IT executives share smart suggestions for boosting IT skills without breaking the bank.
Your training budget probably took a hit in the IT spending squeeze, but you’re still charged with providing a solid IT infrastructure to ensure your company stays competitive. To do this, your staff needs to learn how to innovate with existing or new technologies.
Standardize your IT infrastructure and training.
When SBC and BellSouth joined forces to form Atlanta-based Cingular in 2000, the company began standardizing on technologies, such as databases, which has helped refine its training needs. The company also has defined courses, such as project management, that are applicable to staff across all business units. Instead of each unit developing its own project management courses, for example, training needs are pulled together and courses are developed so that all departments can share the results.
Look for in-house superstars.
Who else are experts at your processes, infrastructures and developments other than your in-house staff? At lighting manufacturer Osram Sylvania of Danvers, Mass., in-house instructors present much of its training. IT staffers are responsible for training power users on SAP. The users in turn train their respective teams. Osram’s human resources executives also provide internal training to IT folks on professional development and leadership management.
“The use of internal instructors/subject matter experts makes sense because who knows how we use SAP better than our employees?” says Ellen Famigliette, IT training manager at Osram. “Most enterprise application deployments are customized and therefore need customized training that is only applicable to that company. In addition, our HR trainers understand the hierarchy of employees at Osram.”
Ask your big brother for help.
Ever thought about how you could roll out new services in your organization without spending a dime buying all the necessary equipment and technologies? IT staffers at the Career Center of the University of California at Los Angeles can learn about and work with advanced technologies such as storage-area networks, Gigabit Ethernet and Active Directory, without the center paying to install such applications or buying specific courseware.
Despite budgetary constraints in the state of California, Abel Stephen, the center’s IT manager, successfully negotiated for the larger Office of Technology Center (OTC), which offers basic networking services to UCLA’s student affairs division, to provide the career center with the advanced technologies listed above. This initiative, dubbed Leveraged Outsourcing of Infrastructure Support (LOIS), helps the OTC argue for the maintenance of its budget level by demonstrating that it has taken on wider responsibilities.
The career center IT staffers benefit because they can work with and learn from their OTC colleagues about the use of those hot technologies. “My staff are rewarded by allowing them to play a prominent role in project-managing each implementation phase [of LOIS],” Stephen says. “Before, my staff was viewed as ‘tech support.’ Now they will have the opportunity to transition to project managers.”
Negotiate free or reduced-cost training from your vendors.
“Every vendor wants their product to be successful, and so you should ask them to help you be successful,” says Greg Snooks, director of IT hardware and software development at Cingular. He says companies of any size could reduce their training costs by a minimum of 20% by pressing vendors for free courses or training credits. Snooks advises users to buy training in blocks, instead of a la carte, and to consider bringing the instructors to their sites so they can train more people.
Take courses online.
You’re probably familiar with the cost-benefits of online training over classroom training (no travel costs, no hotel/training rooms or catering) but computer-based instruction is not suited to highly technical training that requires a lot of interaction between instructor and student, right? Not necessarily, as Osram demonstrates.
The lighting manufacturer has taken offline the third week of a four-week classroom-based Six Sigma process-improvement training course and put it online. That is, the students – Osram process engineers – take the course’s third week on their computers at their desks using a Web conferencing facility from Centra. The facility lets them interact with their instructor and colleagues online.
Steve St. Cyr, quality program manager at Osram’s general lighting division, chose to place that particular part of the curriculum online because it involves working with software that is easily delivered over online training. Putting the first week online was not a good idea because that time is crucial for the students and instructor to bond, he says.
Osram says per semester it trains between 20 and 30 process engineers from its 20 manufacturing facilities across North America and Mexico on the Six Sigma methodology. The company says it has saved between $32,000 and $34,000 in travel-related costs.
Sometimes more is better than less.
Consider cross-training your team. In January, Osram made available 100 e-learning courses, including Microsoft Biz Talk Server 2000, Visual Basic, Java programming, HTML, XML and a range of Cisco networking courses, to its 100-plus IT staffing roster. The courses are not meant to replace instructor-led training but to encourage people to train for different skills. For example, a programmer could try his hand at installing Cisco routers or building multi-layer switched networks by taking a course. It might take a chunk of change to buy the courses and put them online, but the payback of having a team of employees who are multi-disciplined should make managers happy.
