EVONIR

Evolving Into the Future

nschello — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 15:59:10 +0000

We Make Information Valuable!

nschello — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 15:58:27 +0000

Startup – Close Up- EVONIR

evon1185 — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 21:26:33 +0000

New Orleans City Business

POSTED: 11:52 AM Tuesday, March 13, 2012
BY: Jennifer Larino, Staff Writer

Editor’s note: The Startup Close-Up profile introduces readers to new companies in the New Orleans area. Make sure to cast your votes at the end of the profile as whether you think the company will succeed in the long run.

The Evonir staff, from left: Richard Exnicios, Ken Bagot and Clayton White. (photo by Frank Aymami)

Business: Evonir
Headquarters: New Orleans
Employees: 7
Established: September 2009

Product: Evonir’s flagship software is a learning management platform that helps the military and other large employers offer access to on-the-job training from any device. The startup has also developed software that helps police departments manage details.

Founders: Ken Bagot, 41, spent nearly 20 years in the medical equipment sales industry, selling powered wheelchairs and custom technology solutions that helped children and adults with disabilities access computers and other communications devices.

Bagot also founded Maestro Home Automation in 1999, a home automation startup that failed to get off the ground during the 2001 recession.

The Pitch: Large organizations such as the U.S. Army regularly train thousands of employees, but most rely on a disorganized array of equipment manuals, time-intensive classes and other incompatible formats to get the job done.

In many cases, training is not available on mobile devices.

Evonir’s Training Resource Assistance Portal (TRAP) software platform allows mobile access to training videos, text and audio on devices such as the iPhone and iPad. The software also tracks when users complete training and what training formats are most viewed.

Evonir is now targeting the military with its TRAP software. One envisioned use is training when troops receive new weapons.

“The goal is to distribute information all at once and efficiently, not to say, ‘Let’s schedule a class and in six months, we’ll be able to rotate through six sets of 100 people, and we’ll have 600 people trained eventually,’” Bagot said.

Traction: The U.S. Army licensed Evonir TRAP software for up to 8,000 soldiers in April. It’s using the software to train soldiers to use new intelligence technology.

Bagot said the company plans to target the private sector as well as other federal departments such as the

Transportation Security Administration.

The military will be a growth market well into the future, he said. The Army has a goal to improve soldier training by 2015 through dynamic virtual environments, online gaming and mobile learning.

“Part of the 2015 concept is for soldiers to be able to take snapshots on their phone and say, ‘Watch out for IEDs that look like this.’ They can put that content up and tag it, and they can put that in the database after it’s approved,” Bagot said.

Revenue: Evonir licenses its TRAP software on a per-seat basis, charging anywhere from $10 to $20 per trainee per month. The per-seat price scales depending on the number of seats included in a licensing contract.

Financing: Bagot and several partners have invested $350,000 in Evonir. The company also reinvested about $500,000 into product development after securing its contract with the Army.

Bagot said the pace of sales will determine whether the company seeks venture capital. He noted Evonir software is built to scale rapidly and, in turn, fund further development.

“That would be an ideal scenario, but we’re not ruling anything out,” Bagot said. “We just don’t see the need to have to go after money on the basis of need. If we go after any additional investment, it’s going to be to fund going after a much larger client or to fund growth on a larger scale that we can’t do with the current funds.”

Marketing: Evonir relies on military and federal trade magazines, trade shows and associations, such as the National Federal Contractors Association, to help familiarize the market with its TRAP software.

The company also added Tim Dunnigan, a retired Army officer, as director of military operations in October 2010 to help get its foot in the door with defense contracts.

Bagot said having a military liaison is key, particularly as the military consolidates training supervision into one department.

“Right now, it’s about aligning with the proper entity that has that training command,” Bagot said.

Competition: There are a number of large vendors offering learning management system software for the corporate sector, including San Francisco-based Taleo Corp., which Oracle purchased in February for $1.9 billion, and Gainesville, Fla.-based SumTotal Systems.

Bagot said Evonir’s advantage is that its software is mobile and compatible with outside management software.
“What we’re learning is that (other companies) don’t do well at playing with others. They either have their own content, or they’re locked down to specific types of content,” Bagot said.

“We also couldn’t find anybody currently that is both mobile and tracks and reports information for users.”

Challenge: Making sure sales keep pace and can fund software upgrades. Bagot said that’s a constant balancing act when federal contract sales cycles last six-months or more.

“The big thing is how quick technology changes. The software has got to be deployed in an efficient amount of time so that it maintains and continues to be on the cutting edge that we feel it is,” Bagot said.

