn't have to change our tracking and registration software, which was always set on top of our HR system," says Dickerson. [The Sihon-Bookman] merger wasn't a deciding factor, but it put a checkmark in the plus column."

With the LMS slated to serve nearly all of the bank's 11,000 employees, Leininger and his team enlisted help for the selection process from different departments to ensure that they got a good deal and selected a system that would work with the bank's infrastructure. The LMS selection team included the IT department, which guided the group on the technical compatibility of different models. The purchasing and legal departments helped with contract negotiations, finance worked out a budget, and marketing came up with a campaign to lure users to the LMS.

The next step was to put out a search for the best vendor candidates. The company sent out 21 RFPs. From those responses, it invited 11 companies to give presentations at the bank. From the 11 presentations, the selection committee chose four finalists. Committee members visited each finalist at its facilities and invited all back to the bank to go over the RFPs page by page.

"It was helpful because we found out during those meetings that some of the things we thought came with the package turned out to be extras," says Dickerson. The team eventually settled on Pathlore, a decision based in large part on its final presentation. "Pathlore came in well prepared and eager for our business; the other candidates came in with various degrees of preparedness."

Don't assume

RCB groups its operations into four territories: Cincinnati-Louisville, Northern New Jersey, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia-South Jersey. With new systems to implement at more than 700 locations, the bank chose to roll out the new technology one territory at a time. Once the system was installed, employees, as many as 6000 or more at a time, would take a combined online and instructor-led course. To ease them into the new system, the new hardware was installed next to the old hardware, and the old and new systems were run simultaneously.

"Employees took the first course for navigating through the new Genesis software online," says Dickerson. "After that, they had a day of training at a class in a computer room." Following the classroom instruction, employees were tested using an online simulation of what they'd learned. It took six months to implement the LMS and about nine months to roll out the first phase of the Genesis software, a process that wasn't without glitches.