Getting IT Support for E-Learning
By Tom Barron

IT makes a vital ally in the push for e-learning. But some trainers are going the extra mile and becoming IT experts in their own right.

Getting the attention of information technology executives these days isn't easy. They're neck deep in e-business initiatives and face a daily onslaught of requests from various departments, line managers, and CEOs for new services and capabilities. Unless e-learning excites the top brass--or IT executives themselves--training managers are often told to take a number and get in line.

Even if the top decision makers are tempted by e-learning's various promises, they may not see their own training departments as key players in leveraging those promises. In some cases, executives turn to IT--not the training staff--to pursue e-learning.

What are training professionals doing about that affront? Many are realizing the value of developing a relationship with in-house IT staff that synchronizes their desire for scalable e-learning with the capabilities--and clout--that their IT people can provide. In some cases, it's a matter of building on a solid foundation of past collaboration and positive initial uses of e-learning to train IT staff; in others, it's more about extending an olive branch or rebounding from earlier e-learning disappointments. Working with IT staff, trainers can knock on executive suite doors, armed with arguments around scalability, consistency, and efficiency (three words executives are particularly fond of) together with IT's input on the feasibility and impact of e-learning on an organization's IT infrastructure.

Of course, many trainers who have witnessed the field's migration to electronic delivery have taken the initiative to learn the technology ropes firsthand. A growing number have moved from standup instruction roles to become e-learning-content developers, and to boast skill sets and titles that reflect their growing IT savvy. With their combination of education and e-learning development skills, these folks are uniquely suited to make the case for e-learning investments, say some industry consultants.

Training professionals are realizing the value of developing a relationship with in-house IT staff that synchronizes their desire for scalable e-learning with the capabilities--and clout--that their IT people can provide.

Another option for shifting to e-learning has become increasingly popular, particularly among mid-size and smaller businesses: external hosting of e-learning through vendors or third-party ASPs. For training managers who win support from the top for e-learning and have either a mandate for fast implementation or an IT department that is overwhelmed with other projects, external hosting is a viable answer. It's also a way around irreconcilable differences.

One obvious reason to woo IT executives toward e-learning is that they have significant sway in corporate technology decisions.

"While trainers were busy checking out all the possibilities for e-learning in the past year, IT people were being promoted," says Ed Mayberry, a training and e-learning consultant. Mayberry, author of a Learning Circuits article on strategies for partnering with IT, says IT staff has reasons of its own to pursue partnering. "Failure to do so could lead to wholesale outsourcing of both departments," he writes in a related article that provides pointers for partnering.

Another reason to tighten the bond with IT is that IT people are among the most seasoned and enthusiastic of e-learners, with the majority of e-learning offerings still centered on IT skills. Capitalizing on technical staff's desire for e-learning, while demonstrating the growing opportunities for broader business skills e-learning for the rest of the organization, can make a powerful argument, particularly given the technology's low recurring costs once an infrastructure is in place.

Following are vignettes on how in-house trainers in four separate organizations are grappling with their "significant others" in IT.

Long-term commitment

Chuck Kater has been in the training field long enough to remember tinkering with Plato, among the earliest commercial CBT authoring tools. As such, he has a wizened perspective on training's migration to technology-delivered approaches and the sometimes stormy relationship with IT staff it has spawned. His 1980s-era dabblings with early CBT iterations convinced Kater, now the director of educational technology for a subsidiary of a Fortune 500 consumer products manufacturer, that a new era was at hand. But by the early 1990s, Kater recalls, conflict between training and IT departments were frequent and inevitable.

"Back then, network infrastructures were projected out five or 10 years without any knowledge that the training department would want to use any of those resources. We just sort of sprung up in front of IT--not just in my company, but across the industry."

Kater believed even then that IT experts were necessary partners in the drive toward e-learning and sought to build a relationship with IT staff. That included learning about the infrastructure needed to support the technologies of the day, which evolved from text-based CBT to multimedia content stored on CD-ROM. But each new technology brought new conflicts. When CD-ROMs took hold, for instance, his IT department--and many others--raised hell over the prospect of employees loading their own software on company computers, which could foul network settings. The solution brokered by Kater was to design training's CD-based content to run without installing any components.

"It was our way of doing what we wanted to do without adversely affecting their world," he says. It was also part of a pattern of accommodation and conciliation that would later prove to have merits.

By the mid-1990s, Kater had a familiar and steady rapport with colleagues in IT. As he supervised custom content development, Kater would meet with IT staff quarterly to update them on his department's activities and to discuss future IT needs. When the company decided to launch an intranet in 1996, the two departments worked closely to coordinate content and infrastructure capabilities. Two years later, when they began developing Web-based training, Kater and the IT staffers followed a now-familiar pattern.