Link to Original Article

Anatomy of a Lifelong Learner

evon1185 — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 21:20:46 +0000

Kellye Whitney - 3/19/12

Chief Learning Officer (CLO)

Using his own learning philosophy as fuel, Jim Dunn has built a strategic learning function at Texas Health Resources that is attracting notice from the business and the industry.

It all started with a performance review and a white lab coat. Jim Dunn, chief learning officer for Texas Health Resources (THR), began his career as a research scientist at Georgia Tech, where he ran several of the university labs involving toxicological testing. His next move was to Amoco Corp., where he became a regulatory toxicologist doing pretty much the same thing. Six years passed. Dunn was tired of the lab coat and only having mice for company, so when his supervisor learned he wanted to shed his solitary work environment and do something with people, he offered a new opportunity: as the director of HR.

“I had no training, no background, I didn’t even know what he meant. I said, ‘you mean like the personnel folks?’ He said, ‘Yeah, like the personnel folks.’ I said, ‘Dr. White, I appreciate that but I don’t know anything about it.’ He said, ‘I think you could learn it.’ I went from regulatory toxicologist to a director of HR with responsibility for 6,000 employees.”

The rest, as they say, is history. Dunn fell in love with HR, gravitating toward the learning and development and strategy aspects. He went from Amoco to running HR operations for former President Jimmy Carter, which was smaller in scale but large in learning.

“That’s where I really developed the skills, the importance of understanding and getting to know your employees. Of course, I could do that with 200 versus 6,000. From there I was pretty much sold that I was an HR OD professional. I was not going back to the sciences. By that time I had picked up multiple graduate degrees in HR and OD, and I was later recruited away from President Carter to work for the American Cancer Society. That’s where I spent the last 10 years before joining THR in ’08.”

Texas Health Resources is the largest nonprofit health care delivery system in north Texas, with some 23,000 employees serving roughly 6.2 million people in 24 acute care and short stay hospitals in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Before Dunn joined the team at THR’s Center for Learning and Career Development, he said the corporate learning entity was made up of astute trainers and facilitators.

They could engage an audience and provide all types of HR or clinically related training, but there was no strategy or alignment to organizational goals. In his first six months on the job, he took the company’s 10-year strategic plan and stripped it down to learning and development objectives, which had never been done before.

“The finance people were blown away because they typically look at learning and HR and other things as overhead, not necessarily as business drivers,” he said. “I spent a few months with the executive committee showing them that these learning objectives will bring as strong of an ROI as the clinical and financial objectives.

Now we sit within the center for learning with 10 clinical and non-clinical service lines.”

Some of the lines include instructional and curriculum development, measurement and evaluation and leadership development. Leadership development programs and services are designed to enhance the capability of the top 200, typically senior directors and officers, and include succession, 360 assessment and coaching. Management and professional development for general staff up to the director level, roughly 3,000 employees, is another service line which targets work and group dynamics, training, new manager assimilation, mentoring and more than 100 courses on things such as adapting to change, building teams and critical thinking for clinical and non-clinical leaders.

“The faculty of our Center for Learning is constantly scouring the environment to look at the latest techniques for both teaching and for the procedures that we do from a behavioral standpoint,” said Douglas D. Hawthorne, CEO of THR. “Jim is involved in many of our executive team meetings across the system to learn about new techniques, new learning opportunities. We come at it from a variety of ways in order to gain knowledge about how we want to advance the organization.”

Leadership development is one of Dunn’s favorite parts of his job, and while THR makes special provisions for its top 200, he said everyone in the organization has the capacity to demonstrate leadership and should be encouraged to do so because it’s a learned trait, not a title.

“You will have people who clean hospital beds who are leaders and have more to do with the perception of patients than the president of the hospital,” he said. “For me it’s always been a passion that more than just people with the title be developed. The ability to adapt to change, to motivate others, to have empathetic conversations with clients and patients, being involved in that process of elevating and raising the capabilities and competencies of others, for me, it’s great. Money is not the real motivation. It’s the reward of what you do with other people to build success in their careers.”

Having internal motivation and joy in one’s work is helpful when the industry is in flux, which health care is. Dunn said industry changes are his greatest challenge right now. A traditionally static fee-for-service model — get sick, go to the doctor, get treated, billed, then pay — is gone post-health care reform. Now hospitals have to take care of patients as they present themselves, ensure the quality of care and wrap prevention around that.

