InformationWeek

June 8, 1998

Train At The Speed Of Change

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Illustration by John Bleck

"We can show them how we handle a business process, and how the tool is used to do that," Pellerito says. "We've had to put that one extra step in there, between our process and what the training suppliers provide. It could be a smart guy within the organization or the tool supplier doing the info session, or we bring somebody in to offer the session, based on requirements we have written."

To make it happen, GM Powertrain turned to a tool decidedly outside the scope of basic training: change management. Using Continuus/CM from Continuus Software Corp., the company was better able to define its processes and tasks. This helped the organization isolate the pockets where conventional training required shoring up or improved alignment to GM's internal business processes.

Experts laud the approach. "Business processes are arbitrary," says George Nezlek, assistant professor of management sciences at Loyola University in Chicago. "How companies do things doesn't always map to how vendors or trainers envision their tools being used. Organizations that internalize training, or augment canned curriculum, will naturally develop programs that reflect their business processes. That, in the long term, will dramatically cut support costs."

Cultural Change
But some organizations are going even further to integrate training into the organization's culture and development processes, and are pioneering new computer-based learning systems in the process. At Crest ar Bank, part of the $26 billion Crestar Financial Corp., instructional designers and IT developers are working to build online computer- and Web-based learning systems.

"We don't have the staff anymore, with companies downsizing, to deliver instructor-led courses," says Mary Ellen Winks, senior VP of corporate training at Crestar Bank. "Our student population is increasing all the time and we need to be able to handle more students without continually adding more staff. In an instructor-led environment, we couldn't do that. The costs would have been astronomical."

So instead, Winks' organization turned to Pathlore Software Corp.'s Phoenix Intranet courseware development product to develop intranet computer-based training systems. The streaming multimedia lessons, now under development, will push interactive lessons over the firm's intranet to more than 9,000 employees in 477 branch locations. Each course will conclude with an automated aptitude test that students must pass in order to exit a course.

Buying a canned courseware development tool and building multimedia curricula internally is saving the bank a lot of money over outsourced development in the short term--and perhaps millions over the long haul. "We went out and priced having somebody build a custom package for us, and the cheapest price I got was $300,000 for something that wasn't necessarily the best system out there," Winks says. "That's going to stop a whole lot of companies from going that route."

Integrated Approach
Slashing startup and long-term costs are certainly attractive themes for any IT shop. But the real difference isn't Crestar's raw use of intranet and multimedia training technologies. What sets its effort apart is the company's team-integrated approach to building internal IT applications and systems, and its related Web-based multimedia training programs.

This approach synchronizes end-user training requirements with internal programming, deployment, and maintenance as the app lication development effort unfolds. When a new system product or major update is christened, the application development project team is injected with individuals from nondevelopment disciplines. A typical mix includes IT trainers, instructional designers, courseware authors, bank product marketing managers, and end-user representatives.

This front-end team integration cuts development time of new systems and lets the Web-based multimedia courseware be rolled out in concert with application deployment. This results in a huge time and cost savings. It also ensures that the Web-based instructional systems don't suffer from a critical lack of interactivity that devastates many homegrown computer-based training efforts.

"A lot of training departments don't come in until the eleventh hour," Winks says. "Then their own learning curve is so steep, they have to tack three months onto the end of the project. We're in it from day one, and that means we're involved in application development project t eams anywhere from a month to a year."