Elearning - June/July 2008 - (Page 41) Case StudyLearning Portals A Lesson in Leveraging In today’s content-rich environment, training organizations must strive to provide relevant, well-aligned solutions that enable employees to gain just the information they need. More than 35 years ago, IBM set out to strategically transform internal training from face-to-face classes to online programs. It did so by building development tools, virtual classroom systems, assessment systems and internal learning management systems. IBM also made major software investments in an internal enterprise portal (called “ondemand workplace”). A key focus of this strategy was to drive high levels of individual performance, not just a “place to put all the training programs.” As the IBM training managers identified the various needs, they determined that the right combination of content and personalized context could work. LEARNING ON DEMAND IBM’s learning on-demand strategy leverages the company’s “on-demand” business philosophy — which is to create an open, standards-based infrastructure that integrates and automates business processes. IBM’s learning portal, called Learning@IBM Explorer, not only provides three types of Portals International Business Machines (IBM) >> Industry Served: Computer software, servers >> U.S. Headquarters: Armonk, New York >> Number of Employees: 355,766 learning, but also personalized content and information. It enables collaboration among peers and experts to help people perform their jobs. Today, employees use this portal to search for and access every modality of training and any related information, including documents, e-learning courses, SMEs, blogs, wikis and instructor-led courses. The IBM learning portal involves three components: technology, people and processes. It leverages both traditional portal technology and new Web 2.0 techniques. The Learning@IBM Explorer actually leverages the capabiliElearning! June/July 2008 41
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