Dunn said some 34 million people who are uninsured will have insurance by 2013. To take care of those people, increase quality and increase physician and clinical workloads without practitioners suffering burnout creates a prime opportunity for learning, and leadership development in particular, to have a strategic impact. To that end, Dunn and his team have developed the THR Leadership University, a comprehensive corporate university for clinical, leadership and management staff. The university offers THR’s first succession planning groups to identify next-generation leaders as well as high-potential leadership groups.

“You cannot name an aspect of this huge 24-hospital system where my folks are not working somewhere, driving and building the talents of others,” he said.

Dunn and his team also have developed the THR Leader Behavior Model (Figure 1), a six-pillar construct that directs curriculum development for the top 200 THR leaders, who have 24 hours of required training per year. “Let’s say there are 30 outcomes on the business plan. In order to make those happen there’s going to have to be a change in leader behavior because if what we’re doing today is not delivering those outcomes then we need to do something different.”

“He has taken the organization through a nine-month research process to understand and define what are the competencies of a true Texas Health Resources Leader,” Hawthorne said. “Most important were the interviews with our own leadership across the organization to talk about what competencies they feel are critical to be an effective leader. Once that research was done, Jim and his team created the context or material to advance these six pillars to help advance THR leaders going forward.

Now we have people from all over the country coming to study the development of our leadership training and our model.”

Dunn, an avid student and teacher as well as practitioner, doesn’t seem surprised at the attention his efforts have drawn in the industry. He said he will never allow himself to become so comfortable having a certain title, income or even respect from his THR peers and CEO that he stops learning himself. He said there’s too much riding on his continued momentum in the business, and it goes against his personal motivation and philosophy around continuous learning.

“When I get in conferences and I hear the learning leader say, ‘my CEO or my leadership, they just don’t get it,’ what I interpret that as is, they don’t get it because you don’t help them get it. The only way I can help my leadership get it is to stay developed and as well-read in the business as they are. I read the same books the CEO and the leadership teams are reading. I’m looking at the same positive or negative trends and performance in the organization, and I’m thinking about the things that keep them up at night. Then I go back into my learning world to find what I have in my arsenal of learning and development that will assist them.”

Dunn said too often within HR, learning and some of the other operational areas leaders become really good at what they do — excellent finance people, compelling trainers or people-savvy facilitators — but however fabulous or expert people become in a particular area, without a broader organizational perspective they will remain outside of the business.

“I know every year my focus is going to be very different,” Dunn said. “For example, nothing that I shared with you of the past three years — you never heard me say the word physician or physician leadership development because we focused primarily on nursing, ally health and general staff. In 2012 one of our two driving business priorities is the alignment between physician leaders and non-physician leaders within the health care system. My focus this year will be on building great physician leaders. Have I done this before? No. Am I excited about doing it? Absolutely, and I have immersed myself in physician leadership and the constructs of being a physician: how they’re trained in school, how that’s very different from how the MBA and MHA types are trained in school, and how you bring these two together. I’ve taken it on as my task because that is where we are right now.”

Whatever his focus is at any given time, Dunn said measuring the impact of learning and development efforts on THR’s strategic business plan is critical. The measurement service line within the corporate university was built to ensure that ROI is more than just smile sheets and compliments. In the past he said when he asked his staff, “how do we know this training effort is working, they gave answers like, Dr. So and So loves it,” and other people-related feedback. But being asked to come back and deliver a program multiple times doesn’t necessarily mean its adding value to the business.

Dunn deliberately brought in a Ph.D. industrial organizational psychologist not from health care, but from general industry because he said he knew the person would bring a different perspective. THR also does its own needs assessment and has created a 360 assessment tool in house that allows real-time leader effectiveness measurement. “At the end of the year we can tell each of our top 200 leaders how they’ve progressed in their role and in their behavior around [the THR behavior model] constructs,” he said.

THR is five years into its 10-year strategic vision, and Hawthorne said the center for learning has done much to advance the organization and to create a value proposition for the organization to serve patients, their families, the community and THR physicians and staff.

“The center for learning under Jim’s leadership helps provide some of the materials to allow us to keep this vision in front of our employees each and every day,” he said. “But more importantly Jim is an individual who understands our mission and our vision and values and lives those. It’s not just about teaching, it’s also about learning, and he’s constantly involved in doing that. We believe the Center for Learning and our university are truly things that evolved through Jim’s expertise, knowledge and commitment.”

Kellye Whitney is managing editor of Chief Learning Officer magazine. She can be reached at kwhitney@CLOmedia.com.

