Enterprise E-Learning Architecture: Working With the CIO

Much of the strategic plan has to do with putting hardware and software in place to support the needs. Because these are big purchases, IT and training have to decide who owns the pieces. In some organizations, training and IT obviously haven’t communicated or worked together much, so these issues are going to have to be worked out in a spirit of cooperation.

Once you get the idea established, begin engaging the people who are going to make the decisions. Pitch the plan and the value it will bring. You need to focus on building and conceptualizing the model as well as detailing the return on investment.

There are some common elements to any strategic plan involving a training program and IT. When you are talking about an SAP or ERP system, for instance, there will be procedures that tell the user how to perform tasks or transactions, transaction documents, business process documents and job-role training. Issues to consider include getting system task documents into users’ hands, enabling users to get context-sensitive help and whether you want Web access or file server access. This is where it is critical to know the IT architecture and its ability to enable the training goals.

A smaller semiconductor division of another global company that I work with has no training organization. The IT department drives training. We worked together to create a strategic plan for ERP training before they even implemented their first component in the system. The SAP IT manager became the champion, and he and his boss, the IT manager, sold it to their boss. He in turn drove it to the decision makers at the executive level.

They were implementing SAP and service management components first, so we wanted to create documentation, forming a super-user team that would ultimately own the documentation maintenance. We knew this would have to be in a central location, but at the time they had no central server location, so we set a deadline date for accomplishing that. The IT department did its part by analyzing all the alternatives, and our mutual solution was to put the material on the FTP server where all users in the company had access. It was a workable solution that didn’t even require any investment in additional equipment. The important thing is that the identified solution still maps to the big-picture strategic plan.