Increasing the Strategic Value of a Learning …...Increasing the Strategic Value of a Learning...

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AMA Partners with futurethink to Launch Blended Program Series on Innovation Based on study findings released earlier this year that indicated that most organizations lack a formal structure to help develop innovation, business skills trainer the American Management Association (New York) has teamed up with innovation research and consulting firm futurethink (New York) to launch a series of programs that will include innovation seminars, Web-based programming and other resources and development materials.

See “AMA,” pg. 3

Increasing the Strategic Value of a Learning Organization: A Five-Step Process, Bersin SaysAs business demands changed over the last five years, learning organizations have struggled to keep pace, with obstacles like talent shortages and the changing education level of the current workforce often getting in the way of progress. Companies today that would like to increase the strategic value of their learning organizations can follow a five-step process that includes among other things creating a planning process and re-evaluating the role of their chief learning officer, according to Josh Bersin, president and founder of research and advisory firm Bersin & Associates (Oakland, Calif.).

See “Bersin,” pg. 5

Challenger Provides Clinical Training for 10,000 Physicians Using OutStart’s LCMS CUSTOMER FEATURE: Providing clinical training, testing and competency validation for physicians is no small task. Content, which is being delivered to an extremely technically proficient and demanding end-user audience, must be updated on an ongoing basis in order to keep pace with the rapidly changing medical industry. To that end, when Challenger Corp. (Memphis, Tenn.) began to outgrow the technological capabilities of its legacy system about five years ago, the company’s chief executive officer set out to quickly find a new medium for content delivery and management.

SEPTEMBER 15 , 2006⏐VOL . 11 , NO. 18 TOP OF THE NEWS 1 AMA Partners with futurethink

to Launch Blended Program Series on Innovation

1 Increasing the Strategic Value of a Learning Organization Is a Five‐Step Process, Bersin Says

1 Challenger Provides Clinical Training for 10,000 Physicians Using OutStart’s LCMS

IN THIS ISSUE 6 Group Averages Unchanged on CTDA’s Latest Stock Index

ELSEWHERE 7 People In The News 7 News Briefs DATABANK 3 Top Reasons for Pursuing

Innovation Within Organizations4 Factors for Developing an

Innovative Culture, by Rank 5 Impact of CLO 6 Performance of Public Training Company Stocks, Aug. 25‐Sept. 8

T h e P u l s e According to a recently released census study from nonprofit research and advisory firm Catalyst (New York), women continue to be underrepresented in top corporate leadership positions. The census, which tracked women executives in the Fortune 500, found that between 2002 and 2005, the total number of women corporate officers increased by 0.7 percentage points to 16.4%. In addition, out of 21.8 corporate officers in 2005, on average, women held only 3.6 of those positions.

Corporate Training & Development Advisor -2- September 15, 2006


“We have approximately 10,000 physician and resident end users, and the challenge was to find a relationship as much as a platform, where the peculiar needs of our end-user audience would be of sufficient interest to the [vendor] company,” Bob Sweeney, Challenger’s CEO, told CTDA. “With our customer base, we were going to have to get this right the first time around. It was important for us to have a platform that was robust and would be flexible and [a vendor’s] management team that was going to take an interest at the top level so the things we were doing wouldn’t become captive to the technology department.” E-learning tools firm OutStart (Boston) was the early frontrunner in Challenger’s search for several reasons, one of the most noteworthy being the vendor’s platform delivery partnership with

Elsevier, a leading multiple-media publisher of scientific, technical and health information products, and a division of Reed Elsevier (New York), Sweeney said. Challenger was also involved in a venture with Elsevier, one which bore integrated review and reference materials for physicians from the combination of Elsevier’s textbooks and Challenger’s review courses. “There was a common interest to serve that client,” Sweeney said. “We had a working relationship with them first, which was a value to OutStart because we knew that client and environment and could provide feedback about physician user needs and interests. For us, finding a company that would be concerned about the end-user as much as or more than the corporate customer, and one that would make it possible for us to work directly with their technology team to produce things for those end users, was a differentiating factor for us,” he said. Challenger began using OutStart’s Evolution Learning Content Management System right away and has stuck with that product, receiving platform updates as OutStart rolls them out. The latest incarnation, Evolution 2006, features Microsoft PowerPoint authoring capabilities and SCORM 2004 support. Challenger’s current library features 50 courses, 28,000 questions, close to 10,000 images and about 3,800 hours of content in an integrated database that resides on the servers provided by OutStart. Material is peer-reviewed by a team of over 200 practicing physicians and clinical experts nationwide. With Evolution, Challenger is able to see what end users have studied and how often they have reviewed content, what scores they have received and what their preference is for additional courses. “[Physicians] use it for a variety of purposes,” Sweeney said. “Some use it to secure Continuing Medical Education requirements; they need to study a certain number of hours a year and then print a report that they can give to their hospital or medical group verifying that they have done that. Others study for the board exam and still

