How do you train employees in a dispersed organization?

April 25, 2001 —

The Nature Conservancy (TNC) celebrates its 50th anniversary this year; after a half-century of work, it has become the most prominent organization committed to preserving wildlife through the direct action of protecting specific parcels of natural habitat. The 12 million acres under its management constitute "the largest private system of nature sanctuaries in the world." This week, ITworld.com forum members can talk with the Nature Conservancy's IT staff in he ITworld.com Interviews forum. Here's an excerpt from the interview, already in progress.

ITworld.com:How do you handle technology training for a dispersed nonprofit organization? Are you utilizing online learning or any type of learning management system?

Keith Johnston: In asking this question, you have really touched on an important issue for the Nature Conservancy. We are an extraordinarily dispersed organization, with hundreds of offices and other locations in the last great places on this earth, in each state in the US, in Latin America, and all over the Asia Pacific region. One of the things that often characterizes these locations is isolation from what we would call civilization, and a great diversity of infrastructure. We have plenty of places that cannot even be reached by phone.

We attack technology training in several different ways. One important prerequisite for this is standardization. We have a standard office suite and desktop operating system. We strongly encourage (sometimes mandate) acceptable software for particular tasks. This means that for training and maintenance we are able to concentrate our efforts on those identified tools. Once a tool has been put into place, we have to assess just how complex it is and what type of training would be appropriate, and then choose the delivery mechanism. For complex systems used by many staff, such as our system that tracks donations, we may set up a centralized training facility and send our staff to formal classes that offer certification of the necessary skills. For our recent email system upgrade -- much less complex than our donation tracking system -- training was offered on CD-ROM, with a local option of contracting with an outside vendor for training on the software. I think some of our offices also chose to do more informal training, with a key user or local information systems manager conducting lessons in the office, using documentation materials produced by our central training and documentation team.

We were going to offer the course over our intranet, but the course software was apparently incompatible with our server -- installation of it brought the server down multiple times before we gave up (which we may not have done if we didn't have the CD-ROM option available). I also have doubts about our network infrastructure being able to carry large quantities of high-bandwidth items, such as video and audio, and on the cost-effectiveness of building in this capacity when cheap alternatives exist. We always need to balance our mission needs with the cost of useful technology -- we are losing species to extinction every single day, and once gone, these species cannot be brought back. Money that we spend has been entrusted to us by donors to help save these species, and we try to spend it in ways that best enable us to carry out our mission: to preserve the plants, animals, and natural communities that represent the diversity of life on Earth by protecting the lands and waters they need to survive. We try to weigh technology expenditures with this in mind. We are finding that there are many technology investments that make a lot of sense and give us back much, much more than we spend on it. An example would be information sharing systems that enable us to share best practices among TNC protection staff and the community. Some are more doubtful on the payoff, and right now I am skeptical about the cost versus benefit of large expenditures in online training -- not opposed, just skeptical.

We do deliver some internally developed training over the Web, but this process is really in its infancy. We have a system for building Webpages, which is documented via "viewlets" -- action shots of use of the system with explanatory notes, etc. The software we use to produce the viewlets was developed by Qarbon.

We also make use of traditional outside training vendors, such as Learning Tree and New Horizons -- especially for some of the really techie training aimed at our systems developers rather than system users. I am pleased to say that we have some really good internal experts who willingly provide technical training. One of my Web programmers is a super wizard on Web programming. He, and others like him, conduct internal classes for their colleagues -- which may involve travel to other locations for the training.

As you can see, we have to have a number of ways to deliver training. The particular choice of method depends on cost and effectiveness of the delivered training, which are influenced by number and location of users, complexity of system, in-place technology, user experience level and preferences, and the availability of training resources -- either locally or centrally located.

***

If you've got questions of your own, ask them in the ITworld.com forums!

ITworld.com