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Where e-HR meets e-Learning
Case study: On the bus with the Co-op
Presenter: Karen Wilson, Project Manager, Snowdrop Systems
The key learning point from this case study for me was that
when Tony Blair gets up and bangs on about skills gaps and
digital divides, he isn't joking.
Estimable organistion though it is, The Co-operative Group
occupies a position at some distance from the white hot cutting
edge of retail technology. Many of its stores are small and
remote. When it came to introducing the particular e-HR system
featured in this engrossing case study, Snowdrop's consultants
found that not only had many of the Co-op's 25,000 staff never
used email before, a large number of them had hardly been
near a PC. Basic concepts such as the hyperlink were not commonly
understood.
It was a case of baby steps - albeit baby steps taken at
speed: gasps issued around the auditorium at the 4-month timescale
(no four-year TNA here).
This was a very much a training-focused implementation, the
driver for which was the merger of two bodies with distinct
operational structures, the Co-operative Wholesale Society
and the Co-operative Retail Society, to form the Co-operative
Group. The merger had led to the appointment of 31 Regional
Training Officers, with a paper-based system established for
reporting and communications. The essence of the project was
putting this paper-based system online.
Fountain, a module of Snowdrop's suite of software solutions
for e-HR (note the tree-hugger-friendly titling there) was
the system used to do this. Fountain deals with training administration
and employee development, and has workflow tools which in
this case were used to enable the online administration of
the training incentive scheme.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, given the infrastructure and computer
literacy constraints mentioned above, very little of the Co-op's
training is e-learning. I asked Karen whether she had compared
the functionality of Fountain with that of a learning management
system such as Docent, to see what the overlap was. She hadn't,
next question please.
These infrastructure contraints also meant that the best
way of training the 31 RTOs in the use of the new training
administration system turned out to be a bus - a training-centre-on-wheels
equipped with 10 workstations and an onboard server. This
bus parked in the loading bays of the various regional specialist
training stores, from where the training was delivered.
Next>>>
Introduction
Hopkins and Markham: e-HR and change
Mark Doherty plays buzzword bingo
Case study: On the bus with the Co-op
SAP: What is the return on training investment
Conclusion
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