Tom Kelly, vice president of worldwide training at Cisco Systems, has reinvented training development
and delivery at the company. His program for providing education over the Internet to Cisco sales
staff is described in the October 2000 issue of Fast Company (pp. 286-295). Also, we recently learned
that Wayne Weiseler, a longstanding supporter and colleague of the CIDM, has been a major contributor
to the design of a training system that calls for the development of Reusable Learning Objects (RLOs)
and Reusable Information Objects (RIOs). White papers describing Wayne's work are available from the
Cisco Web site.
Kelly sites an anti-learning bias as one of the major drivers behind the development of an e-learning
environment. First, like information-development, training has to keep justifying its existence. That
often means measuring the number of people attending classroom training is important, rather than
measuring successful learning. Second, Kelly notes considerable resistance to e-learning because
people like the social interaction that comes with an instructor-led class. Third, education is
viewed as an event rather than an integral part of job performance.
To combat the biases, Cisco has implemented a learning portal where employees track their own
learning plan and automatically receive updates of time-critical information based on their job
titles, interests, learning styles, and work areas. Kelly foresees a salesperson who downloads a
20-minute information chunk on a new product immediately before attending a customer meeting. If this
immediacy of information access works as intended, the employee won't even label it "training."
As a training manager at Sun, Oracle, and Cisco, Kelly has long been fighting the paper glut and
burdensome classroom time. He notes that Sun delivered a 5-foot box of training materials with the
Solaris operating system. Distributing the information electronically saved millions and made access
faster and updates easier. But just giving people faster access to enormous piles of information
clearly wasn't a final solution. Accessibility is still the most important issue in information
delivery.
At Cisco, Kelly's team created a Web site that groups content by audiences and delivers a specific
learning plan based on job titles, areas of work, technologies, and products. Searching this database
of information is facilitated by a search technology they developed called INFO (Information Network
for Field Organizations Locator). The Locator tool uses an XML-based metadata system that reads the
metadata tags on every content unit in the database, including video, paper, spreadsheets, and
PowerPoint presentations.
Because all the information is stored in a repository, content created for one audience can easily be
directed toward another audience. In addition, Kelly's team has developed a method for employees to
rank the quality of the content. The ranking system puts pressure on the content developer and helps
to better match content with learning needs.
Kelly has also revolutionized content development at Cisco, an issue that should be of considerable
interest to information-development managers. First, he gets content from its source (product
developers, marketing specialists, technical documentation, and others who are willing to develop
structured content using XML and metadata) as quickly as possible. Members of the training group are
assigned to product-development teams from the beginning of a project. They record critical
information by videotaping product experts, developing slides and audio tracks, and enhancing text
with graphics, animation, test questions and answers, games, and simulations as needed. The
information is made immediately accessible to the sales force, who prefer fast to polished.
Although content development is decentralized back to the product-development teams, the training
organization controls its deployment. Using the e-learning infrastructure, the training team is
responsible for getting the content to the people who need it, in the way they need it, and as
quickly as possible. Kelly believes that e-learning gives Cisco a competitive advantage by
aggressively managing the company's intellectual capital.
In a recent email, Kelly informed us that they are working with e-publishing groups and the metadata
framework team to establish corporate standards and guidelines. They are working hard to keep the
momentum going. As we know from working with many in technical publications, the inertia of whatever
people are comfortable with is difficult to overcome.
Tom Kelly has as many challenges as we all have in defining a new approach to disseminating vital
information. It appears that he is trying to break down old thinking about training and turn it into
learning by using the Web as a tool. Publications managers have the same challenge in moving away
from books to delivering content dynamically.
Read the Fast Company article.
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