Democratizing the creation of content does not imply total freedom in how Cisco distributes it. One of Kelly's favorite slogans is, "Content is king, infrastructure is God" -- and there's absolutely no question who gets to play God. "We've decentralized content development back to the subject-matter experts," Kelly says. "But we've centralized deployment. We've told people, 'You have the knowledge, but we give you easy access to the audience.' People have to use our tools in order to reach our audience. That approach gets us the most impact."

It also creates the least resistance from the rest of the company. To create an effective e-learning infrastructure at Cisco, Kelly's training group distributed 160 servers, each with 45 GBs of disk space, to Cisco locations around the world. The team then partnered with the corporate IT group to connect the servers to Cisco's network so that they never touched the backbone of Cisco's information systems -- a crucial strategic move. "Introducing change in a company is hard enough," says Kelly. "Introducing technological change that might threaten the overall speed of the network in a company that generates 90% of its revenue over the Web is no laughing matter. People don't want to get an email telling them that they're responsible for slowing down the network."

Indeed, Kelly is so sensitive about the impact of e-learning on the performance of the company's mission-critical computer networks that he lobbied to create a new position in the IT group, now called director of e-learning for IT, with the responsibility of extending the global e-learning infrastructure. (The position is funded out of the worldwide-training budget.)

There's one final element to making learning smarter, faster, and more effective: tagging the content that you've already created, so that you can reuse it or redeploy it at a moment's notice. In association with the Information Network for Field Organization (INFO) project, led by Kelly's colleague Cristian Anastasiu, the worldwide-training group has begun the arduous task of implementing a "meta-data framework" for its curriculum -- a kind of digital shorthand that creates a tag for every piece of content generated for training purposes, so that it can be stored in and retrieved from a central database. The first order of business was to tag more than 700 hours of video-on-demand content already available to the sales force. When the sales force recognized how powerful this new retrieval system could be, it lobbied for all content -- a white paper, an Excel spreadsheet, a PowerPoint presentation from the best salesperson in a particularly enterprising line of business, a video demonstration from a leading engineer -- to be tagged this way.

"Virtually all sales employees are using the INFO Locator tool to find what they need," says Kelly. "But the system is more than just a cost saver. The sales force is blown away by the convenience, control, and relevance that it allows." Eight months after the launch of the FELC site, the training group launched an almost identical site for its partner sales force, the Partner E-learning Connection. About 60% of training for Cisco's partners is now available online.

The short-term benefit of this initiative, and the least interesting for Kelly, is that now the content created for one audience can be located, redeployed, and reused for another audience in a matter of minutes. But it's the long-term benefit that truly excites Kelly and his team. "We're going to allow the field to rank both the quality and the relevance of the content," he says. "For instance, a systems engineer from Florida who is interested in voice-over technology can locate information and, based on its rating, choose what content to download. That system will create a certain level of accountability for those people generating content -- and, undeniably, a certain level of competition."

Even more important, Kelly and his team are building an intelligent learning system that is supported by a consistent tagging methodology. The goal: to match content with the people who need it -- dynamically and quickly. Kelly believes that this is the true benefit of e-learning.

"We'll soon have a much better way of managing the intellectual capital of the company," he says. "Instead of thinking about how many people we have, we'll understand what they know and what they can do. E-learning creates a definite competitive advantage. There's no doubt that it makes a difference in how a company can grow, act, and learn."

Anna Muoio (amuoio@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company senior writer. Contact Tom Kelly by email (tomkelly@cisco.com).

Sidebar: A Lesson Plan for E-Learning

Tom Kelly, VP of worldwide training at Cisco Systems, works inside the world's most Internet-centric big company. So it's no surprise that he champions Web-based education -- "e-learning" -- and that he and his team operate at the cutting edge of the field. Kelly may be in the early stages of his work, but he has already learned some important lessons.