Author: Sarah Fister Gale

Early in 2008, American soldiers training Afghan and Iraqi armies were having problems using a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. The equipment was old and had a tendency to jam, misfire and explode prematurely.

Frustrated, a unit commander posted a question to one of the U.S. Army’s communities of practice, which are online forums where soldiers ask questions and share ideas with peers around the world.

“Within a few days, someone who’d had a similar experience with the launcher posted a simple solution to the site on how to safely prevent misfiring,” says Mike Prevou, president and co-founder of Strategic Knowledge Solutions and senior knowledge management advisor to the Army in Leavenworth, Kansas.

The solution worked, and when the unit commander followed up to discuss his experiences, the issue became a hot topic in the community. The conversation thread was soon picked up by the Army’s safety commander, who issued a formal safety policy on how to deal with the rocket launcher’s safety issues that was sent out to all the units using this equipment. And it all took place within 15 days of the original post.

“Without the community, those soldiers may never have found a solution to their problem, and they probably would have just put the equipment away,” Prevou says.

Communities of practice aren’t just valuable for military personnel. They are becoming vital corporate tools that allow employees with similar jobs or interests to get advice and share best practices.

“Communities of practice are a super-fast way for users to produce and share content,” says Eric Suave, CEO and co-founder of Tomoye, a collaboration software vendor in Ottawa. Prevou uses Tomoye’s technology to build the Army’s communities. “It’s a more responsive way to share information when it’s needed that allows organizations to collect ideas for formal training.”

That capturing of knowledge is critical for organizations that need to tap into the expertise of a far-flung employee population, such as the Army. It’s also an important issue for organizations with aging employee populations who might soon retire, taking with them important but informal knowledge about processes, customers or corporate culture.

“Both groups can work in concert,” Suave says. “On one side you have fast dissemination of information; on the other you have long-term planning that can draw on what people are talking about and turn it into policies and core content.”

This combined value is why communities of practice are cropping up in organizations around the world. They link globally dispersed workers who can serve as mentors to each other and share knowledge in an informal setting.

“Most companies spend 80 percent of their training budgets on formal learning events, yet 80 percent of what people learn is on the job,” says Charles Coy, director of product marketing for Cornerstone On Demand, a talent management solutions company in Santa Monica, California.

Communities of practice can fill in that gap, connecting not only people in spread-out business units but also those who have similar titles but don’t get the opportunity to network as often as they’d like.

“They offer informal networking venues, while giving trainers a way to guide conversations, identify issues and capture knowledge,” Coy says.

A test drive at Subaru
Darryl Draper, national customer relations and loyalty training manager for Subaru in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, is writing her dissertation on the value of communities of practice as a learning tool. As part of her work, she launched a test program with Subaru dealers in her region. Half of the dealers completed an online self-paced course that featured no interaction with other students. The second group used identical content, but it was placed in a forum where course questions that included real-life customer scenarios could be discussed.

At the end of the training, dealers in both groups were asked about the information they had learned, and whether they thought about these skills in a different way. Then Draper tracked improvements in customer satisfaction surveys following the course. The course that included interaction and discussion came out on top.

“The data on the customer satisfaction surveys was statistically significant,” she says. “It showed that the community of practice worked.”

Draper is quick to point out that communities shouldn’t replace formal training. Rather, they should enhance training, Draper says. “Formal courses cover explicit knowledge with textbooks and facts, while the community covers implicit knowledge—that unspoken expertise that is the difference between novices and experts.”

Implicit knowledge is much harder to tap and track, because it’s unspoken. “Experts perfect their performance in ways they may not realize,” Draper says. “But through sharing and conversations, that knowledge comes out.”

How to make it work
Launching a successful community of practice, however, is not as simple as throwing a discussion forum on your network and assuming people will take advantage of it, says Coy. “It’s got to be integrated into what employees are already using the network for, and it’s got to be contextually relevant,” he says.

There are many tricks to creating environments that will attract people and will make them want to return for advice, conversation and knowledge-sharing.

Prevou says communities must be built out from the middle and networked out. “You have to find a midlevel leader or a core expert to drive the project and inspire people to use it,” he says.

It also needs to be nurtured and facilitated, Draper says. If there is a lull in the conversation, for example, she’ll ask provocative questions. If a question goes unanswered, she will privately e-mail key experts within the group asking them to respond.

“There has to be a champion who takes the lead for a community to be sustainable,” she says.

Prevou agrees. The Army currently runs 25 major communities of practice, and 90 minor ones, under four categories: leadership, functional, special forums and units. The major communities have dedicated facilitators who track and manage the day-to-day conversations, invite users to participate and market the communities through newsletters, e-mail alerts and formal user training.

To bring in new users, the Army posts its new-soldier material, such as rules and regulations, within the forums so new members have to learn how to use it as part of their training.

Prevou notes that this is not simply a tactic to get more users. Instead, he sees it as an effective way to get new people up to speed on what’s going on in the organization.

“When you are new in a company, you aren’t going to go to your boss and say, ‘Tell me about all of the issues you’ve dealt with in the last year,’ ” Prevou says. “But in the community you can see what people have been talking about. It’s like being able to listen in on everyone’s conversation for the last six months.”

Another way to engage users is to launch a community in conjunction with core training courses, suggests Coy. “That way you build a conversation around a specific topic and encourage users to share problems and network before and after the course,” he says.

Organizations also can make the community part of the course by posting questions at the site before class, or using it as a homework assignment, Prevou says. In one of his earliest communities, Prevou assigned students in an officer training course to ask their peers in Iraq and Afghanistan to share with the community the two biggest challenges they face, then to bring those responses back to class.

“It started us talking about what those soldiers should consider and generating ideas and solutions for them,” he says, noting his students brought those solutions back to their peers in the community. “It built a tremendous link between them and everyone benefited.”

