Carl Frappaolo of The Delphi Group believes every KM initiative falls into one or more of these four strategic categories:

1. Externalization – capturing business-critical information, from the specific responsibilities of each employee to best practices in each department. If something is already documented, there’s no need to re-invent it. Look at what people are doing well, figure out what makes them the best, capture the essence of what they know, and use it to help other employees do the same.

2. Internalization – storing and organizing captured knowledge so users easily can find what they need. Smaller companies may not need to do more than create shared folders at the server level and install desktop search tools. Others might choose to capture and share knowledge through intranet portals, group message boards, or a wiki, which is a collaborative Web application allowing users to create, add to and edit each other's content. For the fastest, most efficient classification and search, larger companies can adopt a document management system enabling users to share, search and collaborate on documents and projects across groups of all sizes, from small teams to large departments.

3. Cognition – making the recording, classifying and storing of information an integral part of business processes. Technology can play a key role by automating steps or decisions. For example, when your customer call center operators check a “complaint” box in their call logs, the appropriate manager can receive an e-mail alert providing early warning about problems needing prompt attention.

4. Intermediation – using technology such as e-mail, instant messaging and live chat to help people work together efficiently and promptly. Most people still communicate one-on-one, and even with needed documentation readily available to employees, it’s likely most still will contact someone to verify it or check to validate that it’s the latest and greatest, so it is important to identify the source of the information and how to interact with that person.

  Regardless of the size of an organization or the categories of its KM initiative, a set of basic definitions apply:

§            Knowledge management is a disciplined approach to gathering, encoding, organizing and distributing an organization's information. It encompasses the management of content as well as corporate education and training.

§            Knowledge worker refers to an employee whose role relies on his or her ability to find and use knowledge.

§            Content management system describes that part of a knowledge management system that enables an organization to selectively gather, encode, organize and distribute information.

§            Informatics is a term used in a variety of ways. Some regard it as the study of the impact that technology has on people. Some take a broader view and consider it to be the science of information and information technology. Others regard it as being broader still, referring to the creation, recognition, representation, collection, organization, transformation, communication, evaluation and control of information in various contexts.

§            Data mining is a technique for analyzing data in very large databases and making new connections between the data to reveal trends and patterns.

§            Organizational learning is a company or team’s deliberate attempt to increase the knowledge base of its members, whether through ad hoc learning episodes or formal training programs.

§           E-learning leverages the power of the Internet to create, host, distribute, assess and track learners' absorption of Web-based curricula and other online learning initiatives.

§            Learning management system is that part of a knowledge management system that administers learning programs. It includes registering people for training programs, scheduling, course delivery, tracking and reporting.

§            Learning object is a discrete chunk of information codified by a proprietary software program. Learning-object technology holds that knowledge can best be communicated when broken down into learning objects. An online tutorial about a new product, for example, might consist of several learning objects that convey the message in easy-to-grasp increments. A learning object can be re-used in endless configurations, and the information it holds does not need to be rewritten for different applications. Its small size makes it easy to update, so in theory it always should contain the latest available information.

§            Taxonomy refers to a hierarchical structure used for categorizing a body of information or knowledge, allowing an understanding of how that body of knowledge can be broken down into parts, and how its various parts relate to each other. Taxonomies are used to organize information in systems, therefore helping users to find it.

§            Storytelling is the use of stories in organizations to share knowledge and help learning. Stories can be very powerful communication tools and may be used to describe complicated issues, explain events, communicate lessons learned, or bring about cultural change.

§            Balanced scorecard indicates a business model developed by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton to measure organizational performance against both short- and long-term goals. The balanced scorecard is designed to focus managers' attention on those factors that most help the business strategy: financial measures, measures for customers, internal processes and employee learning. Some organizations have used the balanced scorecard model in setting and measuring knowledge management strategies.

§            Knowledge mapping is a process to determine where knowledge assets are in an organization, as well as how knowledge flows operate in the organization. Evaluating relationships between holders of knowledge will then illustrate the sources, flows, limitations and losses of knowledge that can be expected to occur.

§            Communities of practice are networks of people who work on similar processes or in similar disciplines, and who come together to develop and share their knowledge in that field for the benefit of both themselves and their organization(s). They may be created formally or informally, and they can interact online or in person.

§            Double-loop learning contrasts with single-loop learning, which involves using knowledge to solve specific problems based on existing assumptions and often based on what has worked in the past. Double-loop learning goes a step further and questions existing assumptions in order to create new insights.

