Getting IT Support for E-Learning - forging alliance with information technology depart

Training & Development, Dec, 2000 by Tom Barron

IT makes a vital ally in the push for e-learning. But same trainers are going the extra mile and becoming IT experts in their own right.

Getting the attention of information technology executives these days isn't easy. They're neck deep in e-business initiatives and face a daily onslaught of requests from various departments, line managers, and CEOs for new services and capabilities. Unless e-learning excites the top brass--or IT executives themselves--training managers are often told to take a number and get in line.

Even if the top decision makers are tempted by e-learning's various promises, they may not see their own training departments as a key player in leveraging those promises. In some cases, executives turn to IT--not the training staff--to pursue e-learning.

What are training professionals doing about that affront? Many are realizing the value of developing a relationship with in-house IT staff that synchronizes their desire for scalable e-learning with the capabilities--and clout--that their IT people can provide. In some cases, it's a matter of building on a solid foundation of past collaboration and positive initial uses of e-learning to train IT staff; in others, it's more about extending an olive branch or rebounding from earlier e-learning disappointments. Working with IT staff, trainers can knock on executive suite doors, armed with arguments around scalability, consistency, and efficiency (three words executives are particularly fond of) together with IT's input on the feasibility and impact of e-learning on an organization's IT infrastructure.

Of course, many trainers who have witnessed the field's migration to electronic delivery have taken the initiative to learn the technology ropes firsthand. A growing number have moved from standup instruction roles to become e-learning-content developers, and to boast skill sets and titles that reflect their growing IT savvy. With their combination of education and e-learning development skills, these folks are uniquely suited to make the case for e-learning investments, say some industry consultants.

Another option for shifting to e-learning has become increasingly popular, particularly among mid-size and smaller businesses: external hosting of e-learning through vendors or third-party ASPs. For training managers who win support from the top for e-learning and have either a mandate for fast implementation or an IT department that is overwhelmed with other projects, external hosting is a viable answer. It's also a way around irreconcilable differences.

One obvious reason to woo IT executives toward e-learning is that they have significant sway in corporate technology decisions.

"While trainers were busy checking out all the possibilities for e-learning in the past year, IT people were being promoted," says Ed Mayberry, a training and e-learning consultant. Mayberry, author of a Learning Circuits article last January on strategies for partnering with IT, says IT staff have reasons of their own to pursue partnering. "Failure to do so could lead to wholesale outsourcing of both departments," he writes in a companion to this article that provides pointers for partnering. (See sidebar on page 36.)

Another reason to tighten the bond with IT is that IT people are among the most seasoned and enthusiastic of e-learners, with the majority of e-learning offerings still centered on IT skills. Capitalizing on technical staff's desire for e-learning, while demonstrating the growing opportunities for broader business skills e-learning offers the rest of the organization, can make a powerful argument, particularly given technology's low recurring costs once an infrastructure is in place.

Following are vignettes on how in-house trainers in four separate organizations are grappling with their "significant others" in IT.

Long-term commitment

Chuck Kater has been in the training field long enough to remember tinkering with Plato, among the earliest commercial CBT authoring tools. As such, he has a wizened perspective on training's migration to technology-delivered approaches and the sometimes stormy relationship with IT staff it has spawned. His 1980s-era dabblings with early CBT iterations convinced Kater, now the director of educational technology for a subsidiary of a Fortune 500 consumer products manufacturer, that a new era was at hand. But by the early 1990s, Kater recalls, conflict between training and IT departments was frequent and inevitable.

"Back then, network infrastructures were projected out five to 10 years without any knowledge that the training department would want to use any of those resources. We just sort of sprung up in front of IT--not just in my company, but across the industry."

Kater believed even then that IT experts were necessary partners in the drive toward e-learning and sought to build a relationship with IT staff. That included learning about the infrastructure needed to support the technologies of the day, which evolved from text-based CBT to multimedia content stored on CD-ROM. But each new technology brought new conflicts. When CD-ROMs took hold, for instance, his IT department--and many others-- raised hell over the prospect of employees loading their own software on company computers, which could foul network settings. The solution brokered by Kater was to design training's CD-based content to run without installing any components.