Benefit is a key to keeping a community alive. “Communities have to be reciprocal. It’s got to be a place where if people put something out there, they know they will get something in return,” Prevou says. “When someone gets an answer to a question, it begins to build that trust.”

The communities have to be “sticky,” or created in such a way that users come often, and stay awhile, Suave says. “It’s got to be easy to use and designed for engagement.”

That sense of engagement can be built by sending e-mails when a new topic is posted, or when someone has received a response to their question. Engagement can be fostered by having multiple ways to respond and use content, such as simple one-click bookmarking, and easy posting of documents, images or videos.

Draper warns that a community shouldn’t be all business. “To instill a sense of community, you have to incorporate personal stuff into the conversation,” she says. For example, she posts photos of dealer events and anniversary parties to spur conversations and highlight key employees.

“All of this translates into community-building among peers who might otherwise never connect,” she says.

Draper discovered just how powerful that relationship-building was when she attended a community member’s Halloween event—a car-decorating party for customers.

“I got there and found people from competitive dealerships who’d come to support her,” Draper marvels. “That’s the power of communities. It exploded outside customer-service training to all parts of the dealership.”

There are pockets of excellence everywhere in organizations, Prevou says. “Communities of practice are a tool to tap into that excellence. It’s a way to share knowledge and build networks among people who might otherwise never connect.”

A young woman walks into a trendy restaurant on a busy city corner. She sets down a purse and leaves. Moments later a bomb explodes. The restaurant in engulfed in flames, people are screaming and hurt.

Fire trucks and police cars quickly arrive, and working together the emergency responders rescue patrons, perform triage on the injured and put out the flames.

This isn’t news footage. It’s just one of many emergency-response training scenarios developed by the team atPlay2Train, a virtual training environment that operates in the online world called Second Life. The training scenarios support emergency response training initiatives as part of the Idaho Bioterrorism Awareness and Preparedness Program.

In the virtual world, which includes a town and two hospitals, trainees meet in 3-D interactive virtual environments and participate in educational projects relevant to health care and emergency preparedness. They participate virtually and remotely in scenarios that may include terrorist attacks, flu pandemics or other disasters in which they are expected to jump in, in character, and respond as the event takes place.

Participants may be located all over the country or they may be sitting at separate computers in the same facility. Regardless of their location, they all interact in real time and are expected to work together as a team responding without scripts. If they don’t react to what’s going on in the simulation, characters die and other team members are directly affected by their choices.

“This training is all about collaboration and decision making. It allows trainers to see how people establish teams, develop systems, and how they will react in different environments,” says Ramesh Ramloll, director of Play2Train. “It’s not just what they’d do ‘in theory.’ They are responding to actual situations.”

This kind of collaborative real-time virtual training is gaining popularity for many different learning applications, particularly those in which the trainee is making on-the-job decisions that can have serious, and even life-threatening, consequences. In addition to teaching critical knowledge in a classroom or online training modules, these engaging collaborative environments force employees to apply their knowledge in real-world, team-based simulations.

“We find the level of participation is much higher in a collaborative environment where trainees can see the impact of their decisions,” Ramloll says. “In a classroom it’s easy to opt out, but if you don’t stay engaged in this type of training, you fail.”

Jessica Trybus, CEO of Etcetera Edutainment, a virtual learning development company in Pittsburgh, agrees. “When you really need someone to retain information, they need to participate in role playing where they can make choices and see the consequences of their actions,” she says.

More than flash
Building collaboration and interactivity into virtual training is the ultimate goal of most online learning, but too often trainers settle for minimal click-and-read engagement with the content. Power Point-based training modules may include Flash elements and quizzes with feedback, but it’s hardly an engaging learning scenario, Trybus says.

“That format may be good for some training needs, but it’s still passive learning in a vacuum,” she says. “You need something to bridge that gap.”

Trybus points to a virtual learning environment called Safe Dock, which her company built to train forklift operators at Alcoa, the Pittsburgh-based global producer of fabricated aluminum. In the virtual training environment, employees must check their equipment prior to use and operate the forklift to perform common tasks, such as moving loads from one end of the loading area to the other. A wrong move may result in a forklift driving off the end of the dock or crashing into another employee.

“It’s never the same scenario twice,” says Jamie Mackay, environmental health and safety talent manager for Alcoa. “To successfully complete the course, the trainees have to engage with what is happening in the simulation or it will stop. It forces them to get involved.”

And that, she says, is a critical component of safety training. “You don’t get that kind of participation in a classroom,” Mackay says. “The simulation is a way to immerse them in a workplace environment without having to schedule time on the dock for training. They can make mistakes in the simulation and not hurt anyone.”

Exposing employees to hazards before they perform them on the job reduces risks in the workplace, because they’ve had a chance to practice before taking control of dangerous equipment, she notes. “This is the best of both worlds—it’s hands-on training in a safe environment.”

Alcoa has had the training module for a year, and it’s been a success with younger workers, although Mackay admits it’s a tougher sell for older ones. “The older generation is intimidated by simulation and that’s a hurdle,” she says. “We have to teach them first how to use the computer and get them comfortable with it.”

Despite that hurdle, Mackay is confident this format for virtual hands-on safety training will become the norm for future generations of Alcoa employees, who will have grown up using virtual gaming environments.

“The incoming workforce is likely to change jobs five to 10 times over their careers. That level of turnover creates high demand for training,” she says. “If we are going to be able to train the workforce of the future, we need to start developing more of these kinds of meaningful simulations that can be available on demand.”

Raise your hand
While complex 3-D environments have their place in some training contexts, virtual training doesn’t have to involve computer-generated real-life scenarios to be effective. Many trainers are finding benefits from bringing dispersed employees together in online environments where they can easily interact with one another to discuss everyday training topics and best practices such as sales skills. The environments also have academic applications.