"The difference between the early 1990s and late 1990s could be described as the difference between our saying 'Here's what we want to do, can you support us?' and 'Here's what we want to do, what do you think and how could it be improved?'" he says. "We used to approach them as customers, and now we approach them as partners."

Kater's most recent e-learning initiative has involved using synchronous or virtual classroom technology to train sales reps across the United States. An earlier implementation, managed internally over the company's intranet, led more recently to a decision to use an externally hosted offering. Consulting with IT staff, it became clear that the bandwidth demands of the technology would be too much for the already strapped internal network infrastructure, says Kater. So, his organization's IT staff endorsed the recommendation to seek external hosting.

"This was a case of our taking something off IT's plate--with their blessing," he says. Similar thinking went into a recent decision to explore externally hosted LMS offerings, he says. But those decisions don't end the need to continue courting and collaborating with IT, he adds. "There's always going to be a need to discuss with them what we're doing, even if we're having things hosted externally. We're getting into using streaming technologies that require significant bandwidth on the user's end, which taxes the network.

"To not have IT involved in the decision making would be the IT equivalent of taxation without representation," says Kater.

Conflict yields cooperation

Though Chuck Kater's experience represents a model of forethought and diplomacy, Barb Lesniak's is probably more common, at least among small companies. A self-taught Web-based training developer and primary e-learning content developer for a 3,000-employee electronics manufacturer, Lesniak has had to push for e-learning with little cooperation--and much confrontation--with in-house IT staff. Along the way, she has become something of an IT expert in her own right, though her title--human resource specialist--doesn't reflect that expertise.

Until the end of 1998, Lesniak says she pursued custom e-learning development for employees, distributors, and end users--with little support from the company's IT director. In part, that was due to other pressures facing the small IT department as it grappled with networking separate facilities. But, she adds, the lack of support was aggravated by the IT director's inexperience and distrust of training. "We were viewed more as a threat than an ally," she says.

As a result, Lesniak resorted to back-door tactics to put her e-learning online. She found some free space on a company server and uploaded her custom content for a pilot project, complete with reporting capabilities that would provide test results for a simple LMS system she designed using Microsoft Access.

"I admit I was a bit of a renegade," she says of her darkest days in the push toward e-learning. Encouragement from higher up the corporate ladder kept Lesniak hoping that the conflict with IT would eventually be ironed out.

When the IT director told Lesniak that her methodology for the system's test reporting capability was unworkable, she was skeptical. "They changed the coding in a way they said they had to, but the way they did it made the results useless," she says. As she later gained more knowledge of the company's IT architecture, she learned that the coding changes were unnecessary.

Fortunately for Lesniak, upper management got wise to the IT director's shortcomings and a new director was hired in late 1998. It took six months to gain the new director's confidence, she says, undoing an impression left by the outgoing director. But a working relationship has since blossomed where confrontation once reigned.

"When he saw my JavaScript coding, he knew I knew what I was doing, and that helped gain his trust," she says.

The e-learning content Lesniak developed has proven particularly popular among outside distributors whose understanding of the firm's electronics components is vital to sales. Its popularity "has boosted our role tremendously," she says.

And something of a mentoring relationship has developed between Lesniak and IT as they work toward expanding Lesniak's earlier e-learning creations. "The only conflicts we tend to have now are over what programming languages to use, and bandwidth is always an issue," she says. The IT director advises Lesniak on programming languages that would be beneficial for future content she develops.

"Now I have a dual role: I'm sort of an IT person devoted to the HR department. My supervisor in HR doesn't understand as much about what I do as does the IT director," she says.

Trainer as IT expert

As he reflects on a background that is equal parts training, consulting, and e-learning development and management, Rick Reichenbach says there is no secret to maintaining a relationship between training and IT.

"All the common sense wisdom you hear about partnering is true," says Reichenbach, who recently left a top e-learning management post with McDonald's to join K-12 e-learning technology developer Broadform.

Reichenbach says earlier stints with consulting firms Arthur Andersen and Omniplan, where he worked with clients to implement multimedia CBT and e-learning, provided valuable practice in just that sort of relationship building.

"As a contract provider, it's important to get with IT people early on," says Reichenbach, who started out with a bachelor of arts degree before gradually morphing into an e-learning expert. "If the IT department is uncomfortable with what you're doing, you stand a difficult chance of succeeding."

