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*** Your Business Readiness ***
1. How well is your company using (internet and intranet) technology to run its business?
- Your e-learning choices are significantly impacted by the ways your firm uses the Web for its business. The more ingrained
the Wed is in the mainstream business, the easier it will be to use it for learning.
2. How prepared (skills, knowledge, motivation) is your workforce to compete and win in the high-tech, new economy?
- Understanding the readiness of your workforce to meet future business challenges will be a major driver of the type
and sophistication of your e-learning initiatives. The more comfortable people ate with technology, the more comfortable they
will be with e-learning.
*** The Changing Nature of Learning and E-learning ***
3. How does your company define e-learning?
- E-learning is much more than online training or CBT, encompassing knowledge management and electronic performance support.
How you define e-learning says a lot about your e-learning direction.
4. How will your organization overcome any bad prior experiences you and others have had with technology-based learning?
- It's important to understand the history (good or bad) of your efforts with technology-based learning. You cannot know
where to go, or where to proceed successfully, unless you know where you've been.
5. How much access do people have to the Web (anyone, anytime, anywhere)?
- Without access to the Internet, or Intranet, there can be no e-learning. Creating access, in the office, on the road,
and at home, if appropriate, is your first priority.
6. Do you differentiate between instructional needs (training) and informational needs (knowledge management), and do
you make the right decisions about when to use each?
- Information is not the same as instruction, but it is just as important. A key value of learning professionals will
be to help the organization make the right choices.
*** The Value of Instruction and Information ***
7. What is the level of your organization's expertise in instructional and informational design?
- Building high-quality e-learning is both science and art, requiring significant training and experience. Even if you're
outsourcing parts of the process, it's still important to invest in the right level of talent and expertise.
8. Is your organization ready to move beyond a predominant reliance on classroom training to a more balanced approach
with e-learning?
- The classroom will continue to have an important role to play, but it may be a different role. Integrating classroom
and e-learning will be critical to success.
*** The Role of Change Management in Building a Durable E-learning Strategy ***
9. Does senior management support e-learning?
- Leaders often say they support e-learning when they don't. But e-learning cannot succeed without them. Consider how
you will get senior managers to own e-learning.
10. Does your organization have a change management plan for introducing e-learning in your company?
- The movement to e-learning is a major paradigm shift for most people, including the training organization and your cients.
You must pay attention to the struggle people will have as they go through this change.
11. Can your organization demonstrate the business benefits of e-learning?
- Learning effectiveness alone is not an adequate reason for developing e-learning. Your value proposition must include
cost savings, responsiveness, and speed in addition to effectiveness.
*** How Training Organizations Must Reinvent Themselves to Support E-learning ***
12. Does your organization have a plan to help the training function to reinvent itself for the digital age?
- Training organizations can be the most e-learning resistant group in the company (sometimes without even knowing it).
Reinventing the training organization will take a special and focused effort.
13. Is your training organization's economic model predominately dependent on selling seats in the classroom?
- The retail model for internal training organizations can be a disaster waiting to happen and is incompatible with e-learning.
Moving from tuition to investment will be very helpful to your e-learning strategy.
14. What is that climate in your organization to learning in alternative locations, especially the work site?
- The barriers between doing work and learning are fading. You need to vigorously support workplace learning and help
managers and employees successfully learn where they work.
15. Is your organization willing to allow e-learning to thrive, perhaps at the expense of some of the more traditional
parts of the training organization?
- The failure of training organizations to adopt an e-learning strategy will not necessarily kill these initiatives, but
it may kill the training organization if it is not prepared to radically change its focus to accommodate e-learning.
16. How prepared is your organization to invest in and incubate e-learning for several years in order to get it firmly
established?
- E-learning initiatives must be shielded from the traditional practices and assumptions of the training organizations
that may tend to place it at a disadvantage.
*** The E-learning Industry ***
17. How prepared is your organization to deal with a large and increasingly complex e-learning marketplace?
- The e-learning industry is expanding rapidly. You must keep up so that you can be a smart consumer of external e-learning
products and services.
18. Does your organization have a good handle on what it is buying in the e-learning marketplace? Can it differentiate
quality products and weed out redundancies?
- Buyers beware! Don't buy e-learning products without evaluating them. You must work across organizational boundaries
to manage vendors and leverage your buying power.
19. s your organization prepared to outsource some of its functions and manage then externally so that it can concentrate
its resources on more valuable areas?
- Outsourcing is here to stay and can be an invaluable management approach for e-learning. Training organizations will
have to move away from a "we-can-do-it-all" attitude to one that embraces strategic partnerships.
*** Your Personal Commitment ***
20. How committed are you, personally, to e-learning? Are you ready?
- E-learning will evolve and expand, but it will not go away. As in any change, sound leadership will be needed at all
levels in the organization.
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