Link to Original Article

How to Facilitate True Learning Transfer

evon1185 — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 21:06:25 +0000

Raed S. Haddad - 2/8/12

Chief Learning Officer (CLO)

Learning is more than the acquisition of knowledge — it is also about its application. CLOs must make learning stick to improve performance, productivity and bottom-line results.

In November 2010, Josh Bersin noted in his “Business of Talent” blog that the chief learning officer has a split personality and is actually three people in one: a chief culture officer, chief performance officer and chief change officer. But this leaves out one central role: the chief application officer.

While CLOs must ensure program offerings align with the business strategy and put an organization on a path toward change, none of this is attainable without a plan to make learning stick and improve performance, productivity and bottom-line results.

While there may not be someone with the title of chief application officer, a March learning transfer study conducted by ESI International, a learning consultant, shows there are best practices that can help ensure learning transfer occurs within the organization.

Learning Failure Points

Learning transfer has been scrutinized by myriad studies over the years, including ongoing research by the American Society for Training and Development. The implicit hope within these discussions is that sending employees to training will transfer into the workplace and result in both quantitative — cost savings — and qualitative — productivity, job satisfaction — outcomes.

While organizations may take the time to prepare employees for a learning engagement, budget for development and even measure learning impact, many continue to struggle to support and achieve true learning transfer.

The Transfer of Learning Survey, which was designed to assess an organization’s success or difficulty in fostering a learning transfer climate, identified this gap.

The survey was completed by more than 3,200 learning and development-related managers and leaders in government and commercial institutions spanning multiple industries around the globe. Findings indicated five areas where chief learning officers miss the mark when it comes to learning transfer (Figure 1):

1. Making the case for change: Why embark on this development intervention? What is the expected outcome?

2. Managing expectations and motivating the learner: Learners should understand that the organization expects them to apply what is learned and is prepared to reward their efforts.

3. Expecting manager support: Managers should offer learning support through discussion and reinforcement.

4. Making learning relevant: Provide better context by customizing offerings, including more modalities and making them application oriented.

5. Defining and measuring business impact: Learning can enhance individual and team performance and have a significant impact on an organization’s strategic and financial goals.

Take Learning Transfer Pulse

Before attempting to improve a learning transfer program, assess the current approach. ESI’s survey shows many organizations overestimate the success of their transfer climate.

For example, when asked if they have a formal process or system to ensure learning is applied successfully within their organization (Figure 2), one-third of survey respondents — 32.8 percent — say they do not have a formal process or system. This means 67.2 percent believe they do have a formal process. Two-thirds — 67.6 percent — estimate they apply more than 25 percent of training knowledge on the job.

Yet when asked what they used to prove or measure their learning transfer estimate (Figure 3), the aforementioned two-thirds who indicated they either have a formal learning transfer process or estimate more than 25 percent of knowledge is applied on the job can’t back that up. Almost 60 percent say the primary method for proving or measuring this estimate of learning transfer is either informal/anecdotal feedback or a guess. This calls into question their certitude about having a formal learning transfer system.

Make the Case for Change

Before directing people to attend any kind of learning intervention, explain why they need to, what they should expect and what the organization expects. This is often the most neglected area that connects a learning program to the business strategy.

CLOs should put a strategic focus on employee development, and this means change management needs to be implemented in the following ways:

• Articulate the as-is state and the “problem” at all levels within the organization.

• Communicate the vision and reasons why a change in knowledge/skills/competencies is needed to support the company’s growth/future strategy.

• Enact change management processes as part of skills development along with associated interventions, coaching and performance support systems.

To motivate learners to apply what they’ve learned, the majority of the Transfer of Learning study respondents — 75.1 percent — said they make sure training supports the organization’s goals, followed by 57.3 percent who make sure the trainee has the necessary time, tools and investment for learning application. Only 20 percent indicate there is any financial reward or incentive.

Further, when asked what specific rewards are used to motivate employees to apply what they learned, almost 60 percent listed the possibility of more responsibility, followed closely by an impact on the HR/performance review. Organizations may have to re-examine their strategies to motivate a new, changing workforce when it comes to learning transfer. If monetary rewards are out of the question, organizations should consider offering moments that instill pride and serve as an incentive for an employee, such as a lunch with the CEO.

Expect Manager Support

The survey uncovers a lack of manager involvement and commitment after learning — 70.9 percent of those surveyed said the organization expects managerial support as part of the learning process (Figure 4). Yet, when asked what managers are expected to do to ensure learning transfer, 63.3 percent said managers formally endorse the program, while only 23.1 percent hold more formal pre- and post-learning discussions.

