Roundtable participants earmarked e-learning as a critical training tool in a cost-conscious business climate. A smaller workforce means that productivity has to be maintained by limiting the time that employees are away from their jobs. This makes e-learning development a more efficient method of training. One participant commented that e-learning has allowed for much quicker deployment and can be developed and implemented effectively and efficiently by a “leaner and meaner” training team.

To minimize the cost of ownership and reduce the pain of multiple integrations, middleware technology can be introduced. This “broker” system can act as a go-between the portals and the multiple applications that serve as data repositories. So any changes in the applications would be detected by the middleware and communicated to the portal. This process simplifies the number of validations and change points between systems and significantly reduces the cost of the technology over time.

At first glance, modifying processes to fit the LMS seems counter intuitive, but it is critical to controlling the cost of your learning systems. The cost of customizing adds up very quickly and tends to be a recurring cost as software upgrades are made. The message here is to centralize LMS services and modify the business processes and reserve customization for only critical long-term enhancements.

Reducing the cost of a typical customization frees up the training dollars to spend on enhancing processes. In the long run, this is a much better approach. The typical LMS is designed for more efficient operations, so patterning your processes after the LMS is usually the right way to improve training efficiency and reduce the recurring cost of customizations.

When organizations have a decentralized learning set-up– that is, when business units autonomously manage learning — these functions are often duplicated. For instance, various business units would likely have their own learning administrative staffs, handle their own class registrations and reports. The positive side of a decentralized approach to training is that business units have complete control over employee learning and can customize all aspects of learning to the specific needs of their employees.

The downside of decentralization is that it is rife with inefficiencies. Technology purchases are duplicated and staffing is often redundant. Integration efforts can be lengthier and more costly because of a lack of standardization. When a learning BPO service provider initially obtains a company’s business, the typical first response is to centralize as many commonly used functions as possible in order to eliminate duplication of tasks. This does usually result in immediate cost savings but it does not account for the need for different business processes.

Our recent survey on LMSs also showed significant challenges. More than half of the survey respondents (About 55%) expressed that LMS customization was their top LMS challenge. Integration was next highest. Almost 40% of respondents said their companies did not use the latest versions of their installed LMS. Reasons for not upgrading included lack of budget (38%), impact on previous customization work (32%), uncertainty about version stability (32%), and lack of technical resources (25%).

Why the problems? Are they part of the package, so to speak?

Not necessarily so! But, avoiding major problems does require some upfront thought and a realistic perspective.

Work on LMSs whether an implementation, an upgrade, or a consolidation requires in-depth technical expertise with both the LMS application as well as a wide range of other applications, tools, and content. Even if your LMS is a stand-alone application today, we can assure that you’ll want integration in the future.

We’ve found that most companies require LMS customization whether the LMS is hosted or installed behind a corporate firewall in order to achieve the promised benefits of the application. Most companies simply do not have the technical resources for such work despite what their IT teams may tell them. And LMS projects are too important for them to be viewed as training projects.

Anyone who touches your LMS application also should have what we call domain expertise, a thorough understanding of corporate learning and its best practices. For instance, if you implement an LMS based solely on your current needs, you’ll likely find yourself trapped and limited within the next year or so. Though there’s no need to over-engineer, it is highly essential to consider likely future needs and de facto standards for corporate training.

LMSs are highly sophisticated applications that offer great value if you handle them with care. If you’ve got questions about the direction you’re taking on an LMS-related project, contact us. We’d be happy to offer an objective and practical perspective.

And the third is use corporate social learning as a natural adjunct and follow-on to more formal methods, a very cost-effective approach that enables organizations to squeeze more knowledge and value out of the learning continuum. Lastly, a simple Google search really is informal learning. Your Learning Management System or Learning Portal should have the ability to do federated searches. If a student is searching for a class, they should also have the ability to find other resources that might save them a day of training and get the knowledge they need quicker.

For more information log on to http://www.expertus.com/.

www.trainingefficiency.com

Our most important recommendation for getting the most value out of your training budget is to focus on managing your training organization like a business.

This could be done by knowing your training organization’s core competency, and your true value to the company as a whole. If you don’t add value through training administration or application management, then it would be apt to shed that work or find ways of streamlining it. Apart from these two areas, training content development is one other area of this kind- typically these are the best areas for improving efficiency and offloading responsibilities.

Our research revealed that the average cost of administering a training program is around 40% of a total training budget. Streamlining or shedding some of these responsibilities allows you to redeploy a percentage of your training budget to more important and valuable services like training delivery and content development, which helps you, obtain a greater ROI. Business process reengineering and outsourcing helps your training organization operate in a more strategic way. This is done by allowing you to focus on designing and delivering learning initiatives that have direct impact on your company’s   performance improvement and competitive position.

During this slow economy and financial crunch it is also important to market your training programs. Building a training program alone will not help in getting higher learner enrollment. This is especially true if you’re shifting from ILT to more cost-effective models such as e-learning development. This is a cultural shift and requires internal marketing to achieve a reasonable adoption rate.

