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May 2005
be a year full of happiness, prosperity, and success for you and your loved
ones!
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
"To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the
affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure
the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in
others; to leave the world a little better, whether by a healthy child, a
garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has
breathed easier because you have lived. This is the meaning of success."
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)
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Call
for Presenters & Sponsors!
3rd
International System-on-Chip (SoC) Conference, Fall 2005, Newport Beach,
California.
http://www.savantcompany.com/SoC-Fall2005/SoC_Call.htm
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2nd
SoC Conference Proceedings is now available for sale.
To order, please
visit:
www.savantcompany.com
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Savant
Company Inc. is now a member of Open Core Protocol - International
Partnership (OCP-IP)
http://www.ocpip.org/home
We
welcome this collaboration and cooperation!
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Training Challenges for Technology Companies
Dr. W.
Edwards Deming (1900–1993),
who was regarded by many as the leading guru on quality in the
United States and known as the father of the Japanese post-war industrial
revival, very elegantly and creatively stated the importance of
change/transformation in his famous quote: "It is not necessary to change.
Survival is not mandatory."
We
live in a world in which technology is changing continuously and rapidly,
causing obsoleteness of its previous generation as well as forcing the
organizations to regularly train and educate their workforce just to keep up
with the latest technologies, tools, methodologies, approaches, or business
models. Another factor that contributes to the need for training is the
mergers and acquisitions that are very common today, especially in the
technology segment. For example, companies are taken over; larger firms
acquire smaller, comparable companies or merge with competitors to create
larger companies; single-product startup companies are bought by mid- and
large-size corporations as a means to acquire new or complementary
technologies; and so forth. All these changes create instability in the
industry, which further forces individuals to continue learning about their
particular field of interest as well as earning about complementary and
adjacent areas as a means to secure their jobs (and thus maintain their
marketability).
Providing systematic training is an expensive but unavoidable challenge for
both the businesses and the individuals. In a typical technology-related
organization, we already have several major divisions or business units,
such as (1) design and development, (2) production, (3) marketing (business
development), (4) sales (including customer service), (5) distribution, (6)
finance, and (7) operations (including IT). This traditional model is set up
around the functional divisions that must harmoniously and effectively work
together to meet the needs of the customers and the shareholders. Adding the
challenge of continuous learning and training to this already-complex
business model presents a new dimension of difficulty for everyone. For
example, where should the training team actually reside within an
organization? In the Human Resources Department? Sales? Marketing? Or
perhaps a completely separate functional unit next to the other mentioned
divisions? Should the training provider be an outside vendor? How should
companies measure the effectiveness of the training? And so on …
Another challenge is that while companies need to train their workforce,
they must simultaneously cut costs. The trend is well established: The
cost-cutting usually starts with the training budget. (Talk about a
double-edged sword!)
Selected strategically smart U.S. firms have effectively implemented the
function of Chief Learning Officer (CLO) in their business infrastructure,
and they spend a significant amount of money and time on developing the
necessary tools for methodical training for all their employees as part of
their overall business model. This approach has provided them with the
necessary tools to have consistent and effective training programs as well
as tools to evaluate the results and the effectiveness of their overall
training programs.
Many
other technology companies provide training only on specific tools (e.g.,
EDA tools) or only on products to meet a particular job function. This
traditional model, which is centered on learning about a product or a new
service for performing a job, is very popular due to its simplicity and ease
of management. The huge disadvantages are (1) the expense of redundant
responsibilities within an organization, (2) the inability to share
resources across training “silos,” (3) the lack of consistency in
sharing/teaching the new information within the entire corporation, (4) no
practical training program for new employees or for employees with new job
assignments, (5) the lack of necessary tools to measure the effectiveness of
a particular training, etc. Many companies expect their employees to use
their own time and money to keep themselves technologically up-to-date.
In
many of the foreign-based companies with large organizations in the United
States, systematic training in their U.S. facilities is nonexistent. Workers
are learning in small chunks, and only so that they can address day-to-day
technical and/or business issues.
Some
other U.S. companies, as part of their training vehicles, have focused on
developing various collaborative hardware and software systems to
“distribute information” and make it available seamlessly to everyone
(inside the company, in the field, or to the customers). Several wireless
products allow the field staff to find and work with remote experts. These
solutions are not really training mechanisms, and they provide what is
considered an over-the-shoulder presence of a remote supervisor via
collaboration software, high-performance imaging, and wireless broadband
connectivity. These techniques and models are very effective as an
“information distribution” tool, but they don’t help the individuals to use
their “knowledge as a tool for innovation and business advancement” in these
organizations.
Additionally, various companies have been working on implementing E-learning
into their corporate training programs. There has been great progress in the
E-learning area due to its obvious benefits, such as:
1.
Content creation and conversion to various forms and formats
2.
Content reusability
3.
Sharing content between multiple heterogeneous systems (reduces switching
cost and associated risk)
4. Low
cost for content maintenance (lower obsolescence risk)
5.
Maximize technology investments
6.
Avoid proprietary authoring tools
7.
Train developers faster and leverage best practices
8.
Future-proof courseware investments
9.
Decrease reliance on proprietary tools and technology
10.
Dynamically configure personalized courses
However, due to technology limitations (e.g., broadband wireless), lack of
rich multimedia content, required talent and expertise for content creation,
and early stages of true collaborative software, E-learning has been limited
to selected areas and has not been adopted by large or mid-size corporations
as a mainstream training vehicle.
So,
what is the solution? How can companies survive--absorb the training budget,
keep up with the changes, train their workforce, and manage overall costs?
There
is no simple answer, nor a single answer, to this complex issue. We are
gradually witnessing a spectacular and incredible convergence of networks of
people and businesses in every industry. Workers and their work are becoming
synchronous and inseparable (some might look at this as a negative), where
colleagues and customers collaborate seamlessly. Their role and the
architecture of organizations are changing before our very eyes, and
businesses are morphing into flexible, self-organizing components that
operate in real time. Any training model that we develop must be able to
fit in this complex, real-time, and collaborative model. In addition,
corporations must be able to address these two tightly coupled and
intertangled challenges into their business model and organization
infrastructure:
(A)
How to effectively shift the whole notion of training in an organization
from a traditional “cost center model” to an innovative “profit center
model.”
(B)
How to correctly understand the difference between the notion of
“information distribution” with “knowledge as a tool for innovation and
business advancement” when one is developing the training mechanisms and
tools.
Savant
Company’s experience-based training programs are designed to collaborate
with technology companies to address these challenges.
Farhad
Mafie
P.S.
"Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten."
(B.F. Skinner)
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For
more information, contact Savant Marketing:
Marketing@savantcompany.com
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