The key, however, is making the virtual environment feel real, says Remy Malan, vice president of Qwaq, a creator of virtual environments for business applications. The company is based in Palo Alto, California.

Unlike videoconferencing or electronic white boards, Qwaq builds environments in which participants interact with one another. Using avatars to represent themselves, they can move about in the virtual space, gesture, point to objects in the room, and talk to one another using visual and verbal cues. When users click on objects using their mouse, for example, the item will light up, indicating to others in the room what they are looking at.

“This enables people to speak more naturally because the context is evident,” notes Malan. “They can say, ‘What do you think of this?’ and everyone will know what ‘this’ is referring to.”

Part of the success of this type of training environment is the fact that everyone who is participating can see what others are doing. If a trainee sits motionless on the side of the “room,” others will see that he has checked out. “It’s much clearer how engaged people are. You can’t just click on a mute button and do something else,” Malan says.

Dick Riedl, chairman of the Department of Leadership and Educational Studies at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, has been using the Qwaq environment for 18 months to teach distance courses, and he finds that it helps his students connect with one another despite their remote locations.

“Our program stresses collaboration and working together, even though a large part of the course is conducted online,” he says. “The Qwaq environment lends itself to a more collaborative experience.”

However, Riedl is quick to point out that these learning environments are only as good as the training that is conducted within them. “No learning has value until it’s put into a social or work context,” he says. “The training activity can’t just pass information along; you have to use the information and engage others to create experiences that are relevant to the user.”

Enabling students to interact while perusing course content makes the courses more engaging and sparks network building, Riedl says, noting that his students take advantage of a course “common room” where they can access materials, meet with peers and share best practices. The space is open to current and former students, so that experiences can be shared beyond the boundaries of the class-time experience.

“In the workplace, employees in the same office continue to communicate with each other, even after a classroom course is over,” Riedl points out. “If you provide that kind of environment online where people can go back anytime, you can have that same kind of interactivity even with employees who are located remotely.”

And that leads to an ongoing, richer learning experience. “It’s not just what happens in class that matters; it’s about continuous growth,” Riedl says. “If a chance interaction gets workers talking about a problem, you develop a continuous spread of knowledge among employees, and that benefits the entire organization.”

While many companies may be skeptical of the value of open-source or free downloadable software systems, Moodle, a learning management system, is proving that high value doesn’t necessarily correlate to high price. Moodle was created by a developer in Perth, Australia, and over the past several years has developed an almost cult-like following. It currently has more than a half-million users and developers who blog daily at Moodle.org about how they use it and how they can improve it. They also share best practices from around the world.

While Moodle’s foundations are planted firmly in academic use, more and more of its users are coming from the corporate world, and not just from startups. The software, which can be downloaded free onto any computer and can scale from one to 200,000 users, is now being used in global organizations, including Subaru and Cisco, as a platform for training and for building communities of knowledge to share best practices and collect corporate information for future training programs.

“A year ago most companies using Moodle were in the smaller scale,” says Jason Cole, author of the book Using Moodle and chief learning officer for Remote-Learner, a Moodle hosting partner in Denver. “Not anymore. Today there is an enormous range, from mom and pop shops to mega-companies using Moodle to create and manage course content.”

Subaru dealers bond via Moodle
    Automotive manufacturer Subaru is one large company that has embraced the open-source tool for training management. Darryl Draper, a national customer relationship and loyalty training manager for Subaru of America in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, delivers and tracks customer service training courses for more than 600 Subaru dealerships across the country using Moodle.

Face-to-face training in an industry where 300 percent turnover rates are not uncommon had become too much for Draper, and Moodle offered an alternative. “There were some markets where as soon as I finished training I’d have to go back again,” she says. “It was all reactive. I had no time to develop a strategic training plan.”

Instead she opted to develop online course content and deliver it to dealers via the company’s intranet. Subaru had been using another LMS package to track some course content, but it wasn’t flexible enough to do what Draper needed. “I wanted robust training where dealers could collaborate,” she says of her quest to find a new e-learning management system.

Moodle, with its open-source platform, gave her that flexibility. Using the software, which she hosts through Remote-Learner, she developed two versions of each course, giving users self-paced options with content and tests, as well as developing interactive communities of practice within the Moodle platform. In the communities, trainees have a place to study the course material while sharing ideas and questions with other users.

“The dealers love the communities,” she says. “They talk, and share information and develop best practices. There are a lot of robust dialogs taking place in those forums.”

Draper monitors the forums to make sure conversations stay on track and to collect questions and responses that she thinks will be valuable to other users, which she stores in wikis or glossaries at a separate internal Moodle site.

“We have a lot of executives who will retire soon and they have valuable knowledge,” she says. “The Moodle communities let us gather their best practices into a knowledge database.”

Cisco supports entrepreneurs
    Cisco, the global manufacturer of networking solutions, uses Moodle for its Entrepreneur Institute, which partners with organizations and governments to use Web 2.0 tools to deliver entrepreneur education and business planning skills. Cisco uses the LMS to offer self-paced courses, assessments, and registration options to users around the world, from students in Latin America to nonprofit groups in the EU.

“We wanted an open-source tool because the institute is a free program, and it’s in line with our community approach,” says Vito Amato, solutions architect for Cisco in Scottsdale, Arizona. “We also wanted to use something that our customers can replicate for their own businesses.”

Amato also likes the way Moodle integrates seamlessly with other systems, such as Salesforce.com and WebEx, and that it is available in dozens of languages right out of the box. “That’s important for a project working in emerging markets,” he says.

But Amato is quick to point out that Moodle should not be ventured into without planning. “You need to understand what you want to accomplish from a business perspective before you choose any software tool,” he says, noting that too often users select technology solutions before they define their project goals.

