Tata's e-learning division is extending the Raj

Most of us haven’t heard of Jamseti Nusserwanji Tata, yet the organisation he founded in 1868 is now a $22bn international corporation. It’s into steel, hotels, brewing, motor vehicles, watches, software services, aeroplanes and tea (including Tetley). There’s more, much more, but it gives an idea of the sort of organisation that Alan Samuel first joined in the late 1970s.

Working for the food and drinks operation, Samuel became manager of two of the company’s restaurants at the Taj hotel in what was then called Bombay. After five years with Tata, he took a circuitous route to arrive at his present position as head of operations in the UK for Tata Interactive Systems. The company describes itself as “a global leader in e-learning” with a presence in the US, Canada, the UK, the Middle East, Japan, India and mainland Europe.

Tata Interactive’s professionalism is unquestioned. It has completed more than 1,000 projects around the world, mainly for blue chip clients. It
has a highly systematic approach to its work and delivers learning systems to many corporations, universities, schools, publishers and government institutions. Its offerings comprise “a diversified and innovative bouquet of learning and training systems, including simulation-based learning objects,
story-based learning objects, courseware and curriculum design, special needs education, assessments, electronic performance support systems, mobile learning, along with other corporate training and consultancy services”. It has won numerous awards, including a couple from BETT in 2004 and in 2006.

Samuel’s career has equipped him well for his present job. He spent a few years at CBS Records India before teaming up with a friend to become one of the head honchos at a company that supplied steel plate for offshore oil operations. He then became marketing manager of a brewery selling London Pilsner beer against competitors Kingfisher and Cobra.

After four years of this, he joined advertising giant Ogilvy and Mather as head of the Bangalore office. By 1995 he was working for United Television (UTV), part of whose output was advertising and commercial films. Other activities included dubbing Disney films into Indian languages.

At this time Samuel’s daughter, who was three, was using CD-ROM software on the computer he had bought her. “This opened my eyes,” he recalls. “When I joined UTV, the market for corporate films – tour of the factory, interviews with the CEO, induction stuff – was dying. Why not get it onto CD-ROM?”

So they started giving out CD-ROMs with everything on: the tour, the interview, the annual report and so on. Soon after, they started up UTV Interactive.
From here it was just a short jump, in 2001, back into Tata, in its educational division, working on commercial operations and business development. He joined because he thought the work would be interesting and challenging, he bought into the company’s goals, visions and ideals, and it would pay him a decent salary. He commuted to London for seven months before settling down here.

“The common threads that run through my career are sales, marketing and management,” he says. “An important factor is my experience of different industries and product lines. I’ve worked a lot with people and with both large and small organisations.”

Samuel is able to look at learning from both large and small view points. He now also has six years experience of Tata Interactive, which qualifies
him to comment on e-learning and related topics, albeit from a company perspective.

In particular, he notes the huge change in the market from the supplier saying “this is what you get” to the customer saying “this is what I want”.

FROM PUSH TO PULL

“In the early days, selling was about push,” he says. “And it was about classroom stuff that no-one wanted to teach.” He saw the motivation as economic. Companies thought that e-learning was about doing training in the office and saving on travel, hotel costs and staff downtime. The return on investment was often calculated on this basis. Samuel doesn’t think this is a good justification for e-learning. He sees it as something more important, something that can deliver more profound results when tailored closely to the needs of the clients. But it needs to be done in a way that keeps the cost down and the quality high, and leaves the customer in control of future development.

When he joined Tata Interactive, e-learning content production was very much the preserve of specialist suppliers. Then rapid development tools, such as Lectora, came along, which meant that an organisation could bring the creation of e-learning materials in-house. However, the content was created by experts in the subject matter, who delivered high-quality material but were not learning experts.“The key issues now are the quality of the resulting materials from an instructional, presentational and ‘encouraging learning’ point of view,” Samuel says.

He believes the future of e-learning consultancies and developers is to work closely with these in-house teams and to bring instructional design expertise, experience and creativity to the task. “Learning has to have structure and design. You have to look at the subject, the user, the environmentand the instructional design.” E-learning was never an alternative to the classroom; it was always an adjunct, a further tool in the trainer’s
armoury. The result is blended learning where pre-course work and post-course assessment could be “e-”.

Formal classroom training represents only 20% of all organisational learning. As Samuel notes: “E-learning is moving into the informal space.”
Closely linked to e-learning is electronic performance support systems (EPSS), known in the US as “workflow learning”. EPSS are a type of reference system that supports work processes by making the right information available to users when they need it. Learning happens inductively.