Securing manager support is selected as the second-most important strategy to ensure learning sticks. However, to ensure a successful work environment where learning leads to on-the-job application, managers must do more than simply endorse a program. They must have clear responsibilities and provide tactical support every step of the way, including developing a plan for learning transfer, holding formal pre- and post-learning discussions and ensuring post-instruction reinforcement. CLOs can help foster this involvement by formalizing and tracking manager involvement in assessing impact, challenges and catalysts to implement what was learned.

Organizations and their employees are leveraging an ever-expanding array of tactics to recall information learned during programs, thereby increasing their use of just-in-time tools to apply knowledge and skills directly on the job. At the same time, there is a steady, continued reliance on traditional post-course reports, assignments, discussions and on-the-job aids, and more flexible, community-based support is emerging, such as communities of practice, peer coaching and social networks.

To make learning relevant, where possible learning and development professionals should involve employees in program design and follow-up application, provide refresher courses, just-in-time follow-ups and go-to mentors for post-event reinforcement, and align learning with efforts to solve failure points or current state challenges.

There are varying ways to determine learning value, and much of that is determined by whoever is asked to define it. CLOs assess learning value differently. However, executives will expect learning results in one or more of the following outcomes:

1. Maximizes returns: Improves business results, grows revenue, earnings and cash flow and reduces operations costs.

2. Increases agility: Enables the business organization and operations to adapt to changing business needs.

3. Minimizes risk: Ensures continuity of internal business operations while minimizing exposure to risk factors.

4. Improves performance: Improves business operations performance end-to-end across the enterprise and increases customer and employee satisfaction.

To ensure learning results in true business impact, employees should understand that the organization or sponsor expects them to apply what is learned, and that there will be a learning impact assessment by collecting data from them and other stakeholders, such as clients. It’s important to set expectations up front on how to measure. Then, CLOs should implement a scalable, repeatable and non-intrusive way to collect predicted outcomes and validate impact.

For some, it’s difficult to see a direct link between learning and business impact. In today’s economic climate, that puts learning budgets at risk. However, by analyzing the learning transfer climate, and then working to address the five common failure points for learning application, value can be shown through concrete results, and thinking will shift from ROI to VOI — the value of investment.

Whether helping drive learning application individually or working with others throughout the organization to help accomplish this mission, the chief learning officer can close key gaps and assume the role of chief application officer with or without a formal title.

Raed S. Haddad is senior vice president of global delivery services for ESI International, a learning consulting company. He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

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Survey: Business Leaders Plan to Maintain, Increase Training Budgets

evon1185 — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 20:59:54 +0000

Camberley, U.K. — March 27, 2012

A staggering 93 percent of British business leaders plan to either maintain or increase their training budgets during the next year, according to research published by global e-learning company SkillSoft.

Further, the research highlights the importance that businesses place on their training needs, with just 3.6 percent of businesses planning to reduce their training budgets during the coming year.

The independent study, conducted by OpinionMatters on behalf of SkillSoft, took place at the end of November 2011 and involved telephone interviews with more than 500 CEOs.

The results revealed that 31 percent of businesses plan to increase training budgets by 10 percent during the next year. This figure rises to 41 percent in the sales and marketing industries and to 44 percent in the manufacturing industry.

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Saving America Money

evon1185 — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 20:56:41 +0000

Babak Salimi - 10/20/11

Chief Learning Officer (CLO)

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service saves millions of dollars, time and resources annually by using real-time, virtual collaboration technology.

Businesses are always looking for ways to save money, and government agencies are no exception. However, adjusting the routine to cut costs can be hard on employees. According to Lori Ann Jacobs, the virtual environment (VE) program coordinator at the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS), agencies don’t accept change easily. “We like to do it the way it’s always been done,” she said.

But sometimes change is necessary. In 1997, the government established executive order No. 12862 to set new customer standards and audit requirements for various government agencies, including the IRS. While adhering to this order, the IRS found that its national customer service call site phone assistors were not providing unified answers to tax questions. A review of the problem revealed large gaps in employee learning programs, but the IRS did not have the tools to implement an agency-wide system to address deficiencies.

Developing a Virtual Platform
During this same timeframe, the IRS began to implement an e-learning system. The organization developed an intranet interface to give employees access to asynchronous online training such as MS Office applications and various IT courses.

In 1999, U.S. President Bill Clinton issued another executive order, No. 13111, urging federal agencies to use new technology to improve employee training and productivity. The mandate required all government agencies to transition to an e-learning format by 2007.

