Epic show report
e-learnexpo 2004 Paris
January 2004
Report by Donald Clark, CEO, Epic Group plc
First conference of the new year in misty Paris, the 9th E-learning
expo, the fourth held in Paris. This was a small conference in a big
conference hall. Was it worth attending? Only if you were after buying
Saba or Docent LMS, as the conference was dominated by LMS sales talk.
It's quicker to call them up as they'll come to you! Very much smaller
than Berlin Educa and far less useful in terms of breadth and depth
of content.
Case studies
British Telecom
Cable & Wireless
Royal & Sun Alliance
Schindler Group
Best of the rest: B&Q, Tim Neill, LMS fever
hits Paris, Andy Sadler
British Telecom
James Deadman of NETg told how BT needed to rationalise the business,
reduce debt, divest and reduce costs. Docent is the LMS and the
learning requirements included the reskilling of field engineers.
Wanted to centralise their e-learning purchases. 86% of field managers
have achieved IT literacy targets around ECDL. Material was also
available through LeanBT to the family. Unbelieveable success according
to James, but then again he's a NETg salesman!
Cable & Wireless
This case study was different. Mike Booth explained how they've
introduced the rapid development of e-learning in Cable & Wireless.
With a Docent LMS deployed internationally, integrated with SAP,
they have a mixed strategy of commissioning work and doing simpler
things in-house. They wanted to do things that were business focused
with low cost development of content that was fully compliant with
their LMS interoperability standards. Their criteria for the tool
were:
- Ease of use
- Assessment
- Interoperability
- Compatibility with desktop
- Handle legacy content
- Interactivity
- Costing model
- Compatibility with vendor IPR
More than one tool was selected. What they found was an immature market.
Some tools were less sophisticated but easy to use, others sophisticated
but difficult to use. With only three people in e-learning team they
had to keep things tight. This meant a strict five step process:
- Identify business need
- Super-user identified with licence
- Develop course with feedback
- Course goes through QA process
- Course launched
- Evaluation
A sensible and pragmatic approach and welcome break from the LMS hard
sell.
Royal and Sun Alliance
Andy Wooler followed up with another practical talk for those
who are thinking about buying an LMS. He started by rightly showing
how most LMSs have LCMS functionality and vice versa (administration,
testing etc). In other words, there's little difference between
the two. His second point was that there is no real difference between
knowledge management and learning. Quoting Nonata and Takeuchi from
The Knowledge Creating Company, he outlined the now familiar model
of person to person, person to group etc.
But it was Andy's hints and tips that were most useful:
- Check what functionality you already have through Lotus Notes
etc.
- Don't imagine you can be like Cisco - not everyone has the
bandwidth
- Budget for cost of deployment: can be 50-100% more than the
LMS cost
- Do background research
- Engage external consultants
- Understand your IT architecture - a real must
- Engage your IT community now
- Understand the standards
- Have clear aims - if you automate chaos all you get is organised
chaos
- Understand the difference between configuration and customisation
- Prove functionality works as desired - it often doesn't
- Test in your environment, don't take their word for it
- Understand that this is a marriage, not a one-night-stand
- Use standard plan for the RFP
- Do financial due diligence - he was especially emphatic on
this one
- Make full use of reference site visits (one company was same
reference site for four of the vendors)
- Ask, 'If you were doing this again, would you use them again?'
- Pilot where possible
By the way - he bought Saba.
Schindler Group
Marion Blanc explained how we had all come to the hall via Schindler's
escalators (I was about to ask if they did lifts - Schindler's Lift
- get it?) Schindler is a Swiss based company, the leading escalator
company in the world with 40,000 employees. It has grown through acquisition
and there was a need to standardise process and structures. As they
use SAP they had an enormous training task (this one's no joke). Their
research showed that 57% of SAP customers did not believe they had
achieved a positive ROI. This worried them, so they took the training
seriously.
European harmonisation was not easy. Scenario based learning worked
well, showing features in context and on the job. Individual tutors
helped users relate training to their own jobs. Consistency was
vital across all 14 countries as was flexibility and speed of deployment.
The SAP LMS was used then tutoring, authoring etc. Interwise was
used as a virtual classroom. Ultimately a blended learning solution
in 12 languages with classroom kits.
Best of the rest
B&Q
Steve Mackenzie talked about blended learning and was honest enough
to admit that they were getting places on this, but still not 10/10.
This was a good, honest presentation that resisted the 'we're great
and all is well' approach. A Docent house, but largely for tracking
as they don't have the bandwidth for delivery.
Tim Neil
Tim gave an entertaining talk about the importance of quality
content. Hear, hear. It was refreshing to see some real content,
as opposed to software that supposedly manages content. He had put
together a demo showing fault finding on an old first world war
boiler. This confused me. Why spend many nights, as he claimed,
building a demo, as opposed to showing the real work he's done.
That said, he hit all the right spots - learn by doing, surprise
the learner and so on.
LMS fever hits Paris
So far so good, then things got rather strange. We got two heavyweight
sales presentations from Saba and Docent. It's been years since
I'd been to a conference with such overt selling in the conference
hall. Both trotted out their extensive client list and benefits,
Bobby Yadazi, Chairman and CEO of Saba, neatly dodged my question
on cost by feeding back the costs of NOT BUYING Saba. My rough arithmetic
showed that you'll pay £1 million excluding integration costs. At
this point I dozed off.
Andy Sadler
One last word for a good presentation from Andy Sadler (IBM).
He wisely resisted the IBM heavy sell and focused on what he called
embedded learning or workplace learning. In fact he called for a
blurring of work, life and learning. On this he did a good job.
I thought the IBM produced Flash movies were a little salesy, but
at least Andy had the good grace to turn off the obviously heavy
sell at the end of each movie.
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