“First look at how an application meets the needs of your business, then determine what software meets your needs,” he says. “It’s much easier to map the technology to the business than the other way around.” Like Subaru, Cisco also outsources the hosting of the Moodle system. It is using MoodleRooms, a Moodle service provider in Baltimore. Even though Cisco has a huge IT staff, Amato says the company would rather hire specialists to host and manage the Moodle system while his team focuses on the goals of the institute.

“It’s one thing to download and play with Moodle, but if you want to scale the application, it’s a lot more cost-effective to outsource,” he says. “I don’t have to spend time and energy worrying about managing the hardware or the software. I let the experts do that.”

PHS meets regulatory requirements
However, not everyone relies on outside experts to manage the Moodle technology. Pediatric Home Service, a small children’s at-home health care provider in St. Paul, Minnesota, hosts Moodle in-house. The company, which has 136 employees, uses it to deliver, manage and track all of its in-house competency training—a critical element of a home health care provider’s business, since competency training is closely monitored by regulatory groups including the Food and Drug Administration and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

“Moodle works not only to host training, but it also tracks user data for regulators,” notes Pam Clifton, senior vice president of operations for Pediatric Home Service. “We can generate reports on the spot to prove completion rates, or to zero in on test questions that are frequently missed,” she says. “Before we started using Moodle that information was all on paper.”

Pediatric Home Service started using Moodle three years ago after the training staff found it didn’t have the budget for an off-the-shelf LMS. “The others were cost-prohibitive, but with Moodle the price is certainly right,” says Carol Widstrand, training and technology communication specialist for the organization. Because the company has a strong IT staff and wanted to focus its training dollars on developing content, it opted to host the system in-house.

“We definitely started out slowly,” Widstrand says about the choice to keep the system in-house. To avoid becoming overwhelmed, Widstrand’s team rolled the system out to individual departments one at a time, and did not use all the features right away.

They have also come to rely on the Moodle.org Web site when problems arise. “It’s a very good resource. You can troll for information, pose questions and take tutorials,” Widstrand says. “When I post a question I usually have a response from someone within 24 hours.”

Regardless of the size of an organization, or whether Moodle is hosted in-house or is outsourced, most users agree that the key for organizations is to go slow and know what they are trying to accomplish.

“Start off at the 10,000-foot level,” suggests Becki Nielson, education manager for Pediatric Home Service. “Once you have a big picture of what the whole organization needs, you can think about how you will use Moodle in the long term. That has worked best for us.”

Black & Decker has found a way to eliminate waste, shorten delivery time and gain better quality control over the training for its 300 field reps, all by replacing paper-based training materials with mobile learning content delivered directly to their hand-held PDAs.

    The globally recognized manufacturer of power tools, hardware and home-improvement products spends thousands of dollars every year researching the most effective displays and educational materials for its products. Careful research goes into the planning of each display, and the field reps’ jobs are to set up those displays to exact specifications in the aisles of retailers, including Home Depot. They are required to replicate every detail, from the way the product is angled and the number of packages on every shelf to sign placement and inventory control. They are also expected to educate the Home Depot staff about the new products that they stock.

    In the past, to create consistency across all markets, the reps were sent manuals, photographs and other materials on paper to guide them through these exacting steps. But there was no way to track whether they were reading or following the guidelines, or whether they’d even received them, says Cesar Saavedra, field sales analyst for Black & Decker. “You get bombarded with so many communications when you work in the field, there is so much waste and no accountability. A lot of it never even gets looked at.”

    To minimize waste and keep closer tabs on rep performance, Black & Decker began using a Reflexis Enterprise Learning System tool called Enfoblasts, which deliver short two- to three-minute information bites directly to the PDAs used by every rep. The digitized learning modules deliver key points of the products and displays, including include task lists, images, quizzes and short videos about the products.

    “It’s an easy way to deliver information,” Saavedra says. “It saves money, and it creates accountability because we can track who opens and reads the files.”

    The field reps can also show the videos to the Home Depot personnel in the aisles as a quick training tool rather than explaining the new product to them. “It increases the number of people we touch and creates a consistent message,” Saavedra says.

    While the idea of replacing paper-based training with multimedia content may sound expensive, it actually costs less and takes less time. The savings in cost and time come primarily from the elimination of printing and mailing materials, which can take days to produce and distribute, Saavedra says. Instead, he creates content using videos already produced by the marketing department for the product, which means there are few additional costs to develop the training.

    “We just compress the videos with Reflexis and blast them to their PDAs,” he says. “I can send all of the training materials for a new product to 300 reps in less than three hours.”

    This mobile learning model delivers on the just-in-time training promise that is especially beneficial for field workers who may not work out of an office or have a computer at home, says Jerry Massey, director of operations in the enterprise learning systems division of Reflexis in Kennesaw, Georgia. “With mobile learning there are no excuses,” he says. “Everyone has a cell phone or PDA and it’s with them all the time.”

Support on the go
    Like Black & Decker, CA (formerly Computer Associates) arms its field reps with Blackberrys that they can use to access training materials and read or respond to blogs and wikis (collections of Web pages that let anyone accessing them contribute or modify content). The blogs and wikis are built around specific course content, such as new-hire training, leadership development and sales coaching. The conversations take place in virtual rooms, developed using GeoLearning’s GeoEngage, to which participants subscribe when they sign up for conventional classroom or e-learning courses, says Ron Ateshian, senior principal learning consultant for CA. Whenever new content or comments are posted, subscribers receive alerts on their Blackberrys.

    “It’s self-paced training that extends the learning,” he says of the virtual conversations. “Because they can access it anywhere, our people participate more often, and the social networking aspect of the discussions spurs them to more fully engage in the learning.”

    The addictive quality of the Blackberry is an added benefit, Ateshian says. “They respond to the alerts just as addictively as they respond to their e-mails.”