To learn more about this concept and to learn how to eliminate training waste, download our white paper.

If you need to know how to increase the training efficiency of your learning organization, feel free to contact me.

How do learning executives balance spending and results? In a recent study by Training Industry, Inc. and Expertus, half of training executives said that one of their top challenges when it comes to learning measurement is data accuracy and standardization. The effectiveness with which the training money is spent and the efficiency of the training organization is in doubt if this is not resolved.

Organizing the training operations and processes which results in a uniformity in data management is the solution to this.

The biggest enemy of data standardization is distributed training administration, which is notoriously inefficient and inaccurate. That’s because there are multiple people in multiple groups completing the same tasks, but doing it in multiple ways. Various groups within an organization have differences in their processes and procedures, such as registration requirements or course descriptions. Often these process differences are driven by structures or challenges within their skill sets or a lack of bandwidth. The issues that crop up as a result of this can be very costly, both in the short and long term.

For example the process of uploading courses into an LMS. If an organization has various people doing the task, they generally use their own course-naming schemes and their own course descriptions. The result is that it’s difficult for users to find the training they need and managers don’t know what courses to assign to their employees. This acts as a serious obstacle to auto-enrollment and competency management and training utilization stays at a low level.

By centralizing this service, an organization can protect each group or department’s unique needs, while standardizing the important aspects of each of these individual processes and improve resource utilization.

To learn more about this concept and to learn the other 8 ways to eliminate training waste, download the white paper.

If you need advice on how to increase the efficiency of your training organization, feel free to contact me.

It’s clear in this age of the Internet that anything a training organization is doing online is better than anything it does offline. Accessing a learning management system (LMS) in real time through a Website or portal is by far the easiest way. Studies have clearly shown that it’s inadvisable for customer trainees to access the LMS directly. That’s because most LMSs are usually very cumbersome and difficult for people who aren’t experts in using it. Improving the effectiveness of learning portals or Websites is not that difficult. The one key that’s probably more important than anything else on the site is that it isn’t about the colors, it isn’t about the content that’s there—it’s about search functionality. It’s important that customers with questions can quickly and easily find the answer—and not to the first page of a 30-page white paper, or the beginning of a video. Can the customer seeking knowledge search the white paper, the video, the audio, the slides, the classroom materials and whatever else by using one federated search engine? It’s vitally important to focus on the user experience. LMSs aren’t really geared to this, so organizations have to find a better way. Relying on the IT organization to build something is one approach, but training organizations typically are not the principal concern of IT staffs. The best way to do this is by focusing on search and the user experience. And the best way to do that is by learning portal development that takes these issues into account.

If your organization is thinking about developing a learning portal or if you are interested in increasing the training efficiency of your learning organization, feel free to contact me.

]]> http://mohana1.wordpress.com/2009/03/09/fast-track-your-training-programs-with-customer-training-portals/feed/ 0 mohana1 http://mohana1.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/multiple-advantages-of-developing-a-learning-portal/ http://mohana1.wordpress.com/2009/02/27/multiple-advantages-of-developing-a-learning-portal/#comments Fri, 27 Feb 2009 07:12:34 +0000 mohana1 http://mohana1.wordpress.com/?p=51 ]]> To achieve effectiveness in the learning organizations it is quite important to move further than just managing training delivery and controlling the cost of learning activities. As technology is becoming a huge part of the learning experience it’s vital to achieve a high rate of LMS adoption – and that requires a user-centered learning portal or website, that creates learning 2.0 destinations that fits the interest of specific learner segments.

When implementing an LMS, most training managers say their most important objective is to deploy and measure training and increase user return visits. On the other hand, in reality, most LMSs are too cumbersome for the typical learner. The best solution is delivering information in the flavor, format and context that appeal to younger audiences for whom training is often designed. This can be done by developing a learning portal that acts as a front end to your LMS, offering the relevance, immediacy and usability of a Web 2.0 website.

Apart from increasing user friendliness, learning portals tender other advantages. Portal technology means reduced support load on your IT staff, and decreased cost of ownership for the business.

A portal provides multiple advantages for multiple users of the system. It improves the user interface of the system at the front end, while providing administrators maintain a high degree of control at the backend. Though the goal is not to provide everyone with all information, it is to make the right information more accessible, when and where it’s needed. Even for a centralized learning system, it’s imperative to adopt a role-based approach to user access. This allows for capabilities such as informal learning, thus fulfilling the objectives of the organizations and the training managers.

In recent discussions with leading CLOs and Training Directors, Expertus asked, ‘What are the top learning challenges when you don’t have a learning system portal?’ The answers ranged from poor usability, inefficient search capability, unfriendly user interface, slow registrations, and sporadic customer training (check for the case for customer training portal development), to expensive and unnecessary customizations.

One important frequent response was the need for learning organizations to cater to new modes of learning delivery and informal or corporate social learning.

To learn more about this concept and to learn 6 ways to unlock the value of your learning technology, download the white paper.

If you need advice on how to increase the training efficiency of your learning organization, feel free to contact me.