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others have maintenance and certification requirements or internal requirements of their group. All of their records are maintained on their behalf in a secure environment so that there are administrative levels of access.” OutStart is currently helping Challenger set up a second server for development alone, and Challenger has agreed to help OutStart design a new search engine for large end-user audiences. Once that project is completed, Sweeney said he will call upon OutStart to help his company integrate the features of a server from a recently acquired resident scheduling firm into Challenger’s learning platform. “We think of OutStart as our partner; it’s a good relationship,” Sweeney said. “We’re a small firm in a fragmented industry and we have an enormous end-user environment. It takes a special firm to have enough foresight to realize that you are talking about an environment with a distributed end-user base which is large but the channels to that end-user base can be through smaller firms, and there is value in that.”■

► “AMA,” from pg. 1 The inaugural two-day seminar course, “Leading Innovation: Creating and Sustaining a Climate for

Growth,” will be held at AMA’s Executive Conference Center in New York in November and will be expanded to other sites nationwide next year. Designed for executives, directors and senior managers, the course is based on research and tools by futurethink, and will focus on dealing with the challenges of making innovation a part of everyday business. As part of the course, participants will be asked to complete a pre-course assessment to diagnose the climate in their organization, and will also be provided with a case study to read and post-seminar activities designed to support and help reinforce the learning. The next course developed will focus on the topic of strategy and the AMA is looking at doing a podcast series next year. AMACOM, the trainer’s book division, is also currently developing books around the topic of innovation. “With the increased ability to commoditize almost every product and service, every company is looking at innovation as a significant challenge, because the minute you create something someone else can do it smarter, faster, cheaper, and is nipping at your heels,” said Nicole Morgenstern, portfolio manager at AMA in charge of the new product line. “[We wanted to] start to enable the business community to gain skills and competencies so that [innovation] becomes an organic process within organizations.

Top Reasons for Pursuing Innovation Within

Organizations Reason Today In 10 Years To respond to customer demands 1 1 To increase operational efficiency 2 2 To increase revenues or profit margins 3 3 To develop new products/services 4 4 To increase market share 5 6 To better use new technologies 6 5 Source: AMA/HRI Innovation Survey 2006



Creative brainstorming is great in and of itself, but it’s no guarantee that increased growth and profit will really come from that brainstorming if there isn’t a structure around it,” she added. According to the AMA’s study on innovation, which was conducted by the Human Resource Institute (St. Petersburg, Fla.) and released in April, some of the leading reasons why companies should pursue innovation include increased revenue and profits, increased operational efficiency and the ability to better respond to customer demands. Developing an innovative culture requires a work environment that allows freedom to innovate, diversity and one that encourages both small and big ideas (see charts on page 3 and 4). futurethink’s research has identified four capabilities that will make innovation truly effective: ideas, strategy, process and climate. The company offers an online catalog of downloadable innovation research and tools that

are focused on execution and based around these four capabilities. For example, under the topic of ideas there are idea generation tools; the strategy section includes ideas for how to set metrics for innovation; the process section includes evaluation scorecards to help people understand things like which of two ideas is the better one; and the climate portion suggests how to foster an environment where innovation is encouraged and rewarded. “It’s a clear framework based on current practices,” Chetan Chandavarkar, director of product development for futurethink, told CTDA. “Companies want to innovate, but have no idea where to start and no idea how to execute innovation. Our framework is based on best practices from the innovators. Not every company can be a Google, but you can definitely learn from them.”■

Factors for Developing an Innovative Culture, by Rank Reason Today In 10 Years

Customer focus 1 1 Teamwork/collaboration with others 2 2 Appropriate resources (time and money) 3 6 Organizational communication 4 3 Ability to select right ideas for research 5 4 Ability to identify creative people 6 5 Freedom to innovate 7 7 Ability to measure results of innovation 8 8 Encouraging both small ideas and big ideas 9 9 Innovation accountability/goals 10 10 Culture of risk‐tolerance 11 12 Organizational structures 12 11 Diversity 13 13