Fortunately, Reichenbach began learning the language of IT early through work as a multimedia content author and saw the importance of partnering with IT in numerous client rollouts of CD-ROM-based training. In some of those implementations, wrong assumptions by training staff about computer hardware--attributable to a lack of coordination with IT staff--thwarted best-laid plans. Later work developing an e-learning infrastructure for McDonald's made those earlier-era problems seem like a cakewalk, he says.

At McDonald's, where he worked for three years in charge of front- and back-office systems training, Reichenbach's dual knowledge of training and learning technologies was tapped and tested. Though he headed an "operations technology" department more closely aligned with IT management, he worked with the training department to develop a curriculum review that analyzed opportunities to leverage technology for training. He and his staff used that review as the basis for learning technology development.

One area in which Reichenbach says IT staff can be of great value to training professionals is assessing the quality of e-learning software from a "code quality" perspective.

"One thing that's critical is to draft a really detailed set of functional requirements that you can provide to IT," he says. Functional requirements include things such as audio, clickable image maps, text-entry options, and other interactive features. "Then someone on the IT side can drill down from those functional requirements to determine the specific hardware and software requirements for the system," he says.

In his unique role as a trainer with IT expertise, Reichenbach led an effort by McDonald's earlier this year to investigate LMS systems. In that role, he worked with the training staff to develop functional requirements then helped review systems for his IT department as a judge in an analysis of LMS systems sponsored by an IT industry magazine.

One area in which Reichenbach says IT staff can be of great value to training professionals is assessing the quality of e-learning software from a "code quality" perspective. "Training people are typically more concerned with content quality, not code integrity," he says--such as whether software will run over different hardware or browsers. "It's an area where IT has a lot of experience and where they can provide a major benefit."

Anonymous and aggrieved

Kim Smith (not her real name) says she's learning the hard way the importance of coordinating closely with IT in pursuit of e-learning. One of two people in a year-old training department for the U.S. division of a European-based manufacturer, Smith and her colleague sought development of custom content at the CEO's behest to help employees understand the company's diverse activities. They vetted custom developers, selected one, told them what they wanted, and put the developer in touch with internal IT staffers to coordinate on issues such as bandwidth and hardware and software needs. That's when the problems started.

"When the vendor came in and showed us a demo of their work, it was very interactive, with lots of videoclips," says Smith, who asked for full anonymity in exchange for describing her woes. But when a close-to-final version of the content was presented, it was more along the lines of e-reading than an interactive experience. The vendor explained that after talking with IT, it became clear that the bandwidth for video was unavailable. Smith says that IT denies that it placed bandwidth limits on the content and that enough bandwidth was available. She's still sorting through the finger pointing, while acknowledging she should have taken a more active role in overseeing the project.

"One thing we've learned is you can't rely on the outside vendor to drive the project," says Smith, who adds that because of her lack of knowledge about IT issues, she put too much faith in direct communication between the vendor and IT. "Now, we know we have to work more closely with our IT department and stay on top of the project."

Smith, who has an education background and is now cutting her teeth in a training role, says the project is being resuscitated and that the company CEO is keen on developing e-learning. "Luckily, we have strong support on top," she says.

Beware the curmudgeon role

Consultants say many of the hurdles faced by trainers in pursuing e-learning revolve around coordinating with IT and other internal advocates of the technology.

"IT people have something to learn from trainers and vice versa," says Lillian Swider, principal of LPS Associates, who specializes in consulting on the use of virtual classroom technology. "We understand instruction, they understand technology--and those are two important pieces of the puzzle."

Swider continues: "It's amazing how often it's ready, fire, aim when it comes to implementing e-learning. People are in a hurry and strategy gets lost in the rush." She points out that trainers can play a crucial role as brokers who synchronize the needs of various departments as part of their effort to investigate and invest in e-learning technologies.

GartnerGroup e-learning consultant Clark Aldrich strikes a more dire tone in discussing the impact of e-learning on training departments:

"Traditional training groups are being marginalized," Aldrich told attendees of the ASTD TechKnowledge(sm) 2000 Conference in September. "Business leaders are not looking to training people for a lot of these skills they need to roll out e-learning."

According to Aldrich, trainers can fight the trend by aggressively promoting use of the technology and partnering with other in-house e-learning believers, including IT folks who often have the most firsthand experience with e-learning.

Trainers should avoid the trap that IT departments fell into in the past decade of being professional curmudgeons over new technologies that capture executives' attention. "Knowledge management, data warehouses, ERPs--every single one was fought by the IT department, and every single one was forced on them by business units that argued they had to adopt them for competitive reasons," says Aldrich.

"It's critical for traditional training people not to play that same role. It didn't work for them, and it's not going to work for you."

Published: December 2000