§            Knowledge audit is a method of reviewing and mapping information in an organization. An information audit looks at such aspects as what information is needed, what information currently exists, where it is, in what forms, how it flows around the organization, where there are gaps and where there is duplication, how much is it costing, what is its value, how it is used, etc.

§            Lessons learned are concise descriptions of knowledge derived from experiences, that can be communicated through mechanisms such as storytelling or debriefing, or summarised in databases. These lessons often reflect on “what we did right,” “what we would do differently,” and “how we could improve our process and product to be more effective in the future.”

RESEARCH

Loosely described, knowledge management is an entity’s formalized approach to assessing and analyzing its information needs and then developing solutions to gather, codify, organize and distribute information to people within – and sometimes outside – the organization.

Though a relatively new organizational industry, knowledge management has matured so rapidly in the past decade that its practice – at least on some level – is a foregone conclusion in most businesses, however small or large. In an address to the 2005 International Conference on Innovations in Information Technology, M.M. Nadeem of National University in San Jose, CA, reported that the global knowledge management market would reach $8.8 billion by the end of the year; the market for such KM business applications capabilities as CRM will reach $148 billion by the end of 2006; and in the same timeframe KM will save $31 billion in annual re-invention costs at Fortune 500 companies.

One key question now is whether your organization has a chief knowledge officer (CKO) or chief learning officer (CLO) . . . and what he or she really does.

A corporate phenomenon introduced in the late 1990s, CKOs and CLOs cropped up at large companies like Pfizer Inc., Coca-Cola Co. and Monsanto Co. Some of them installed innovative computer systems to help them pursue the newly dubbed “knowledge management.” Then came the collapsing stock market, corporate belt-tightening and a backlash against technology, all of which prompted many companies to scrap knowledge management posts. For example, Monsanto, which appointed a chief knowledge officer in 1997, opted not to fill the post when the officer was promoted to another position.

Stephen J. Andriole, a consultant at Cutter Consortium in Massachusetts, says more than 25 percent of Fortune 500 companies had CKOs during the height of the knowledge management boom. He estimates that fewer than 20 percent of top companies have a CKO or CLO today.

Yet M.M. Nadeem, in his 2005 comments, noted that British Telecom’s sales team generated $1.5 million in new business based on briefings from a new KM system. Further, Nadeem said, Shell Oil’s CKO reported that data comparisons of exploration sites to known sites enabled them to drill and test three fewer wells per year, saving $20 million in drilling costs and an additional $20 million in testing costs for each well, for an annual saving of $120 million.

A CKO is an organizational leader, states Wikipedia, responsible for ensuring the organization maximizes the value it achieves through “knowledge.” CKO is not just a re-labelling of the title chief information officer – the CKO role is much more broad and includes functioning as a change agent. CKOs can help maximize an organization’s returns on investment in knowledge (people, processes, intellectual capital); exploit their intangible assets (know-how, patents, customer relationships); replicate successes; share best practices; enhance innovation; and minimize knowledge loss after organizational restructuring.

CKO responsibilities include developing an overall framework that guides knowledge management in the big picture; actively promoting the knowledge agenda within and beyond the company, sometimes against cynicism or even open hostility; and overseeing the development of the knowledge infrastructure (which today extends beyond intranet portals and databases to podcasts, blogs, wikis, remote sensing and virtual environments).

But industry pundit Rod Boothby of Innovation Creators begs to differ with Wikipedia, calling its CKO definition already outdated. Simply put, says Boothby, the job of the chief knowledge officer is to empower knowledge workers. Few CKOs, he asserts, actually empower: “Today, knowledge workers write once, and cut and paste often.” The new knowledge worker needs to be an innovation creator, and sparking and implementing that creativity is the job of the CKO.

A COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH TO KM

Embedded in the KM matrix is a cross-section of solutions. Some are highly targeted, such as software overlays that enable marketers to graphically present the contents of a relational database. Customers, for example, can be visually grouped by an array of sales parameters such as industry and geography.

Other elements might take a broader approach, providing templates where the resident marketing experts can load their expertise into a central database accessed by the rest of the team. Of all the solutions offered, those that merge content management with organizational learning are among the most powerful.

In a marketing environment, tacit information is elicited from marketers and then articulated through its knowledge management systems. A fully integrated KM solution enables users to query its knowledge base and then presents only those nuggets of sales or marketing information directly related to the query.

Once this captured information enters the database, it can be pushed to those who need to know it right away, made available as a pull information resource on a just-in-time basis to marketers working in a client environment, and institutionalized through sales training programs. To avoid overloading recipients, it's essential to have a gatekeeper who determines which information goes to which individuals or groups within the organization.