    Ateshian is currently exploring more ways to use mobile learning for his mobile workforce, including sending video segments and presentations directly to their Blackberrys.

    “Our sales workforce is so important to our business, and this will help them do their jobs more effectively because they can use it anytime, anywhere,” he says.

    But he is cautious as he looks to the future. “We have to make sure any content we use will work on their technology and will integrate with our learning management system before we commit to it.”

Improving technology
    In fact, technology integration is one of the biggest obstacles for mobile learning, particularly if learners use a variety of mobile devices. In the case of Black & Decker and CA, the content was designed for their standard-issue technology. But for businesses hoping to reach workers via their own cell phones, the content has to be universal, which can limit choices

    “You can do anything on some phones that you can do on a PC, including Java, Flash, animation and videos,” says Bob Sanregret, founder and CEO of Hot Lava Software, a provider of products for mobile authoring, publishing, delivery and tracking in Warrenton, Virginia. “But there is such a variety of devices out there, and not all phones can do all things.”

    That, however, is beginning to change. As cell phone technology and mobile learning authoring tools improve, such content is becoming a viable option for trainers who are struggling to meet the learning needs of a growing mobile workforce.

    Mobile learning formats are already commonly used outside the U.S., particularly in Europe and Asia, says Sanregret. “The U.S. is three to four years behind the rest of the world.”

    The Kauffman Foundation hopes to change that, at least for its own education purposes. Based in Kansas City, Missouri, the foundation is the 30th largest in the U.S., with a vision “to foster a society of economically independent individuals who are engaged citizens, contributing to the improvement of their communities.”

    A big part of that vision is education, and Merrilea Mayo, director of future learning initiatives for the foundation, believes that mobile learning can help deliver that vision.

    “The emphasis of the foundation is to use technology to reach lots of people, and certainly mobile communication technology has that potential,” she says, noting that in low-income communities, cell phones are the most common technology device used. “There are 3 billion cell phones in the world. Education on that scale is very interesting.”

    Mayo has watched the growing popularity of mobile learning in the European Union, but the foundation is not yet convinced that cell phone users in the U.S. will embrace the concept as easily. To gauge their interest, Mayo is launching a nationwide mobile learning pilot program using sports themes to teach math and science. The pilot, developed by Hot Lava, will run in July and August—during the Summer Olympics—and will include embedded animations, clickable icons and interactive question-and-answer links. “The look and feel of the content will be like a Web page interface, rather than a console game,” she says. This simple format was designed to engage potential users while working on most cell phones and PDAs.

    To promote use of the content, the Kauffmann Foundation will market the learning modules on sports and gaming Web sites, during televised sporting events and via score boards at sports arenas, with prizes delivered in real time to users in their seats.

    The point of the pilot is not to prove learning effectiveness, but rather to demonstrate that people will use it, Mayo points out. Her goal for the two-month program is 100,000 users answering at least one question.

    “The challenge for any educational product is that profits are small and marketing is difficult,” she says. “If this pilot is a success and we can show that we had thousands of users for an optional program, we can demonstrate to other agencies that this is a cost-effective way to reach a large number of people,” she says.

    Mayo expects to reach 10 to 30 times more users than she would with more conventional training offerings. “People are swayed by the numbers,” she says. “Once we prove the economics, we can put time and money into making it better.”

    Taking this pilot approach is an excellent way to try out mobile learning technology and gather early numbers on the effectiveness of the model, says Saavedra. “It can be scary to invest in a new technology, but once you look into it, you’ll see how many benefits you get,” he says. “For me, that outweighed all hesitation.”

In 2004, Toyota Motor Europe was in a quandary. It was releasing an increasing number of new vehicle models each year, each with long lists of environmentally friendly technologies and other manufacturing selling points, and the amount of training necessary for its sales, marketing and engineering teams also was surging. Toyota’s sales and marketing organizations in countries across Europe needed quick, easy access to product training before new models were released to the public. But Toyota Motor Europe had no centralized way to deliver that content.

Brussels, Belgium-based Toyota Motor Europe combines three prior Toyota entities on the continent and is responsible for the company’s marketing, sales, manufacturing, and research and development there. It works with 29 independently held national sales and marketing companies based in 48 countries scattered across Europe. At the time, each company had its own system for collecting and disseminating new product information.

According to Sann René Glaza, Toyota Motor Europe’s senior manager for the Learning Technologies Group, some of the more established national marketing and sales companies had their own e-learning or classroom-based systems and fully staffed training departments, while others, particularly those in emerging markets, had little or no formal training in place. Adding further complications was the fact that product and training materials had to be translated into 30 different languages to meet all of their needs.

“Every country launched new products in their own way, with their own training and sales events, which was not cost-effective,” Glaza says. “It was imperative that we develop an entirely new network to get the same product information out to all of the local sales and marketing companies.”

To manage the flow of information and streamline the education process, Toyota Motor Europe implemented a centralized learning management system developed by Certpoint Systems, a global learning management software solution provider headquartered in Roslyn Heights, New York, with offices in Belgium. The new system, branded Toyota Connect, includes access to frequently updated e-learning modules, content management tools, online registration, assessment tracking and an integrated user-friendly authoring tool to develop unique regional content.

“We really wanted to make this something that the marketing and sales companies could manage on their own,” Glaza says of the new system. “We have a grand total of four people in training and support [at Toyota Motor Europe headquarters]. It was important for us to be able to concentrate on refining the curriculum.”

Road show
    The greatest challenge in developing the learning system for Toyota Motor Europe was that it had to be both centralized and decentralized, says Kenneth Fung, senior vice president for Certpoint. “Each sales and marketing group was autonomous with different maturity levels, staff size and languages, but they all needed access to the same global content.”

