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by Mohana Radhakrishnan
As learning becomes more tightly woven into the fabric of the enterprise, weíre seeing increased emphasis on technology integration. Many organizations are trying to maintain dozens of integration points ñ between multiple LMSs, content management systems, HR systems, and dozens of tools.
Keeping up with these integrations ñ ensuring their operation, updating them when needed, and providing ongoing support ñ can be extremely expensive and time consuming. Often, significant technical expertise is also required.
One of our clients recently solved their ìintegration frustrationî with a totally different approach ñ they recently rolled out a learning services architecture that encompassed Saba, the companyís legacy LMS, along with multiple content providers, internal labs and portals, and external systems such as WebEx.
Their learning services architecture is based on three primary concepts:
- A services delivery manager, a middleware application, that handles all information requests and data sends.
- ìContext-freeî APIs that communicate with the delivery manager. By eliminating point-to-point application integrations, changes to APIs are limited when vendors upgrade. Additionally, new systems can be integrated much faster and more simply.
- Building many learning functions -- such as surveys, registrations, and evaluations -- as web-based services that can be shared by other applications outside of learning. For instance, development work related to subscriptions, notifications, evaluations and surveys can be repurposed for customer support.
The client who rolled out this solution is a proponent of using outsourcing for learning technology work. They believe that internal development is much costlier and more difficult because of limited qualified resources. They chose Expertus as an outsourcing partner because of our track record and skills in J2EE, Java, databases and datamarts, and reporting ñ all important to the planned learning services architecture.
Prior to the initiative, a diagram of the companyís learning architecture resembled a tangled web. The learning services architecture eliminated the messy complexity and brought many IT-related efficiencies, including dramatically easier upgrades and integrations, reduced IT maintenance costs, and a platform designed for scalability, flexibility, and ongoing change.
If your organization is grappling with integration issues or if youíre interested in increasing the efficiency of your learning technology infrastructure, send me an email. |