Stephen Denning, former World Bank executive and author of the 2005 publication The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling: Mastering the Art and Discipline of Business Narrative, addresses second-generation issues in knowledge management. Once the seven KM basics – strategy, organization, budget, community, technology, incentives and measurement – needed to launch an enterprise-wide knowledge-sharing program are in place, he believes, then the organization can turn its attention to next-phase issues: measuring and accelerating the culture shift; integrating knowledge sharing with learning and research; streamlining the structures that were needed to launch the knowledge sharing program; strengthening the communities of practice; and improving the technology tools.

Denning’s approach sees knowledge sharing as an integral component of business strategy. Knowledge management is not separate from the rest of the organization, requiring a separate organization and staff.  Communities are the heart and soul of successful KM. The basics are aimed at weaving knowledge sharing into the fabric of the organization to enhance overall enterprise performance.

TRAINING SMARTER

At www.clomedia.com (Chief Learning Officer), a 2006 bylined article by David Austin, president and COO of Contextware Inc., discusses business drivers for real-time learning. Real-time learning can be defined as more than just a single instance of conveniently delivered training and testing, conveniently. As outlined by Austin, there are several key business drivers influencing the need for CLOs to look creatively at how they support their company’s workers. Most are relevant to every business and include:

§         Requirements to increase productivity.

§         The pace of change in business.

§         Corporate consolidation.

§         The emergence of generation Y.

§         Increased business complexity.

Take a look at just one of these drivers – corporate consolidation. Mergers and acquisitions likely will continue at a rapid rate for at least several more years as companies seek to increase market share, grow their technology footprint and expand into new markets. In a successful merger, employees must rapidly learn the acquiring company’s way of doing business and integrate with a sense of seamlessness. The CLO’s task is to ramp up 100, 1,000, even 10,000 or more new employees rapidly and effectively. This type of mass orientation and training is critical, and the faster key role-based information can be disseminated, the greater the positive impact on the business. Although existing methods allow for mass training either in person or virtually, the learning team can’t stop the entire workforce to take them through the curriculum, and even if it could, the capacity of employees to absorb content and put it to practical use can be limited.

The move to a real-time learning environment will look more like a paradigm shift and less like an evolution, says Austin, who goes on to explain that such a shift requires other elements to fall into place, including technology advancements, the on-boarding of generation Y, and expected retirement of baby boomers. Those charged with learning, workforce development and succession planning can initiate a few practical steps to take advantage of the changing environment for their businesses.

He cites a recent report from The Conference Board, showing a lot of room for growth: “Only 31 percent of survey participants say that HR executives in their companies have a strong understanding of strategic key performance indicators. Even fewer (25 percent) surveyed consider their HR leaders capable of linking people measures to such indicators.” But there has been progress, as evidenced by several other indicators, including the rise of the senior human capital officers to the C-suite, the outsourcing of non-critical HR tasks, and the shift of administrative tasks to the employee’s immediate manager. As needs change, the learning organization will want to add new competency requirements to mid- and senior-level management responsible for executing learning strategy. Competencies can be used to refocus the learning organization on what’s really required to be successful. CLOs will need to consider core competencies including business process experience, business planning, strategic planning, finance and other operational expertise.

In the real-time learning environment, workers will have access to information support as they are performing their jobs . . . not just when they’re in training mode. Real-time learning will connect these employees to the strategy, tactics, policies and procedures in the context of their jobs so they can accomplish increasingly complex and higher-value tasks with speed, quality and precision.

WHAT KM DOES FOR SALES AND TRAINING

In the January, 2006, issue of Chief Learning Officer magazine, Elliot Masie of The MASIE Center focused on the concept and practice of nano-learning, which is learning in really small chunks, much smaller than many of us envision. But even 90-second nano-learning experiences might someday be considered too long. When we combine workflow learning and nano-learning, said Masie, we might be on to something.

Consider nano-learning in the life of a company’s road warriors. These sales professionals spend a great deal of time traveling to customer sites, and it’s critical that they have an opportunity to enhance their skills just as their on-site colleagues do. Traditionally, learning experts have looked at the sales force as a great audience. They have lots of “windshield time” (or airline terminal time), so learning managers think “let’s hit them with long segments (15, 30, 45 minutes, maybe even an hour) of training while we have them as a captive audience.”

