The restructuring is aimed at improving the performance of CS employees by delivering the information that helps them do their jobs better and faster. With 4,600 employees worldwide, CS provides a variety of services to Intel including facilities engineering, building maintenance, public affairs, construction, and environmental health and safety.

"A lot of different services are included under the CS umbrella, and as Intel becomes more global, the need to get information to large numbers of people is becoming more critical," says Susan Dodd, manager of IBS. "Constantly changing business conditions are driving us to create a workforce that performs quickly and can beat the competition."

Preparing for the E‑Learn Environment

Representing the application development side of Corporate Services, the Information Systems (IS) group is responsible for developing and maintaining software tools for preventive maintenance, facilities planning, project management, and cost‑tracking. In contrast, the People Systems (PS) group targets internal workforce development, crafting programs and processes to hire, train, and integrate employees into the Intel culture. A primary focus is to boost retention and minimize turnover.

Operating independently, PS and IS were both providing information to CS employees using similar business models. Since IS understands the technology and PS understands the ways in which people learn, Dodd's vision was to merge the technology and people aspects to form a single cohesive body that would help the CS workforce improve its performance, thereby improving productivity.

The goal of the merger was to enable CS employees to achieve results any place, anywhere, and at any time, which meant that IBS had to support flexibility in the work environment. Work life effectiveness gives employees options to manage their work and home life in a way that suits each individual. It is not taught in the classroom, but the concepts of‑‑for example, flex time, telecommuting, comp time, and job sharing‑‑are championed by each manager in the organization.

"Work life effectiveness is here to stay," says Dodd. "We cannot assume everyone will be doing their jobs from a desk from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. This naturally affects how we develop and deliver performance support tools."

Defining E‑Learn

One concrete way to facilitate the work‑anytime/anywhere model is e‑learn, the use of any electronic medium, whether client/server system or Web‑based product, to enable an employee to keep working instead of stopping to seek instruction or assistance.

The key is to focus on performance support tools that help employees learn the tasks necessary to do their work as quickly as possible with minimal instruction and intervention. Performance support can take the form of reference manuals, a help file in a software application, other Web‑based products, or any tool that helps an individual learn.

"The ultimate goal is to improve worker time to productivity. When you bring in new people, the faster you can ramp them in the job and get them up to speed, the more value they are going to deliver to you more quickly," notes Dodd. "This makes the organization more flexible in its delivery of products and services."

Along with lowering costs by reducing employee training and time away from the job, e‑learn also greatly enhances internal communications. For example, Intel can disseminate information to a large number of people simultaneously using Web‑based applications that also offer more timely content and can be customized to different locations and varying cultures.

Creating a New Way of Thinking

Before the two groups merged in July 2000, each had a fragmented view of its own role in the information delivery process, along with divergent expectations of the other's contribution to the new entity. Employees on the IS side thought People Systems would develop training for their applications. Their counterparts in PS believed IS would help develop Web pages for their own training materials.

"The first thing we did was try to build a shared understanding and appreciation for what each group brings to the table," says Dodd. "The key function of both groups, even though they did it a bit differently, was providing information that enabled Corporate Services to improve its performance, thereby better serving customers."

Now, the new organization emphasizes the use of e‑learn principles for course development, making content available on the Web rather than just in the classroom. Both sides collaborate in the early design of applications to enable deployment without separate classroom training.

For instance, the company's emergency management training, originally developed as a classroom session, has now been converted to a Web‑based program. New training courses for technicians also are being developed for Web delivery.

Easing the Transition

One year into the merger, the former IS and PS groups are working well together, concentrating on the e‑learn model to improve their service to CS employees.

Flex teams, put into place to review specific issues or focus areas, have made the merger transition a little easier. The e‑learn flex team, consisting of individuals from both PS and IS, is researching new technologies and tools that are available to help make software applications, such as those used to train new employees, more user‑friendly‑‑once again showing how the combination of technology and people factors can improve business processes.

"We are educating everyone in our organization about what we want to accomplish with e‑learn," explains Dodd. "We want to ensure that everyone understands that when we start a project, we automatically consider the human factors, such as ease of use, right up front."

All decisions regarding IBS and the introduction of the e‑learn strategy are based on three guiding principles: reducing costs by focusing development efforts on the items of greatest return; expediting delivery in a fiercely competitive market; and using the Web to enable global delivery of the necessary information.

"IBS provides information to Corporate Services so the workers can take the information and turn it into knowledge," says Dodd. "That's the key factor here. We don't pretend to be content experts. We try to deliver the information in the most efficient and effective way so the people in our workforce can do their jobs better."

What's Next?

With e‑learn viewed as a work in progress, the current focus is on improving the existing business processes that support information delivery. A joint needs assessment conducted by both PS and IS personnel assures that IBS resources are applied to items with the strongest ROI. A list of nine different success indicators‑‑ranging from a reduction in training requests to increases in applications rolled out without classroom sessions-- will ultimately provide several measures of e‑learning effectiveness.

Plans also exist to intercept new developments, major revisions, and applications migrating to the Web to make sure they are based on e‑learn principles. IBS has implemented a usability test strategy to make sure applications take human factors into account and include more accessible, comprehensive help files. CS will deploy more Web‑based training products in the future, and an online survey will gather employee feedback.

"Our goal is to build all new applications with the human perspective in mind," says Dodd. "Revisions of existing applications will be looked at on a case‑by‑case basis to see how we could make them more user‑friendly."

For example, IBS planned to use the upcoming revision of its document management system as an e‑learn prototype. When it proved to be too complex for the prototyping strategy, they were still able to apply usability principles to the tool to improve the applications search and help features and make the system easier to use.

"When CS expands its knowledge management in the future, we will be approaching this jointly from an information systems and instructions systems mindset. As a result, we should be able to develop a user‑friendly system from the beginning versus having to go through several revisions to get there," says Dodd.

"We've tapped into the tip of the iceberg, but there's still a long way to go. We are still in the learning and continuous improvement stage," she concludes.

By Tracy Carbasho