Balancing incremental improvements and breakthrough discoveries 14 14

Source: AMA/HRI Innovation Survey 2006



► “Bersin,” from pg. 1 In the U.S. this year, about 44% of employers reported having difficulty filling positions, and industries in a particular slump include the government, energy, oil and gas, telecommunications, chemical and manufacturing firms, Bersin said during the Webinar “Increasing the Strategic Value of Learning Services Organization” last week. The event was sponsored by hosted learning platform provider GeoLearning (West Des Moines, Iowa). This talent shortage has created a need for a heavy focus on recruiting and on-boarding programs, as well as a tremendous investment in leadership development and succession planning, he said. “The learning and development function has gone through a shift,” Bersin said. “The old corporate university used to be a variable cost function; as you served more people on the bottom, costs went up. About five years ago, that completely changed. E-learning took off and companies needed to make huge capital investments to stay in business. [Learning] became a fixed investment and it changed the nature of the function. In the new learning services world, high performance training organizations are very performance-oriented and focus on business processes, not just training programs,” he said. Among best-practice solutions for companies today that are looking to increase the strategic value of their learning organization is creating an integrated planning process that includes a detailed business plan for learning. This business plan should include a strategy, budget, program plan, organizational model, alignment with major business initiatives; alignment with HR talent initiatives, operational measures for doing things like getting courses out on time, a governance process, a year-to-year comparison, a major capital investment, major commitments by quarter and sign-off by all major business units, Bersin said. “If you have that plan you will have a governance process around that plan to monitor it and to

Impact of CLO

Area of Operational Excellence How CLO Matters

Measuring impact of learning +20% higher Sharing best practices +15% higher Developing innovative e‐learning +14% higher Partnering with lines of business +12% higher Making the most of resources +12% higher Developing high job satisfaction +10% higher

Source: The High‐Impact Learning Organization Research, Bersin & Associates.

communicate progress of that plan over time,” he said. “Without a business plan they don’t have a context and no way of being measured,” he added. In addition, companies should address the critical role of the chief learning officer, who should be focused on the business as a business manager would be and should have the authority to say no and to hold people accountable, Bersin said, citing research that shows how effective CLOs have driven significant improvements in efficiency and effectiveness (see table above). Other necessary steps, according to Bersin, include business alignment through performance consulting which can help to identify root causes of problems and to figure out what learning can be done to address those business problems. Among other things, performance consulting brings companies much closer to their business sponsors and forces them to ruthlessly prioritize investments, he said. The fourth step requires service centric operations and measurement and the final step involves aligning the learning with talent management and integrating it with performance management, Bersin said.■



Group Averages Unchanged on CTDA’s Latest Stock Index Average stock prices for the instructor-led firms, e-learning vendors and the combined group average all remained flat on CTDA’s index for the latest two-week period, ended Sept. 8. Of the nine firms tracked on the index, the slight increases in certain stock prices balanced out with the slight decreases in others, causing the totals to remain unchanged. The stock price for the nine training companies tracked closed at an average of $7.63 per share on

both Aug. 25 and Sept. 8, compared with the NASDAQ index, which rose 1.2% to close at 2,165.79 on Sept. 8. Average stock price for the four instructor-led firms remained flat at $3.59 per share on Sept. 8, as did the average stock price for the five e-learning firms on the index, which closed at $10.86 per share on Sept. 8. The two companies experiencing the most trouble with their stocks posted the largest gains for the period. Instructor-led, IT courseware and certification firm Prosoft Learning (Phoenix) posted a 50% increase to close at $0.03 per share on Sept. 8. The company was purchased by e-

Performance of Public Training Company Stocks, Aug. 25-Sept. 8

Close On Close On Price Percent YTD

Company Ticker Aug. 25 Sept. 8 Change Change Change Prosoft Learning 1 POSOQ.PK $0.02 $0.03 $0.01 50.0% N/A New Horizons 2 NEWH.PK $0.95 $1.10 $0.15 15.8% N/A SkillSoft SKIL $6.14 $6.30 $0.16 2.6% 15.4% WebEx WEBX $36.30 $36.44 $0.14 0.4% 69.5% Learning Tree Int’l LTRE $7.42 $7.44 $0.02 0.3% ‐42.8% iLinc 3 ILC $0.45 $0.45 $0.00 0.0% 73.1% Saba SABA $5.10 $5.07 ‐$0.03 ‐0.6% 23.4% Franklin Covey 4 FC $5.95 $5.80 ‐$0.15 ‐2.5% ‐9.7% SumTotal Systems SUMT $6.32 $6.05 ‐$0.27 ‐4.3% 34.4%

Average for ILT Firms $3.59 $3.59 $0.00 0.0% ‐26.0%

Average for E‐Learning Firms $10.87 $10.86 ‐$0.01 ‐0.1% 81.9%

Average for Group $7.63 $7.63 $0.00 0.0% 38.1%

NASDAQ Nat’l Mkt. 2,140.29 2,165.79 N/A 1.2% ‐0.6%

1 The company filed for bankruptcy on April 12. 2 Year‐to‐date prices are from Dec. 30, 2005, not Jan. 3, 2006. Currently being traded on the Over the Counter Bulletin Board. 3 Listed on the American Stock Exchange. 4 Listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