That year the IRS acquired an online delivery tool to deliver synchronized learning using its existing infrastructure. However, the tool needed to be updated to train more than 26,000 revenue agents, revenue officers, tax specialists and customer service representatives, as well as 10,000 new employees hired for seasonal tax work. This was a daunting task, since all course content was produced on paper using traditional classroom delivery methodology.

The IRS identified various online instructional tools, delivery systems, training development tools and courses that could be taught electronically in a blended method. Officers knew they had to look for an all-encompassing e-learning collaborative system that would work for different users. For instance, of the 100,000 IRS employees, 22,000 had a handicap, ranging from mobility, to sight, to hearing. For any collaborative e-learning application to be productive, it needed to be accessible to everyone.

After researching the options, the IRS purchased 100 licenses for a collaboration product as its VE development tool and deployed it for Continued Professional Education (CPE) training for senior revenue agents, revenue officers and tax specialists in fiscal year 2000.

At first, many IRS employees were hesitant to try the new software and preferred the face-to-face interactions from on-the-job learning and in-company meetings. The majority of learners were used to a learn-by-doing environment, and they had a difficult time adjusting to the online learning approach.

Jacobs suggested the agency offer gifts as incentives for employees to try the new VE system. Those who were willing to use the collaboration environment for blended and synchronous training got free headsets, and the gifts garnered enough interest for the IRS to train a volunteer group of 50 employees. Each of the 50 people received 10 headsets to conduct synchronous training, introduce blended training and train the event managers within their divisions.

Progress Promotes Standards, Success
The incentives worked, and were one of several factors that enabled the IRS to adopt a synchronous collaboration system for learning and development. Factors such as the Office of Personnel Management’s repeal of training travel budgets also pushed federal agencies such as the IRS to consider e-learning options including online synchronous collaboration.

Like any new change effort, there were hiccups in the implementation of the virtual system. The IRS’ lockdown security environment posed a particular problem, as it required a directory on a user’s workstation be created to download files. Users were required to have administrative privileges to their desktop or laptop for this automatic action to take place. Then, when an IRS employee accessed the VE for the first time, all files could be downloaded and the individual could use the tool.

Once the system was installed, the agency saw immediate results. Traditional classroom instruction costs were reduced as more employees used the IRS’ VE for on-the-job training, CPE, new hire training and work-related meetings. Travel costs were decreased as well because employees could train in-house. In 2001, the IRS held 46 events using the virtual collaboration environment. More than 550 people attended, saving the IRS $140,968. In 2005, that number jumped to 3,941 events with 35,268 people attending, saving $22 million. As of January, the IRS has saved $251 million and held more than 68,048 learning events for 473,376 employees.

Training uniformity is no longer a problem as every employee receives the same messaging via VE. The program also enabled the IRS to put together presentations that could be repurposed year after year. In the past, presentations were often lost when an employee retired, which contributed to considerable knowledge drain.

The VE’s user-friendly interface helped employees ease into the new technology as one click of an embedded link played back an important development object, presented new exam strategies for revenue agents and officers or provided updates on last-minute changes to tax laws.

Employees began helping one another using the VE’s tools in creative ways that ultimately benefited the entire organization. Employees turned to the system first for answers to questions and guidance in solving issues, instead of flooding the IRS help desk with calls. Using VE an IT person could assist an employee by taking remote control of the person’s desktop while recording the session via Web conferencing. The employee could then save the e-meeting and share it with other employees experiencing the same problem, thus enabling employees to learn how to fix daily mishaps in a non-traditional way.

As more employees began to use the program, the IRS expanded its e-learning offerings again. In 2007, AT&T upgraded the IRS’ backbone network to support voice over Internet protocol (VoIP), photo sharing, streaming video and advanced audio programs. All IRS agents and officers had their workstations replaced with upgraded laptops, which gave them the capability to download recordings for later viewing, a kind of “just-in-time” training. The upgrade, coupled with the new laptops, enabled the IRS to increase learning flexibility.

Enterprise use of VE technology began in 2003. Currently, all IRS business units use it for technical training, CPE, new technology training, blended training and project meetings. During the past 10 years, the use of VE for meetings has grown, saving telephone conference costs by using the VoIP feature.

Adding It Up
By March 2011, the IRS had saved a quarter of a billion dollars by installing VE technology. It calculated that each person who uses VE saves the company $800. To attain this metric, the IRS calculated how much it cost for employees to travel to train for any position. It also examined reports, talked to employees and surveyed training organizations to see how much money was spent and how many employees they have to train. The IRS took into account students who didn’t have to travel for training, and thus counted every third student.