Today’s road warriors have a lot of priorities tugging at them that weren’t there just a few years ago. In the words of Bill Byron Concevitch,  author of Increasing the Odds: Sales Is Not a Numbers Game, it’s common to hear the following response from a sales professional:

“When I get in my car, I have to quickly make the decision of what to do first. Do I check e-mail to see if my customer responded to my earlier message, or do I pick up the message from my boss and call him back with an update? Do I finish up the proposal I need for tomorrow and send it off for binding, or do I research the company I am about to walk into to see if anything earth-shattering happened to their stock and valuation in the last few hours that could affect my ability to close the deal today?”

All of this, and they don’t have time for learning in their travels. Yet, in fact, they do have time for very pertinent learning if companies apply the same concept they do for agents and customer service specialists on the phone: nano-bites of workflow learning. Give sales professionals something, in just two to three minutes, that will help them on their next sales call, or even help when they return their boss’s call. In doing so, you’re providing real value to sales professionals, real impact to the bottom-line . . . and earning buy-in from the sales staff.

SPREADING THE WORD

Virtual collaboration can mean different things in different contexts. In one company, virtual collaboration can be as simple as e-mail and document sharing. In another company, it can be the combined use of asynchronous tools – such as calendars, links and bulletin boards – with synchronous tools such as Web, audio or video conferencing. Learning leaders might even incorporate learning content such as courseware, streaming media and narrated slideshows into any of these online tools. Virtual collaboration, no matter how you look at it, is any process that employs the use of technology to bring people together to achieve their goals.

For learning and development purposes, the most tricky part of the increasingly important collaborative learning strategy is understanding the elements in engaging people to learn, practice and apply their new knowledge and skills. Understanding what goes on in the learner’s head is only the first part. Understanding how learning happens throughout the organization is equally important. With four generations of workers currently in the workplace, learning and development professionals are challenged more than ever to create learning technology solutions that address different learning styles and values, and also to build learner competencies aligned with current and future organizational needs. When preparing for this challenge, consider:

• What is the overall benefit to the learner?
• What learning activities are you fostering off-line?
• How easy are your tools for workplace professionals to access and use?

With collaborative learning, there are measurable time savings in developing products, says Tanya Goodwin-Maslach of learning and development solutions consulting firm TalentSmart Inc., and in answering customer needs and distributing information. Global teams learn on the fly, apply new knowledge to products design and tap into each other for mentorship and expertise. But success in building virtual collaborative learning environments hangs on several key organizational issues. Infrastructure, usability and security parameters/practices will influence the ease of implementation and employability of the learning technologies you choose. Furthermore, the people issues – such as meeting norms, workgroup protocols and the incorporation of cultural differences – will be equally critical for successful implementation. Assess your readiness in terms of the following:

• Is the technology a value-add or simply an add-on?
• Is the virtual environment you’ve designed integrating other modes of learning?
• Will the technology be used for individual, team or enterprise-wide learning?
• What is the current culture of the organization?

It’s not the content, it’s the process. And part of that process is the ease with which individuals can participate. Start small and provide support, especially if some users are unfamiliar with the new territory. Finding a simple technology tool that can educate and create opportunities for relationship-building will improve both an individual’s level of engagement and your company’s chances of developing an even larger, more successful virtual learning community.

KNOWLEDGE ACROSS GENERATIONS

Social-network analysis – is it the next big thing? Based on the sociogram, invented 76 years ago by Jacob Moreno as a diagram of points and lines designed to illustrate relationships and social interactions among people, social-network analysis has attracted the attention of philosophers, sociologists and statisticians looking for ways to analyze human relationships. Author and independent learning consultant Jeanne Meister says the term “social-network analysis” was coined to refer to “the mapping and measuring of relationships between people, groups, organizations, computers or other information.” Some of the research on social network analysis, Meister adds, has made its way into popular culture, such as the notion of “six degrees of separation,” followed by the rise of social networking sites such as Friendster, LinkedIn, MySpace and Dodgeball – all raising the profile of social-network analysis, now being used by a growing number of organizations to turn social networks into a tool for innovation and knowledge management.

Masterfoods USA uses social-network analysis to understand how a group of scientists network with each other to improve their innovation process. In an online survey, Masterfoods asked the scientists to identify the 15 people they work with most closely and go to for advice. Masterfoods then was able to map this network of scientists and examine how they were working and how to increase innovation.

With social-network analysis, there is a growing recognition that what makes employees successful at work is their personal expertise combined with their networks of professionals inside and outside the organization. Capturing both best practices and employee networks creates the synergy of how work really gets done within an organization.

