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At Hills Pet Products, Inc., a major corporate education initiative is under way that originates from an unlikely source: the IS department.
Dan Pitts, vice president of information services at the $600 million Topeka, Kan.-based pet supply company, wants to educate Hills employees about technology and business issues. He's spending 4% of his information systems budget on training to do it. "The company has held education as a value for quite a while," Pitts says, "and (IS is) at the forefront of that."
That kind of take-charge commitment to education by IS is rare. Training of corporate end users continues to be a conundrum for most companies, consultants say, and most training offerings are either limited, poorly structured or ineffective.
Poor Job
Observers blame several factors -- ranging from budget pressures, poorly qualified IS trainers and lack of interest -- for the poor job done by many IS departments in training end users (see story page 74).
"IS is still bogged down doing the '80s style of support; it's demand-driven and reactive," says Naomi Karten, head of Karten Associates, a Randolph, Mass.-based consulting firm that specializes in IS training. "Not enough of the right training is being provided to end users."
A big part of the problem, says Chuck Winslow, managing partner at Andersen Consulting's Change Management Service, is that IS isn't equipped to train end users about technology.
In most cases, Winslow says, IS lacks skills, such as instructional design and organizational behavior, needed to train end users. Thus, human resources and training departments have taken up the task, leaving IS the odd man out.
"Companies spend millions of dollars on software development, but training is an afterthought," adds Ruth Clark, an IS training specialist based in Phoenix.
The problem is not lack of spending: Recent estimates place the amount shelled out by U.S. companies on employee training last year at $45.5 billion.
Nor is interest or awareness lacking. For the first time in Training magazine's annual survey, "technological change" topped the list of important challenges. Concern was especially high in business services, education and public administration (see chart page 74).
Similarly, a recent survey of IS executives in large U.S. and Canadian companies conducted by Andersen Consulting found that...