The test of EPSS success is whether the business’s bottom line benefits from its implementation. Samuel says it does, citing examples from the insurance industry, where claim processing times were slashed from 21 months to just seven, and from banking where a newcomer was getting 100% accuracy after just three days in the job. Good plugs for Tata Interactive’s EPSS division, then. The commissioning side of e-learning is changing. Whereas it used to be facilitators – HR, training, and so on – who procured it, now it is more likely to be the internal stakeholders who own the business problem to be addressed. “In the early days we were never exposed to the problem owner,” says Samuel. “We’d just be asked to do a job.”He adds: “Internally, HR had its own metrics – it wanted to make itself look good.” This might be in terms of number of courses delivered, for example. “Only when we met with the business problem owner were the true needs understood.” For the past couple of years, Tata Interactive has been asking clients upfront: what is your business problem?

The size of individual e-learning modules has been shrinking, especially over the past two years. It used to be four hours plus. Now, it’s down to an hour or even half an hour.

A lot of information is now on the intranet, mirroring the EPSS strategy, whereas it used to be incorporated into the training package. One reason for the change is that users’ computer skills have improved. "We used to be frightened that if they left the course environment, they wouldn’t find their way back. Now,they are skilled and more discerning.”

Another reason for the change is that the monolithic e-learning bundles involved a lot of wastage. As, indeed, does some regular classroom training.
Portals were set up to help people find courses. Tap in “leadership” and you could be offered half a dozen courses. Choosing was hard enough;
maintaining, tracking and ensuring training materials were up to date was bad enough; and the generic products were unlikely to resonate with the user. As Samuel puts it: A materials handling course which uses sacks as its example gets the reaction, ‘But we work with chocolates, not sacks.’”

CREEPING TOWARDS KNOWLEDGE

When it comes to classroom training, delegates arrive with different abilities and levels of knowledge. But they are squeezed into the same standard course. The knowledgeable have to sit through stuff they already know, hoping to be awake enough to pick up the new stuff when it arrives. The course instructor is more or less obliged to address the needs of the slowest and least knowledgeable.

It’s easy to see how a more granular e-learning approach would be more cost-effective for all concerned. Especially when coupled with assessments to determine which modules are most appropriate. Generic e-learning courses were usually based on a licence fee per user per year and the publisher retained the intellectual property rights. Change was either impossible or very expensive – and that presupposes that the publisher would still be in business.

“There was a high mortality rate in e-learning industries – mom and pop shops,” says Samuel. “Clients went from a large number of suppliers
to consolidation on a framework approach.”

Of course, Samuel has an interest in painting a bleak picture of traditional e-learning methods. He is, after all, a sales and marketing man at heart. But he genuinely believes that his company has an enlightened approach to e-learning. For example, Tata Interactive liberates its customised e-learning clients by handing over the intellectual property rights and the source code as part of the deal. Clients are not obliged to return to the company for future changes although most of them probably do. Development speed is largely determined by the duration of the module. The company has a tool based development system which saves coding and some graphics work. This reduces the major part of the workload to content creation. Most modules have a generic core around which the developers customise.

Instructional designers look at the subject, its presentation and the user needs. “In the case of something like an induction programme, they will attend an induction class, prepare story boards, do prototypes,” Samuel explains. “Then they review from cultural and local perspectives, languages and so on.”

Development centres are in Mumbai and Kolkata – and not because they’re cheap, but because they are the places where the experience lies. If people want cheap, then Argentina is apparently the place to head these days.

Tata Interactive expands organically and by acquisition. It recently bought two European companies. By buying team-based simulation specialist Edusoft, it saved itself more than a year of work (and, presumably, removed a competitor). Similarly, it bought a Swiss company which leant towards the financial
space and gave Tata Interactive a bigger foothold in Europe.

It also works with third parties that have domain expertise. An example is Solutions Training and Advisory, which specialises in training and education
courses for emergency professionals. Clients increasingly expect their e-learning suppliers to know about their business, Samuel says. “They don’t want to call their own experts out from their regular work.”

SIMULATE TO ACCUMULATE

Looking to the future, Samuel sees simulation, EPSS and enterprise application training growing as a share of the business. Together, they already amount to more than half. And even though traditional e-learning is shrinking as a percentage of business, it’s still growing in value terms. As part of the simulation
activity, the company has bought a presence in Second Life, although this is hidden and purely for research at the moment. Samuel points to bandwidth concerns with corporate use of Second Life.

In fact, IT’s control of bandwidth is an issue generally. Organisations want customers online, so IT allocates faster bandwidth to them rather than internal users. But that’s a problem when it comes to training staff online, and staff denied a fast intranet prefer to work or train from home via their broadband
connection. This suits organisations but, says Samuel, “in union-led organisations, this will never happen”. “There’s a crying need for ‘training technologists’ – people who understand both training and technology,” he says. It would certainly increase the chance of successful training implementations.

It would also give training a voice in the allocation of IT resources.

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