Source: Yahoo! Finance, Simba Information. Copying prohibited.



learning firm VCampus Corp. (Veston, Va.) in April (CTDA, April 28). IT trainer New Horizons Worldwide (Anaheim, Calif.) posted a 15.8% increase in stock price to close at $1.10 per share on Sept. 8. New Horizons, which has been trading on the pink slips for some time, announced late last month that Mark Miller, president and chief executive officer, exercised a provision in his employment contract and purchased 108,695 shares of the company’s common stock, saying he was investing in the company’s future and “looking forward to doing all that I can to see that our potential is realized.” Miller became CEO July 5, succeeding Tom Bresnan.■

People In The News Business skills trainer the American Management Association (New York) management has named Keith Dalton senior vice president of corporate learning solutions. Dalton will provide a leadership role in client relationship management and sales of all seminars and professional services within AMA’s U.S. Management Education division. Prior to joining AMA, Dalton was global vice president of sales, marketing and the public sector for RWD Technologies, a consulting services and training firm. At AMA, Dalton will focus on identifying and pursuing new business opportunities, build collaboration between sales, marketing and product delivery groups, and drive improvements to AMA’s customer relationship management capabilities.■

News Briefs Instructor-led IT trainer Learning Tree International (Los Angeles) this month added a new course to its Web Development and Web Services curriculum entitled Content Management Systems for Web Sites: Hands-On. During the three-day course, an expert instructor will lead participants in extensive exercises for the

purpose of providing practical experience creating and implementing a content management system (CMS) solution. Attendees will also receive instruction in how to install and configure a CMS site foundation; develop a site layout using templates, menus and content pages; secure a CMS by creating users and assigning roles; publish informational content using database-driven plug-in modules; and support collaborative online communities. The new course will premiere at Learning Tree’s Washington, D.C.-based training center from Oct. 25-27, and at its London, England-based center from Nov. 22-24. E-learning infrastructure and human capital management firm Saba Software (Redwood Shores, Calif.) announced the addition of seven new courses to be offered by Saba University this week. Tightly integrated into Saba’s Achieve Implementation Methodology, the new courses support the various phases each customer must complete as part of their specific implementation. The new curriculum includes Architecture Fundamentals for Saba Enterprise 5.3; Content Deployment Strategy for Saba Learning; Implementing Saba Learning 5.3; Implementing Security in Saba Enterprise; Maintaining the Saba System; Saba Enterprise 5.3 Configuring the Web User Interface; and System Configuration for Saba Enterprise 5.3. Saba University offers more than 50 courses in a variety of formats, including classroom-based, instructor-led training at Saba’s San Francisco Bay Area-based headquarters, virtual training, on-site training, and self-paced, Web-based training. LMS firm SumTotal Systems (Mountain View, Calif.) announced last week that Cooper Tire & Rubber Co. (Findlay, Ohio) has purchased SumTotal TotalLMS 7.1 to provide training to its 9,000 employees around the globe. Cooper Tire has 59 manufacturing, sales, distribution, technical and design facilities around the world. Beyond centralizing the tracking of all learning and development at Cooper Tire, SumTotal’s LMS



will eventually offer a Web-based portal to Cooper Tire that delivers training to employees at any time of day, from anywhere in the world. Cooper Tire will also have a platform that provides staff in Europe, Asia and North America with online learning plans, Web-based courses, a comprehensive catalog of training opportunities and a system for assessing employees’ skills. Chalk Media Corp. (Vienna, Va.), a provider of interactive learning solutions and tools that help organizations communicate more effectively with their employees, business partners and

consumers, announced this month that Fujifilm Canada (Mississauga, Ontario), innovators in the field of imaging and information solutions, has selected the chalkboard Learning Content Management System (LCMS) as the platform for its e-learning portal. Fujifilm will first populate chalkboard LCMS with a Digital Photography 101 course, which the Chalk team is creating in its entirety, including content, design, Flash animation and knowledge checks. The course will be targeted towards Fujifilim’s retail sales representatives, and will roll out this fall.■

Companies Featured in this Issue ■ American Management Association: 212-586-8100

■ Bersin & Associates: 510-654-8500

■ Challenger: 901-762-8449

■ futurethink: 212-629-0913

■ GeoLearning: 800-970-9903

■ Human Resource Institute: 727-345-2226

■ OutStart: 617-897-6800

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