The agency’s e-learning program grows annually. Introducing new applications to exchange income, barter and trade over the Internet, the IRS ensures its agents, officers, tax specialists and taxpayer customer support personnel learn about these trends, their impact on taxpayers and on businesses. The agency started the program with one server. Today, it houses 11 production servers.

Last year, the IRS used VE technology for more than 28,000 events, nearly 50 percent of which were virtual meetings. In addition to traditional group meetings, it holds project meetings, strategy sessions, town hall gatherings and audit meetings using the e-learning system. These virtual events draw many more people than the IRS’ traditional meetings because of availability, convenience, accessibility and cost. Prior to implementation, meetings that attracted large groups of employees were often canceled because of budget. Now, not only does the new solution allow anyone to participate, it enables users to record their sessions for anytime playback. Participation ranges from 6,000 to 8,000 employees per month. In August 2010, the IRS saw record numbers of participation in the VE as more than 16,000 employees attended 2,693 events.

An elevated rate of user adoption facilitated success with the VE implementation. The user-friendly system helped employees get acquainted with the new technology without overwhelming or confusing participants. After originally rejecting the system, employees began to support it, and now e-learning VE is the top learning tool within the agency, more popular than asynchronous training delivered through the enterprise learning management system or person-to-person knowledge transfer using Microsoft Office Communications Server.

E-learning via VE saves the IRS time and resources, setting an example for other agencies to begin using new technology to improve and drive business and saving millions of dollars without making a comparable up-front investment.

Babak Salimi is senior director of marketing and collaboration at Saba Software. He can be reached at editor@CLOmedia.com.

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Recession Resilience

evon1185 — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 21:28:21 +0000

Victoria Ryan - 2/22/11

Chief Learning Officer (CLO)

HD Supply Utilities’ nine-month transformation from classroom to virtual learning delivery was required by the recession and a necessity for the company.

HD Supply Utilities is a major business for HD Supply, a multi billion-dollar wholesale distribution company providing a range of products and services to professional customers in the infrastructure, energy, maintenance, repair, improvement and specialty construction markets through 10 lines of business. HD Supply Utilities was one of the last to be hit by the recession, but in mid-2008, the effects were obvious. By November 2008, all classroom training was postponed, and the Utilities Learning Team (ULT) had to come up with a solution.

The ULT responded by capitalizing on HD Supply’s doing, learning, winning culture to build a competitive, differentiating learning structure leveraging talent to strongly position the company against its competitors. In August 2010, when a potential supplier stated during a webinar session that every program it offered had shifted from classroom to virtual in 18 months, ULT members looked at each other and gave the proverbial wink; they had executed the exact same project in less than nine months.

The economy tightened resources and staff, but learning did not diminish in importance — it simply evolved, as it has done since the ULT came into its own.

Learning Before the Recession
In late 2007, HD Supply Utilities had nearly 1,000 associates and no training program. President Rick McClure heard the counsel of Robert Joseph, vice president of HR, and others and built a learning team that would identify and train the skills needed to drive growth. “It’s not that I don’t believe in learning. I do. People I trust are telling me we need this. I’ve never needed a learning team to get it done before,” McClure said.

Over the next 24 months, the ULT grew. Each member had a combination of design, delivery and program management experience, and each had a primary focus — one on technology and operational excellence; one on sales and service; and one on leadership, team and organizational effectiveness.

To make a difference, the small team needed to reach associates located in more than 37 states, all of whom possessed varying degrees of willingness to learn. Then operations vice president Dean Witt’s suggestion to tap into field resources quickly developed into the Regional Learning Leads program — an internal, voluntary certification process associates can go through to become training liaisons.

Further, the team went from offering no training to offerings that include:

• Selling skills for outside sales paired with sales coaching skills for sales leaders and managers.
• Service skills for inside sales and branch operations.
• Technology skills.
• On-boarding and introduction to utilities.
• Business acumen programs, including finance, meeting effectiveness and project management.

The key to learning effectiveness was to identify the senior leaders who had a passion for learning and harness their field and functional talent. These leaders would support the learning team with design, subject-matter expertise, delivery, reinforcement, goal alignment and learning advocacy.

By November 2008, the impact of the recession had hit hard. Less than 60 days later, with hundreds of hours of training scheduled for delivery, all non-customer-facing travel budgets were reduced. It was a defining moment for swift, decisive action and a workable solution: Create a virtual delivery system to replace classroom training and do it within 12 months.

