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This 22 July meeting gave an opportunity to Silicon Valley companies and others joining the meeting synchronously (we used Macromedia's Breeze to enable remote participants to join the meeting) to discuss some of the issues and topics that the LoD report Learning Outsourcing: Strategic Opportunity addressed. Presentations from the meeting are available at www.sric-bi.com/LoD/meetings/2004-07-22.shtml.
A few highlights from the presentations of Hal Richman (Productivity Solutions), David Sanchez (Autodesk), and Brad Johnson and Heather Muir (Intrepid Learning Solutions) follow. Hal summarized a few conclusions that will appear in a paper soon in ASTD's Training and Development magazine:
- After outsourcing, we see an important (cultural) shift taking place as training is then being run "as a business"—and as a result processes become more transparent and metrics become important to determine performance of the training operations. Performance improvement and business outcomes gain greater visibility and importance.
- After outsourcing, a number of new roles and responsibilities emerge, and many have to do with partner management, issue resolution, and building and managing the transition team.
Brad Johnson and Heather Muir of Intrepid concluded that:
- Training outsourcing results in a single point of accountability and greater "benchmarking perspective" (and benchmarking an organization's training processes and operations against others is an important first step in an outsourcing project).
- Although a goal of most outsourcing projects is to lower costs, it is also important to shift to "variable costs" and use the outsourcing vendor as a source for innovation and expertise and for "shared R&D."
Finally, David Sanchez of Autodesk discussed why his company's experience with offshoring training-content development to India has not been a great success—at least so far. Autodesk's experience revealed the following:
- Problems with offshoring content development to India were traceable to the following factors: mismatch in process (between Indian companies and those of Autodesk), insufficient volume and pipeline (to take advantage of the economies of scale that Indian vendors offer), lack of instructional design (ID) expertise in Indian content-development companies (strong ID knowledge may have existed in small number of senior staff but typically did not exist at lower level staff), and increasing prices (thus reducing the cost advantage that previously existed).
- Autodesk is now focusing on improving its own processes as well as improving the designer/subject-matter–expert/author relationship, and although it is not actively seeking partnerships currently, it is still looking at offshore vendors.
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