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An
organisation can meet its ultimate objective to maximise its market
share/profitability/customer retention, only if there is an integrated
system linking CRM, KM, BI and other legacy systems, write Ganesh
Natarajan and Uma Ganesh
Although
e-learning has evolved significantly in terms of being able to deliver
the intended learning to individuals and has provided a comprehensive
system for the management to monitor and fine-tune its effectiveness,
it is interesting to note that there has been a shift in the learning
framework of organisations on account of increased clarity with
respect to the role of technology in the overall context. Hence
e-learning is no longer considered ‘an end’ in itself,
but has become ‘a means’ to an end This transition has
taken place with the spread of the knowledge management (KM) concept.
Knowledge management involves managing all knowledge created in
the organisation, including storing. enabling easy access, addition,
and sharing.
Organisations
achieve their objectives and maintain their relevance by what they
know and how well they harness their knowledge. This fact should
be a compelling reason for organisational governance and management
to nurture most diligently its people and the systems that create,
preserve, disseminate, renew and deploy knowledge. Intellectual
capital is made up of human and knowledge capital. Human capital
comprises individual talents and knowledge that is acquired through
education, training, experience and cognition. Knowledge capital
is the documented knowledge that is available in such forms as research
papers, reports, books, articles, manuscripts, patents and software.
Knowledge capital consists of artifacts of the human mind that are
stored outside the minds of their authors and are therefore available
to who ever seeks them.
 The
traditional paradigm of information systems is based on the consensual
interpretation of the information as per the socially dictated norms
or the mandate of company bosses. This has resulted in confusion
between knowledge and information, which are distinct entities.
While information generated by the computer systems is not a very
rich carrier of human interpretation for potential action, knowledge
resides in the user’s objective context of action based on
that information. Hence, it might not be incorrect to say that knowledge
resides in the user and not in the collection of information.
Thus
in the context of knowledge management strategy, e-learning becomes
a vehicle for acquiring knowledge and delivering it when, where
and how it is required. Therefore, e-learning, besides its own environment,
has to provide learning for those who are outside its environment,
through other e-learning sites, classroom based training programmes,
magazines, books and journals, videos and off-the-shelf generic
titles of e-learning. This e-learning assumes a new dimension by
enabling maximum customisation to the learner by bringing together
the nuggets of knowledge or by showing the way to where they are
available.
The
era of integrated e-learning environment
Capitalisation
on the intellectual knowhow being created within the organisation
and exploiting it effectively was seen, until recently, as the greatest
contribution to the field of management science. However, we believe
that the increased focus on customer relationship management (CRM)
and other initiatives to capture business intelligence (BI) for
exploiting the existing customer base, the learning needs of the
organisation will be best understood and served if both internal
and external needs are served by any new learning system.
The
organisation will be better equipped to meet its ultimate objective
to maximise its market share/profitability/ customer retention,
only if there is a cohesive and integrated system linking CRM, KM,
BI and other legacy systems. Although initiatives such as CRM enjoy
high return on investment, there is also a high purported failure
rate. Marketing and business end-user respondents feel that the
single biggest reason for failure has been the lack of technology
integration. The integrated e-learning strategy has to recognise
such problems and should be so designed that its foundation is built
around linkages between these various systems in order to facilitate
the organisation transformation process.
Building
an integrated e-learning environment
A
comprehensive WBT (Web-based training) solution has multiple components.
As it is important to develop a customised solution for each organisation,
let us take a look at a generic framework here (diagram given below).
The
focus is primarily on an asynchronous system since this constitutes
the more significant part of online learning today. At the heart
of the system lies the LMS or the learning management system. This
will need to interface with the authoring tools for content creation.
The process of content creation per se is a very involved one requiring
subject matter experts, instructional designers and tools, visualisers,
graphic designers, and so on. Content needs to be delivered and
tracked, and performance monitored and evaluated.
Let
us now look at each component of our WBT framework and understand
what functionality they provide within the overall solution.
Content
creation
Content
creation by itself is a vast area. There is a widely held misconception
that authoring tools take care of everything that has anything to
do with content creation. This is not so. What most authoring tools
help achieve is content assembling, presupposing that many activities
would have taken place prior to this.
Content
delivery and tracking
This
is one of the primary functions of a learning management system.
It begins with the necessary user interface (generally provided
to authorised authors/tutors) for uploading and maintaining content
in the content or learning object repository. A learner determines
his requirements and chooses his learning path, based on which,
learning modules are delivered to him. A good LMS would have the
facility for enforcing a learning model based on skills pre-requisities
(judged through pre-tests), study chronology, etc. It would also
track the progress of the student, enabling him to start from where
he stopped the last time. It might have an in-built assessment tool
or could be interfaced to one. Different vendors provide a varying
number of features to the student—from a home page and clock
to bookmarks and personal comments.
Assessment
This
component of the online training system takes care of the complete
process of evaluation of the learner’s performance. It could
include pre-test, post-tests, assignments, and so on. It could have
facilities for creating a question bank and generate questions at
random, based on various parameters. It could have quizzes with
multiple choice questions: true or false, drag and drop, hot spots,
match the columns, etc.
Excerpt
taken from the chapter ‘The Role of IT in Quality Education’
by Ganesh Natarajan and Uma Ganesh, in the book ‘An Executive
Handbook: World-class Quality’ by Suresh Lulla; Tata McGraw
Hill
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