Each national marketing and sales company would also have to pay for access to the new system—and participation was not mandatory.

Going into the project, Glaza knew it would be a hard sell. “I’ve found, as a program manager, that getting people to embrace e-learning is much more about change management,” she says. “It’s bigger than making people to use the system; it’s about changing the way they think about getting information.”

Toyota Motor Europe began to introduce the system in early 2005, and to ease into the change, Glaza went out on the road with her IT people and representatives from CertPoint to educate executives, managers and training managers about Toyota Connect and the value it would bring to their businesses. “We demoed the system and showed them the time and cost savings,” she says. At the end of the presentation, Glaza’s team asked for letters of commitment from the national marketing and sales companies.

“It was a difficult process,” notes Fung, who was a member of the road show. “They had to see the value of the system and it took a while to convince people.”

As part of the lure, Toyota Motor Europe gave all of its national marketing and sales companies access to a “light” version of Toyota Connect, so that they could try out the e-learning content. Once they bought in fully, they could take advantage of all the courses and assessments, as well as the tracking, notification, learning management and authoring tools. At that point, the marketing and sales companies could decide which functionalities to use, how they wanted to track assessments and which courses they would make mandatory for personnel.

Key members of each country’s training staff were also brought into headquarters for a three-day training session on how to use the system and the authoring tools.

“It was all part of the change management process,” Fung says. “The change management is almost as important as the technological pieces, because if you are not able to get buy-in and convince people to change their behavior and attitude about learning, what’s the point?”

By the end of the road show, 26 markets had signed up, Fung says. “That’s incredible for a non-mandatory tool that they have to pay for.”

Leveling the playing field
    Today, through Toyota Connect, Toyota Motor Europe’s central training office develops core content that is disseminated to all of the regional offices, where the course material is translated and tweaked for local users by regional training personnel. Each national marketing and sales company has its own domain and the ability to localize its content. But the core content is the same across Europe.

“In this way, they all receive the same training to ensure the message we are giving our retailers is consistent in quality,” Glaza says. “It really does help to maintain our brand image. Even if they make some minor tweaks and changes to localize the material, we can still maintain control of the message.”

The translation tools in the system have also delivered valuable benefits to local dealers. Before the e-learning system, it took the national marketing and sales organizations 10 weeks to translate course content and new product information from headquarters, which meant training materials often weren’t ready until well after a new model hit the market. With the Toyota Connect templates and tools, the translations can be completed in several days. “That means they are getting product knowledge to sales people 90 percent faster,” Fung says.

Early success
    Many of the national marketing and sales companies saw early success with the new system, particularly those in France, who have been the greatest champions of the system, Glaza says. They participated in an early pilot program, measured results and shared their numbers with the rest of the organization.

Their measures of success include the reduction of a four-day classroom training course to two days, replacing the two days of instruction with e-learning modules. The marketing and sales companies estimate each day an employee spends in off-site training is the equivalent of €1,000 billable time, and there are 12 to 20 participants in each session. “That savings adds up quickly,” Fung says.

The dealers in France have also seen a 90 percent reduction in administration time for training because employees sign up directly for courses online and receive automated confirmations and notifications of courses, eliminating the need for the training department to handle course management.

“Toyota France was able to show significant numbers in terms of time and administrative savings,” Glaza says. “That helped us generate a lot of excitement.”

Even more impressive were the success stories coming out of emerging markets. Romania in particular saw great results among early adopters, and used those early successes to persuade skeptical managers to more fully embrace the system.

Camelia Strete, training manager for Toyota Romania, says that prior to 2006, her group offered only classroom training and had no tools or system for self-study. When Toyota Connect was launched, she attended the three-day training and was so excited that she went back to Romania and delivered a presentation on the new system at a dealer conference, showcasing its benefits and educating managers on the technology they would need to invest in—including computers and office space—to give employees access to the new content.

Unfortunately, her enthusiasm for e-learning wasn’t contagious. “They didn’t say it out loud, but a lot of managers were reluctant,” she says. Most of the dealers agreed to implement the system, which launched in February 2006 in Romania, but their usage of the e-learning modules varied significantly.

To prove the system’s value, Strete spent the next year collecting information about usage and impact among local dealers. In December 2007, she went out on a road show of her own with a graph that she was certain would change the minds of those reluctant dealers.

The graph ranked dealers in order of the amount of time their employees spent online, and compared it with the same list of dealers in order of sales rankings.

“The two rankings were extremely close,” Strete says. Her data showed that those national marketing and sales companies that spent the most hours training had the highest sales. “It was very realistic for them. It showed the direct link between training and sales results.”

That presentation won over the managers, whom Strete relies on to foster a work environment that places value on learning.

“So much of e-learning is about management’s attitude,” she says. “If managers encourage people to use the training and reward them for it, the whole team will do it. That’s when you see results.”

John Coné retired as Dell’s chief learning officer in August of 2001, but the company never replaced him. It wasn’t because the CLO position is a passing concept. It was because Coné believed that his work as the CLO was done.

    He’d been with Dell since 1995, and was given the official title of CLO in 1999, although he says that he really always worked in that capacity. His job was to define the policies and infrastructure that would make Dell a distributed learning organization where employees have access to training whenever and wherever they need it. Ultimately, that meant making learning such an inherent part of how they did their jobs that it became an unremarkable event in employees’ lives, he says.

    He achieved that goal in part by making training a necessary piece of every new-product release. “We wanted training to be a natural part of the development process,” he says. Today, new products at Dell don’t move forward unless the necessary training for the product release is in place and deployed. Since Dell comes out with thousands of new products every year, training quickly became a constant in employees’ lives.

