8 lessons about e-learning from 5 organizations: this summary of Gold's five-part series of case studies on enterprise-wide e-learning captures the crucial and often hard-earned lessons

T+D, August, 2003 by Martha Gold

"Training has a direct effect on customer satisfaction with Lucent's products and solutions," says David Roller, senior manager of delivery platforms for the information products and training organization. "It also influences associates' proficiency to sell and service the products."

Lesson 7

Don't attempt to go it alone; get buy-in from upper management.

Within a three-year time span, Deloitte Consulting's training organization transformed from a series of separate, discrete, and predominantly classroom-based departments into a unified organization that provides 85 percent of its training electronically. One key factor that enabled the firm to execute an extensive overhaul of its training organization so quickly was support from top management. Such support means more than approval for funding an enterprise-wide e-learning initiative. In the case of Deloitte Consulting, the support didn't begin or end with an executive's sign off. CEO Doug McCracken was involved from the beginning in the implementation when in 1999, he announced that the company needed to expand its business lines into new Web technology to stay competitive. That required training thousands of employees within months, a feat that required Deloitte to expand its e-learning network and begin implementing an enterprise-wide system.

Van Dam said his team got top management's support by working with a group of the firm's directors. "We talked to them about what we were doing with education and training and the business challenges," says van Dam. "That helped get buy-in. The CEO said as an outcome that we wanted to have a more centralized training function. We still encounter resistance, but now have a mandare."

Lesson 8

Good things come in small packages: chunking,

The Internal Revenue Service has developed a metadata tagging schema that will make information available throughout the organization and eventually the federal government--an effort that could save a lot of money on content and provide a valuable information resource to federal employees.

"We're investing significantly in acquiring new content, and we want to maximize that investment so that it has broad use," says Wydeven. "One way to ensure that is to design the content so it can be picked up in small chunks as well as by entire instructional products, depending on the needs of the business unit that's calling for that product."

As the amount of rime people have to spend in class decreases, the popularity of offering information in smaller portions, or chunking, grows. Instead of making employees sit through a real-time or virtual class for valuable information, more companies are focusing their content development on breaking down information into quickly consumable units and tagging them so that they can be found quickly via a keyword search. Chunking won't completely eliminate classes, but it will make important information more readily available and enable companies to work at the rapidly increasing speed of business, which is the whole point of e-learning.