CLOs should begin to think of social-network analysis as one component of a total knowledge management solution. For example, when an aircraft manufacturer was concerned about the potential loss of intellectual capital of its senior engineering staff, the company used social-network analysis to identify the community of product design engineers “at risk for retirement in the next five years.” This led to the creation of a formal mentoring network based around various areas of expertise. The effort increased the rate of advancement of the most talented engineers by 50 percent over existing mentoring programs and helped mitigate risk of lost institutional knowledge.

The program started with a business owner who was able to estimate that the dollar value of the lost knowledge among soon-to-retire product design engineers was more than $1 billion. That got the attention of C-level executives who approved the creation of a pilot program. Social-network analysis is one tool to help solve the brain-drain increasingly facing all organizations as the first baby boomers turn 60 in 2006.

ASSESSING KNOWLEDGE CAPABILITIES

Is knowledge integrated into YOUR business strategy? Management Information Systems professor Jim McKeen, director of The Monieson Centre for knowledge-based enterprises at Queen's University School of Business in Canada, and Michael Zack, Fulbright Chair at Queen’s, offer this checklist of 10 critical capabilities your enterprise needs to stay competitive in the current knowledge economy:

1.        Does your organization explicitly recognize knowledge as a key element in its strategic planning exercises?

2.        Does your organization benchmark its strategic knowledge against that of its competitors?

3.        Has your organization developed a knowledge strategy that maps knowledge to value creation?

4.        Is your organization able to identify internal sources of expertise?

5.        Are your employees valued for what they know?

6.        Does your organization look for opportunities to experiment and learn more about customers, products, technologies and internal operations?

7.        Does your organization encourage and reward the sharing of knowledge?

8.        Do you have effective internal procedures for transferring best practices throughout the organization?

9.        Is the knowledge management group a recognized source of value creation within your organization?

10.     Does your organization exploit external sources of knowledge effectively, including customer knowledge?

A concept has fully arrived when cutting-edge thinkers begin to debunk it. Such is the case with KM in futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler’s 2006 release of Revolutionary Wealth, a penetrating look at how tomorrow’s wealth will be created, and who will get it and how. Twenty-first century wealth, in the Tofflers’ perspective, is not just about money and certainly can’t be understood through industrial-age economics. Just as Alvin Toffler did in his1970 best-seller Future Shock and in The Third Wave in 1980, the team looks at life and business with astonishingly fresh eyes and shocking candor, taking on unexpected cultural icons.

“By accelerating change,” they write, “we also speed up the rate at which knowledge becomes obsoledge. [sic.] Unless constantly and ruthlessly updated, experience on the job becomes less valuable. Databases are out of date by the time we finish them . . . With every passing semi-second, the accuracy of our knowledge about our investments, our markets, our competition, our technology and our customers’ needs diminishes. As a result . . . companies, governments and individuals today base more of their daily decisions on obsoledge – on ideas and assumptions that have been falsified by change – than ever before.”

Companies organize their “knowledge management” programs, “knowledge assets” and “intellectual property,” yet with all the numbers crunched – according to the Tofflers – no one knows what obsoledge costs business and government in the form of degraded decision-making. “Even more important,” they add, “are changes in our knowledge about knowledge and in the way knowledge is organized, with long-standing disciplinary divisions going up in flames.”  

BEFORE YOU START, A CHECKLIST

Perhaps. But current knowledge approaches and tools aren’t going away in the foreseeable future, and business leaders in unprecedented numbers and intensity are in pursuit of KM best practices.

The temptation – and danger – of knowledge management is a sense that every piece of information is equally valuable. The most counter-productive thing you can do is try to capture and automate everything.

Rather, start building your knowledge management strategy by determining and prioritizing what you most need to know. Use what some experts call the “criticality factor” – whether failing to document something could lead to a business loss.

From there, set goals and develop a system for measuring your success in attaining them. You may be wanting to answer customer requests twice as fast, minimize costs by a certain dollar figure, or just save your staff the time they once spent looking for information that now is at their fingertips. When you've set goals, you’re ready to explore which strategies will help you reach them.

When evaluating knowledge management software and training solutions, organizations might want to cover the following points:

1. Can the solution integrate pre-existing knowledge content and training material?
2. Does it have an open architecture so that other vendors’ e-learning software and hardware products can be integrated?
3. Does it publish to several output media, such as online outlets, print, CD and DVD?
4. Does training allow for the possibility of both classroom and virtual instruction?
5. Can online training assess the user’s familiarity with a subject and adjust the curriculum accordingly?
6. Are the rapid content development tools easy to understand and use?
7. Does the solution incorporate learning object technology?
8. Can the system be accessed through personal wireless devices anytime-anywhere?
9. Does it include a security feature to ensure information is disseminated only to those who need it?
10. Is the solution easy to maintain?

