Cisco Tends The Tree Of E-Knowledge

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January 08, 2001 (3:33 PM EST)

By Sandra Swanson,

Motorcycle rallies and bonsai gardening -- not a likely pair of hobbies, right?

Wrong, if you're Tom Kelly, Cisco Systems' vice president of worldwide training. When he isn't evangelizing Cisco's e-learning efforts, Kelly tends to about 70 bonsai-tree pots and rides his black '98 Wide Glide and '00 Electra Glide Harley Davidsons.

Kelly likes to be where the rubber meets the road, and that applies to e learning as well. Cisco (stock: CSCO) CEO John Chambers calls e-learning the "next killer app," which creates major expectations for innovative Cisco e-learning projects. It also puts pressure on Kelly to deliver. It's up to him to transform Cisco's training into Chambers' vision.

When Kelly joined the company in December 1997, about 95 percent of Cisco's sales-force training was done in the classroom. But that approach represented a "model for extended failure," said Kelly, since salespeople couldn't spend the necessary time to keep pace with weekly product introductions. Today, Cisco's sales force gets about 80 percent of the information for their jobs online.

One e-learning tool he said will gain momentum is business simulations. Scenario-based online games can help assess a salesperson's customer interaction or a system engineer's router knowledge. And business simulations may also infuse employee training with some much-needed panache.

"Learning could very easily become a competitive part of your job, if there are ways to keep score," said Kelly. Even if bosses don't monitor employees' skill level, it may become a source of pride for co-workers. "It's like Doom without the blood and gore -- how many levels have you been through?" he said. The key is to create a buzz about the importance of learning.

While e-learning doesn't deserve the rap it sometimes gets of "self-paced hell," it certainly hasn't achieved its real potential yet, Kelly said. "Imagine if e-mail was sent to a repository somewhere, and you had to go search for the e-mail that was appropriate for you." That -- making people search for what suits them -- is a widespread approach to training and learning, he said.

Kelly's solution? Metadata tagging for content that works with a profiling structure, so individuals have germane content delivered to personal training home pages, for example. "The whole profiling mechanism is going to be a little clumsy for two or three years, but it will probably address 50 percent to 80 percent of the problem of what content do you need to do your job," said Kelly.

To accomplish e-learning goals, Kelly emphasized the need for IT support. "We come to them with a learning problem and they help us design a technical solution," he said. "If IT isn't your very best partner inside the company, you can't be successful."

For Kelly, the challenges and rewards of large-scale e-learning programs parallel those of bonsai gardening. That's because bonsai artists must continually respond to their trees' additional growth or damaged branches.

"A bonsai is never finished," Kelly said. "You have to keep working on it, evaluating, and often adapting your vision to the changes. It's a great metaphor for life, for work, and especially for hard projects."