Pursuing the intelligent enterprise

Many of the organisational luminaries listed in the top 100 have a strong presence in Australia, such as Ernst & Young, Marriott, LexisNexis, Dow Chemicals, Hewlett-Packard and Starbucks, to name a few – though no Australian organisation made the grade.

At least, none did this year. Whether the motivation is compliance, best practice or differentiation, Australian companies are fast learning what they have to learn.

Enter the dragon

Five years ago, St.George Bank was investing around 2 per cent of its salary budget (equating to $13 million per year) in staff development. Training was generally restricted to entry-level induction. Only two of the bank’s seven business divisions operated formal training programs. Incredibly, a complex web of 770 external training organisations were on St.George Bank’s payroll.

It’s fair to say that back then the bank’s approach to learning and development was decentralised, inconsistent and hugely inefficient.

In 2000, Colin Pitt was appointed head of the bank’s Corporate Performance Centre (CPC). Two of his immediate priorities were the rationalisation of St.George’s outsourced training providers (using a competitive tender to reduce the 770 to 30) and the development of an online learning strategy. The driver at the time was cost reduction, with the initial imperative being to halve training costs.

A Click2learn Learning Management System (LMS) was selected in early 2001, christened ‘e-luminate’ and was operational by the end of that year.

Just a few years on, St.George boasts one of the most admired HR teams in the country and is generating enviable results in the learning and development arena. Colin Pitt reports the bank has realised a twenty-fold increase in training output with 25 per cent less cost. For St.George, the bottom-line saving is about $3 million annually.

According to Bob Spence, the bank’s manager learning design and delivery, the success of the enterprise learning strategy is due to the very close relationship the CPC enjoys with the business. This intimacy ensures all learning programs are relevant and meet the needs of the stakeholders.

“We have people who are operating, in essence, as relationship managers for the CPC. They work within the business day-by-day, understanding what the business requirements actually are and then bringing back to the CPC recommendations for various interventions to overcome problems and meet their demands – whether they’re training demands or some other sort of HR requirement,” says Spence.

St.George has resisted the urge to extract the largest possible cost savings from its enterprise learning strategy. Its approach does not revolve around e-learning or the LMS. Instead, it’s opted for a blended model, even though this model doesn’t achieve as dramatic a saving as pure e-learning.

Systems training and lending courses are conducted in conventional classrooms, as is St.George’s induction program which, for customer service staff, runs for a whole four weeks.

Conversely, the bank’s management development program, ‘Empower’, takes nine months to complete and consists of three components: around 25 hours of online content, followed by four one-day workshops and then consolidation of learning through on-the-job as well as individual and group projects.

“We also have other courses where online learning is completed prior to coming into the classroom. The whole idea of that is to make sure everyone is up to speed so the cost of getting people together in the classroom is more effective. We can jump in and do cases studies or role plays and make use of the group dynamics, as opposed to wasting time on tutorial type activities,” Spence explains.

Finally, there are courses that are 100 per cent online, such as the Financial Services Reform Act compliance training. Around 20 per cent of St.George’s total training is compliance-based.

The bank commenced FSRA compliance training in September 2003, just six months out from the March 2004 deadline. Using the Click2learn platform, it delivered more than 100,000 courses at a completion rate of up to 18,000 courses per month. The curriculum was determined by each employee’s role within the bank but contained an average of 11 courses.

The cost of delivering the FSRA compliance training electronically was just 10 to 15 per cent of the cost of conventional training. This one program easily paid for the entire Click2learn system.

“The return on investment was easy to measure because we knew the precise cost of developing and deploying the program online. The bank is very satisfied with the system and the progress we’ve made,” Spence says.

The CPC has many more projects on its to-do list, including extending training to its brokers and agents network. The bank is also building a new training centre that will include 10 classrooms and a sophisticated telephone simulation facility. Virtual classrooms are another technology Spence would like to investigate over the next 12 months.

“We’re continually looking at new and improved ways of introducing innovation into the courses we run, and introducing technology into the classroom. There’s a real thirst in our organisation to innovate and it’s certainly very clear within the Corporate Performance Centre why we need to do that,”Spence says.

The power to comply

Queensland government-owned Ergon Energy is one of Australia’s largest electricity companies, serving more than half a million household and business customers in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT.

To say Ergon’s workforce is geographically disbursed is an understatement. The corporation’s 5,000 employees service an area that’s six times larger than the size of Victoria, including some of the most remote and inhospitable terrain in the country.

The span of Ergon’s network presents many challenges for management and has necessitated the corporation take technology and innovation very seriously.

Its enterprise learning strategy now incorporates a large online component, significantly reducing the time and travel costs that are incurred delivering face-to-face tuition.

Legal compliance training was one of the first programs to be converted to an electronic form. As automated legal compliance training is dominated by law firms rather than training specialists, a Blake Dawson Waldron package called Salt (Self Administered Legal Training) was selected.

Sue Barnes, Ergon’s business risk and compliance officer, says Salt was estimated to offer more extensive training and to be more user-friendly than other products on the market.

Two years on, Ergon is using Salt to deliver standardised modules in privacy and trade practices (for retail and frontline staff), as well as in EEO and OHS. All of the Salt training is delivered via an intranet to office-based personnel who have their own desktop computer.

“There has been no deterioration in the quality of learning since moving to an online format,” Barnes reports. “Plus, it paid for itself in the first three months – based on the number of staff that had completed the training and the cost [such as travel, wages and accommodation] that would have been involved had we done it face-to-face.”

Ergon is now working with Blakes to develop a customised module on ring fencing, which in crude terms refers to the separation of aspects of the corporation’s distribution and retailing businesses so as to prevent anti-competitive behaviour and guard against uneconomic bias.