The virtual solution had considerable value. It would enable continued delivery of training that, when combined with strong leadership support, alignment with key initiatives and a cadre of field-based associates who doubled as learning leaders, truly made a difference in driving results and associate engagement.

Making It Work
The team conducted a rapid deep-dive analysis focused on people, process and technology. Internet searching, networking and brainstorming with suppliers was the focus, with a goal to guide the team on how to continually deliver training in new, innovative ways. The analysis went as follows:

People: ULT assessed learner readiness for virtual learning, and it was dauntingly clear that most learners had never taken a virtual class and most preferred classroom training.

Process: A review of existing best practices and supplier partnerships brought more questions than answers: How would the company’s before, during and after implementation approach be affected if it were to switch to virtual training? How would existing suppliers respond?

Technology: A quick needs assessment using best practices criteria made it clear that the team didn’t have what the experts suggested was necessary — including an LMS — but it had enough to get started, including programs such as AdobeConnect and Sametime.

The ULT had earned the trust and support of senior leaders and had the vision and passion to succeed in making the shift from 90 percent classroom training to 90 percent Web-based delivery in a short period of time. The learners were in full support, too, and willing to learn the clicks and more needed to engage in virtual delivery.

In March 2009, HD Supply Utilities’ first full-day session was delivered virtually from Orlando, Fla., to participants at two major branch locations in Wake Forest, N.C., and Mattoon, Ill. The group’s engagement was as strong at the end of the day as it was in the beginning because of planning done before the delivery — communication, logistics, establishing an on-site producer — and during the session — the use of no-cost re-purposed laptops pilfered from IT, inexpensive webcams and engaging instructors who had read up on virtual delivery best practices. The virtual program immediately became a draw for sales, field operations and functional leaders who saw learners emerge from training with an understanding of utilities key metrics and how to use them to make sound business decisions. As one senior sales leader said, “I’m called on less frequently now to make decisions because the team understands the impact of approving a non-budgeted expense.”

The research from training industry experts indicated that only highly experienced trainers should deliver virtual training and that they would need formal training to do so. Out of necessity, HD Supply Utilities’ approach defied this. Further, during the cuts, ULT had lost its sales trainer, so the company sought field sales leaders to share the responsibility. The four who took charge of this responsibility had never been trainers and lived in four geographically dispersed locations. However, they all shared a passion for learning, and each committed to and passed the certification process, all virtually delivered, to become Achieve Global sales trainers.

Today, the four sales trainers within HD Supply Utilities — Rob Adams, Greg Conte, Bill Lawyer and Shane Thompson — split the quarterly 18 hours of virtual delivery lessons on professional selling skills. Adult learning techniques are maximized for virtual delivery, including polling, chat, sub-conferencing and white boarding. This is supported with a learning structure that includes an aggressive attendance policy, learning pods — teams of three to four who support each other with coaching and feedback outside of formal learning — and a makeup process designed for user ease and efficiency. All of these elements have created a positive buzz about executing programs for a large audience with a small team.

Training Inclusion
In 2010, HD Supply Utilities reached a longtime goal of including customers, suppliers and alliance partners in its training. Although the learning management system (LMS) doesn’t readily support this, virtual delivery — combined with 5 percent classroom delivery — has made this possible. The benefits include alignment with the company’s doing, learning, winning culture and having a consistent language and approach to leadership, sales, service and partnerships.

In less than two years, HD Supply Utilities has seen its LMS become a more robust solution for scheduling, tracking and reinforcement. The collaborative partnership with the HD Supply Corporate Learning Team is helping to meet the goal of breaking down content into just-in-time chunks and to input and output decades of institutional knowledge, allowing the company’s learning strategy to grow.

HD Supply has a lean learning organization, but the company believes in and invests in learning. Dozens of associates across HD Supply are willing and passionately encouraged to provide learning subject-matter expertise, delivery and reinforcement. To support these, in 2010, the company implemented key metrics tracking the ongoing effects of selling skills training and margin improvement to ensure that learning is making a difference. A long-term study, which also began in 2010, is trending to show that many of those who complete the training are driving stronger gains in margin and revenue when compared to a control group.

Every class HD Supply Utilities delivers includes a Metrics that Matter evaluation using SurveyMonkey. On a 4.0 overall scale, Utilities Learning comes in at 3.7, with lower scores in the area of management support. The ULT has set its sights on raising that number in 2011 with a concerted effort — via a virtually delivered session — outfitting all managers on best practices to support and sustain learning effectiveness before, during and after training.

Victoria Ryan is senior manager of learning and organizational effectiveness for HD Supply. She can be reached at editor@clomedia.com.

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