Cisco's Quick Study

By the time Kelly left Oracle, 80% of all training material was being released on the same day as the product. Other executives might have been satisfied with this performance. Kelly saw it as an invitation to take his change agenda to the next level. "It was a big deal," he admits. "But we were only optimizing the old way of doing training. We still hadn't made much progress in scaling the dissemination of knowledge."

At Cisco, he could take on this new challenge. "The company was growing too fast and moving too fast to centralize training," Kelly says. "There was no way that I could use the same model that I used at Oracle, regardless of how successful it was. We had to revamp training at Cisco by creating a whole new model for it. It was pretty daunting, pretty scary."

"Content Is King, Infrastructure Is God"

Tom Kelly arrived at Cisco with an enviable track record, a broad strategic mandate, and a sufficient budget. So it would have made perfect sense for him to begin the process of building his learning legacy by building a version of Cisco University -- a click-and-mortar empire modeled on other well-known corporate universities, such as Dell and Motorola. But Kelly had other plans. "The university metaphor just wouldn't work in Cisco's professional technical setting," he explains. "We're not interested in promoting an academic description of education or a vocational description of training. We're interested in building a learning-solutions center -- a place where you find what you need in order to do your job better."

One of the biggest problems with learning today is not a shortage of information but information overload. So the first step for Kelly and his team was to figure out what Cisco already knew and where that knowledge was in the company. "When I first got to Cisco, there was a joke that the answer to any question could be found on the Web," recalls Kelly. "But where on the Web? Well, that's a different problem." Kelly says that Cisco has roughly 10 million Web pages on its corporate intranet. Trying to find the right information can be a colossal waste of time -- and a big obstacle to learning. "Before, we had no way of aggregating information," he says. "If you were looking for information on a specific product or initiative, it was almost impossible to figure out where to begin."

This was an especially big obstacle for the sales force, which depends on quick access to reliable information in order to stay current. One way to deal with information overload on the Web is to use another medium. Prior to Kelly's arrival, business units would ship 8 to 12 CD-ROMs every quarter to the beleaguered sales force. "This system worked if your only metric of success was how well you could create and distribute CDs," says Kelly. "But no one could tell you how many people looked at those CDs, or if people learned anything from them. Inevitably, the CD-ROMs would end up stacked in a corner of an office gathering dust. Or, if anyone did watch them, they'd shut themselves in a room and wake up just in time to change the CD."

So in August 1999, Kelly and his team launched what they call the Field E-learning Connection (FELC), a Web site where content was aggregated by audience and organized in curriculum maps based on job titles, work theaters, specific technologies, and products. "On one database," Kelly says, "we began to gather all of the information that salespeople would need, so that they would no longer have to suffer through outdated CD-ROMs or wander around 40 business units. But in order to become smart, efficient, and fast on the front end of delivering content, we had to become smarter on the back end of creating it."

Becoming smarter about content meant letting people outside the training operation create it. "In most organizations, the training group doesn't just deliver the content," says Kelly. "It develops it as well. We've gone in a totally different direction. We believe that the most up-to-date knowledge exists right at the source. We go to the engineers, to the product-marketing specialists, to wherever the knowledge is, and we give people the tools to build content. So 'content developer' is no longer a job title at Cisco. If you're involved in developing a product, then developing educational content is also part of your job."

That doesn't mean that chip designers or software engineers have to become curriculum gurus. Kelly tries to assign a member of the training group to new-product teams at the outset of a project. Then, during the course of development, that team member, armed with knowledge about the new product, can walk into the office of an engineer or a product-marketing manager, sit down with a video camera, and ask for a list of the 10 critical things that an account manager or a systems engineer needs to know. "Thirty minutes later," says Kelly, "that person walks out of the office with raw material that is deployed directly to the sales force -- a group of people who would rather have raw, clumsy data sooner than polished, perfect information too late."