    During his six years at the company, Coné also oversaw the organization’s vast e-learning program. His team transformed more than 90 percent of the company’s learning content to technology-based formats, putting employees in control of their own learning, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. “Learners must be in a position to make decisions about what they need to know based on job requirements, company expectations and skills assessments,” he says. “When learning is technology-based, whenever employees are ready to learn, they have access to the content.”

    Admittedly, Coné is not sure if he was successful in making learning a permanent part of the culture at Dell. The traditional measures for training success, including the number of hours people are in training, executive involvement and the percentage of payroll dedicated to learning, show that his efforts are still going strong, but it’s been only two years. “I don’t know if the ideas are deep enough in the fabric of the culture to survive long-term.”

    Whether or not he was successful, however, he believes that the ultimate goal of all CLOs should be to put themselves out of a job. “When responsibility for learning is integrated across the organization, you don’t need a CLO,” he says. “The job becomes redundant.”

What happened to the CLO
    The idea that this is a temporary role could explain the difficulty of determining how many CLOs are out there. A January 2003 article inThe Wall Street Journal (“Learning Gurus Adapt to Escape Corporate Axes”) stated that the number of CLOs in Fortune 500 companies had dropped by 20 percent since the mid-1990s, suggesting that the bad economy had caused some businesses to scrap the position. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that at many companies, the CLO position has only been established in the last three years, and that the number of CLOs in large companies actually is growing.

    Further undermining the accuracy of the data is the fact that many people who fill this role have different titles, says Steve Kerr, the CLO of Goldman Sachs since 2001. Kerr was dubbed “the first CLO” when he created the position at General Electric in 1994, but says he wasn’t the first person to fulfill the CLO duties. “There were others doing it before me, but we came up with the title,” he says, noting that initially he suggested the title chief education officer, but Jack Welch, president and CEO of GE at the time, felt that “one CEO at the company is enough.”

    In companies that don’t have CLOs, chief knowledge officers often have similar responsibilities—to break down knowledge-sharing barriers and create learning opportunities. CEOs, directors of learning and vice presidents of education also have been known to take on those duties. In other cases, heads of learning are named CLOs but not given the power and strategic responsibility that typically go with the role.

    Whatever the title, a true CLO is the person held accountable for how learning is developed and implemented throughout an organization, says Karl Wiig, a senior consultant at Cutter Consortium, an information technology consultancy in Boston. “The CLO looks at learning with a strategic perspective and creates knowledge-sharing opportunities so that everyone benefits from the best practices within the business.” Not every company should have a CLO, he adds. Reactive companies that are focused on short-term gains such as meeting consistent quotas on established product lines but have no intention of changing the business don’t require someone in that position. However, proactive organizations that expect and plan for change, such as adding product lines, altering the sales cycle or expanding, need a CLO to make sure the workforce has the information and skills it needs to move forward. “In a proactive company it’s essential to constantly bring in new ideas and push people forward.”

    Kerr concurs. “Every organization needs ideas from the outside,” he says. Finding new concepts and sharing them with the workforce in ways that are relevant to their needs has always been one of his primary tasks, at both organizations. “The ideas have to be universally applicable or people will put up barriers,” he says. CLOs have to break down those barriers so that people can see how new concepts can work for them.

“Part of my job is to make people independent of me through self-sustaining systems. In that sense, maybe my job is to build structures that will replace me, but since business is always evolving, so does my role and the systems I build.”

    With that in mind, Kerr isn’t sure whether the CLO position should be temporary. “You can’t succeed without new ideas, so elements of the job will always be there.” But, he admits, the role of the CLO may change. “Part of my job is to make people independent of me through self-sustaining systems. In that sense, maybe my job is to build structures that will replace me, but since business is always evolving, so does my role and the systems I build.”

    He imagines that after he leaves, the role could be filled by a rotating series of retired professors who could offer objective perspectives on the business strategies of the organization. “There is value to having someone from the outside look at your methods, to tell you what’s worth bringing in and what’s worth phasing out,” he says.

Some are here to stay
    Not all CLOs see themselves as temporary fixtures. Many believe that if organizations are going to continue to evolve, they will always need a champ-ion of learning to shepherd them through that process. T. J. Elliott, the CLO of ETS, an educational services company in Princeton, New Jersey, sees himself as a permanent part of the strategic hierarchy. “Organizations that pay attention to learning and knowledge sharing have the competitive advantage,” he says. “That isn’t going to change.”

    Since he took the job in 2002, Elliott’s foremost goal has been to push learning initiatives that have a measurable financial impact. He co-designed an action learning program that resulted in ETS’s directors launching more than 40 learning projects, including a sales program that targets teachers seeking certification, which has brought the company $2 million in revenue in 2003.

    At the same time he’s creating for-ums for project leaders to meet and collaborate on their efforts. “Some of these people had never met with each other before,” he marvels. “Now they share their best-practice ideas, which benefits the whole business.”

    Similarly, Pat Crull, the CLO of Toys “R” Us, thinks her position is solid. “As long as there are strong leaders who view learning as a critical function of the business, the CLO will be relevant.” And while she agrees that a primary goal of any CLO is to make training an integral part of the culture, she doesn’t see it as a self-sustaining system. “It’s better to have a champion who can help training grow as the company grows,” she says. “The goals of the CLO may change, but the role as a leader in the business will not.”

The CLO expiration date
    Even if companies do see the role of CLO as temporary, it could be years before they determine that the position should be dumped, Coné admits. “It depends on the state of the organization. You need the infrastructure to support learning and policies that incorporate training into the business function.” He estimates that there may be only dozens of companies that have the training content established and a strong enough belief in the need for learning to survive without a CLO, and thousands more that are nowhere near ready. “It could take some companies three years, and others 20.”

    Wiig thinks CLOs will be history in 20 years. He compares the CLO transition to the Total Quality Management movement of the 1980s. Quality officers helped businesses see that excellence was everyone’s responsibility. The CLO is doing the same for learning, he says. “Eventually, learning will become a natural part of the job. When that happens, the CLO will be unnecessary.”

