The choices for potential buyers of e-learning technologies are becoming more complex every day as new tools and strategies emerge. This situation presents particular challenges for smaller companies and others with a limited budget. The cost to acquire the necessary components can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. How do organizations without large budgets take advantage of e-learning?

The American Heart Association (AHA) is one such example. The AHA needed a low-cost, integrated training platform for its Continuing Medical Education (CME) program, designed to help health care professionals keep current with new research and treatments. The program combines satellite broadcasts, online courses, and conferences (over 200 workshops per year).

This case study discusses the solution chosen by the AHA to automate the CME program which has a target population of approximately 100,000 professionals.

We discussed the Oracle-Peoplesoft merger at length in our Member Research Bulletin. Bottom line: Oracle is focused on becoming the #1 provider of HRMS software, and competing heavily with SAP for the enterprise market. The LMS market, while interesting, is not Oracle's #1 focus.

The Saba-Thinq acquisition is very similar to the Docent-Click2Learn merger of last year: the companies have a larger customer base but are now faced with a difficult product management challenge. The Upside: Thinq customers can migrate to Saba 5.x without a license fee, and now are doing business with a larger more sustainable company. The Downside: Migration costs are 3-5X or more higher than the cost of the software license. The real issue is whether or not these customers will migrate to Saba or perhaps look at another enterprise solution.

With the rapid change of its call handling and claims systems, Aetna decided it needed a new approach to training its call center employees. Aetna's traditional classroom-based training programs were costly and not entirely effective.

By monitoring call center employees' tasks over a period of time, Aetna's learning team found that these employees used roughly 20% of the training material 80% of the time. In other words, they perform a small subset of tasks on a daily basis, and a large number of tasks on an infrequent basis. As a result, Aetna decided to focus its classroom training on the tasks that are critical to an employee's every day job. These tasks and processes should be mastered by every call center employee.

For other tasks, mastery is less important. Employees are unlikely to retain knowledge on tasks performed infrequently, so the traditional training on these tasks was ineffective. Instead, Aetna deployed performance support tools to provide the necessary information when needed, resulting in higher quality claims processing and lower overall training costs.

We have two webinars slated for this month. This Thursday we will present "Performance Support Systems: How to Improve User Productivity."

Given the high costs of training and support for software applications and systems, companies are looking for alternatives to traditional training methods. Performance support tools (or EPSS) have been shown to effectively reduce overall training and support costs and improve employee productivity.

• "Performance Support Systems: How to Improve User Productivity"
• Presented by Karen O'Leonard and Josh Bersin
• Thursday, April 21, 2005
• 2:00 pm Eastern / 11:00 am Pacific
• SIGN UP NOW

And you still have time to sign up for today's webinar, which discusses new tools and approaches in software application training that can be used to improve employee performance. Managers will learn how to target training to those people and tasks that need the most improvement. They will also learn how to monitor processes and refine training to meet ongoing application training needs.

• "Improving Workforce Performance by Integrating Application Training with Process Improvement"
• Presented by Josh Bersin
• Tuesday, April 19, 2005 (TODAY)
• 2:00pm Eastern/11:00am Pacific Time
• SIGN UP NOW

We recently released the largest ever study of customer satisfaction with Learning Management Systems. The study evaluates satisfaction on a wide range of factors, including product features, technical support, customer service, business partnership, and implementation - all from the customer's perspective. The study is designed to help buyers and vendors understand vendor strengths and weaknesses in the LMS market.

Vendors included in this study are: CyberU, DK Systems, Generation21, GeoLearning, GeoMetrix, KnowledgePlanet, Learn.com, MeridianKSI, NetDimension, Pathlore, Peoplesoft, Plateau, RISC, Saba, SumTotal, and WBT Systems.

What you will learn:

• The top performing LMS systems and vendors across a variety of categories.
• The key drivers of customer satisfaction with Learning Management Systems.
• The latest industry benchmarks in cost of operation, hosting vs. in-house systems, and implementation strategies.
• The differences among vendors and detailed satisfaction results.