CASE HISTORY

An organization’s valuable e-learning can extend beyond its employee base. When the Lucent Technologies VitalSuite team in Sunnyvale, CA, wanted to improve its customer training, focus was placed on improving the quality, availability and accessibility of courses. Learnframe, Utah-based developer of knowledge, e-commerce and e-learning infrastructure technologies, provided a 21^st-century solution.

To enhance customer training, the Lucent product training group chose to implement Web-based product training for its VitalSuite portfolio – a family of software products enabling enterprise and service provider networks to measure, monitor and manage their business processes. The goal of the VitalSuite Web-based training (WBT) project was to offer customers an alternative to classroom-based training. The Lucent team sought to develop WBT, based on its existing instructor-led training (ILT), that was easy to construct, implement and maintain using internal resources. The primary team in the development of the WBT was the information delivery organization within the VitalSuite group, which consisted of instructors, courseware developers, documentation writers and managers.

Because of resource constraints, two outsourced vendors were selected to fulfill the objectives. The first vendor was needed to host the WBT and provide the e-commerce and reporting capability to support the e-learning portal. Learnframe was selected as Lucent's Web portal vendor because its staff understood the need to implement a solution that could be maintained with minimal support by the internal training group. Learnframe's training engine Pinnacle supported whatever courseware Lucent could provide with minimum coding or customization. Learnframe also provided the ability to add third-party WBT courses to the list of VitalSuite courses, allowing for flexibility if Lucent chose to provide students with WBT on related technologies. In addition, Learnframe’s training portal was easily adapted to the look and feel of Lucent VitalSuite products.

The second vendor was the source of a programmed template with which non-programmers could build training modules. Trozzo Interactive Design of San Francisco, showing understanding of the model the VitalSuite team wished to create, was chosen and worked closely with the group to build a template that was easy to use and provided expansion capabilities.

The primary instructional delivery method for training customers on VitalSuite products remains its five-day ILT, which is presented via interactive lectures using slides with notes, software demonstrations and hands-on lab activities via a closed network. Because of the highly flexible nature of the products, ILT was selected to satisfy customer-specific training needs. The Web-based training was created as an alternative for customers who did not have access to ILT.

With the ILT created in Microsoft PowerPoint, the decision was made to use the slide presentation format to allow a quick conversion to WBT. A Macromedia Flash template was developed internally that could convert the PowerPoint slide images into a Web-based presentation with audio, flexible navigation and some online resources such as a glossary and other reference documents. The interactive media vendor crafted a template that could be populated with content quickly and without the need for additional programming. The template also allowed the team to test the WBT modules. Once the template was created, a streamlined process was developed to port the ILT to WBT.

In the process of streamlining the Web development, the team experimented with some commercially available media tools, but PowerPoint provided features that allowed for expanding the module presentations, adding scripts for audio and tracking of each slide in an environment where frequent changes were common practice.

To batch-process more than 1,000 images and convert them into a Web-appropriate format, a shareware tool was used. The presentation engine was built as a template in Macromedia Flash 5.0. Using Flash to run the WBT also enabled the use of a high-quality audio file format for the scripted audio. An additional benefit was that Flash movies would simultaneously run and load in the background. Movies were tested online at speeds as low as 40Kbps to ensure customers could use the training from a modest-performing 56K line.

With some minor programming, Learnframe’s Pinnacle was able to run the WBT modules and collect back-office data. Learnframe worked with Trozzo to pass information between the training template and Pinnacle. Once these final program changes were made, each WBT module was tested on a Learnframe staging server while the final site went through the testing and approval process. Three months after making the decision to offer customers an e-learning option, Lucent launched its 10-hour, VitalSuite WBT.

With Learnframe, Lucent gives customers the flexibility and convenience of anytime-anywhere, self-paced access to its VitalSuite 8.0 product training. Lucent has greater control over course content, which can be updated instantly, providing customers immediate access to the latest material. Lucent also has the option of providing a full range of courses on related technologies created within the company or by a third-party vendor. Learnframe’s open architecture enables VitalSuite trainers to migrate existing courses online in a matter of days, and its reporting capability provides up-to-date status for trainers to monitor activity on the WBT and generate regular reports.

MEASURING KM PROGRAMS