Workforce Management, October 2003, pp. 79-81 — Subscribe Now!

Name: MCKESSON CORPORATION Location: SAN FRANCISCO Business: PROVIDER OF HEALTH-CARE SUPPLIES AND SOFTWARE Employees: 22,000

McKesson executives see Six Sigma as a fundamental change in the way they dobusiness. “It’s not an additional step or certification system,” says JeffReinke, McKesson’s vice president of Six Sigma. “It’s how we operate.”

    Before 1999, McKesson Corporation had never thought to implement a qualityinitiative. “Until the late ’90s, quality was an issue for manufacturingcompanies, not transactional ones,” Reinke says. But as health-care costsskyrocketed, McKesson executives realized that the only way they could staycompetitive was to drive costs out of the supply chain.

    At the time, companies using Six Sigma were getting a lot of press abouttheir results, so McKesson’s leadership team met with Six Sigma Academy to seeif the process could transfer to the health-care-supply arena.

    In 1999 they launched Six Sigma, using what Reinke calls “a traditionalapproach.” They identified exceptional employees for a four-week black-belttraining course, pulling them out of the business for two years to work solelyon Six Sigma projects. Beginning with the health-supplies and pharmaceuticaldivision, they trained 15 to 20 black belts and then reassigned them to theiroriginal business units as their teams’ Six Sigma representatives.

    Each wave of training since then has targeted a different business group, andslowly the Six Sigma philosophy has infiltrated McKesson’s business philosophy,Reinke says. The company has since trained more than 120 black belts, 80 of whomare still active.

    When the two-year commitment ends, black belts return to the business athigher positions, helping to spread the approach throughout the organization andensuring that key leaders are committed to the philosophy. “The black-beltassignment is like a succession-planning effort at McKesson,” Reinke says. Thestrongest performers are chosen for the training, and they are promotedaccordingly when it’s over. “Associates know that if they want to grow inthe company, they need to be selected for black-belt training.”

    But Six Sigma training doesn’t end with black belts. In most divisions ofthe company it is mandated that all senior vice presidents go through “basictraining,” which introduces the Six Sigma concept and details how to identifyand scope a Six Sigma project. Across the company every manager and director isexpected to attend basic training and green-belt training, which gives them ahigh-level working knowledge of Six Sigma methodologies and why it’s importantto follow them. “They understand Six Sigma well enough to identify potentialprojects, discuss them using unique Six Sigma vocabulary, and participate on SixSigma projects led by black belts,” Reinke says.

    The mandatory training also raises awareness of the company’s commitment tothe new fact-based approach to business. “In the past, requests were grantedon the basis of seniority or past experience,” Reinke says. “Now,decision-makers know that every project must be supported by hard data before itcan be implemented.”

    Six Sigma training also has no end-date at McKesson. The company now has fourmaster black belts who conduct all of the Six Sigma training in-house, andReinke expects the training to remain an integral part of theemployee-development process. Eventually, all teams will have a dedicated blackbelt, just as they have vice presidents and associates, he says, and everyone inthe company will embrace Six Sigma as a way of conducting business.

    And while the Six Sigma effort showed profits in the first year and eachsubsequent year, Reinke sees it as more than just a cost-cutting initiative. “Ithas helped us get better at our core competencies,” he says. “Six Sigma isour culture now.”

Workforce, May 2003, pp. 67-68 — Subscribe Now!

Name: Circuit City Location: Richmond, Virginia Type of organization: Consumer electronics retailer Number of employees: More than 40,000

For years Circuit City used classroom training to get salesreps up to speed on new products and technology. But by the late 1990s, theclassroom model wasn’t fulfilling the company’s increasing training needs,says Bill Cimino, director of public relations. “Associates would be out ofthe store for a week to train, and by the time they got back and started to feelgood about what they’d learned, the technology would change again,” he says.They needed a faster, more flexible solution, so the training department beganexploring e-learning.

In late 2000, with the help of DigitalThink, they rolled outa company-wide custom e-learning program, and within a year, Circuit Cityemployees had completed more than 1 million courses. Cimino attributes the earlyhuge success of the program to two significant factors: tracking andcertification.

To ensure that the training is effective, the trainingdepartment tracks every user’s performance in the courses and on the floor.”We know, by associate, who takes what training, how much time they spend in acourse, how they scored on the tests, and how they are performing on the job.”DigitalThink and Circuit City’s training department use the data to evaluatecourse effectiveness and constantly improve the offerings. “E-learning has tobe organic,” Cimino says. “It has to grow with the company and change asemployees’ needs change.”

To reinforce the training on the job, many of the new productcourses feature “try it” exercises, in which associates are instructed to gointo the store to identify certain features on a product or to demonstrate theproduct for a manager who then signs off on the lesson. “The ‘try it’exercises are an example of our corporate culture,” Cimino says. “This isnot just a place to work, it’s a place to learn.”

To further tie training to performance, Circuit City rolledout an e-learning certification program in 2002. Product lines are now tied tospecific certificate tracks, and in order to sell those products, associatesmust first complete the learning for that track and pass the certification exam,Cimino says. The more training they take, the more products they can sell. Forexample, if associates are trained on Sony’s new digital camera, they can workin that area of the store, but if they have the full technology certification,they can work anywhere and sell anything, he says. “It’s a win-winsituation.” Because associates work on commission, the more products they cansell, the more money they can make.

The combination of tracking and certification is enough toinduce most Circuit City associates to seek out training opportunities, he says,which is why the learning program is such a success. While Cimino won’t quotespecific numbers, he says e-learning returned its investment within months ofimplementation and continues to add value every day.

Workforce, March 2003, pp. 60-62 — Subscribe Now!