Two Different Goals for Content Management

Chris Howard
Principal Analyst


I recently hosted a panel discussion on LCMSs at the recent Training Tech Solutions conference. Joining me were Joel Huchthausen with State Farm Insurance and Chris Johnson with Orange County Teachers Federal Credit Union.

Both organizations are adding business value through the use of LCMSs - albeit in very different ways.

State Farm has 68,000 employees and multiple business units, each producing hundreds of hours of online training. A major goal for the LCMS was to streamline content development. Joel discussed how the LCMS now expedites the development of online courses and greatly increases the efficiency of developers. Content developers across the enterprise now share content and standardize development through templates. This success story supports our research findings -- LCMSs do increase the productivity and efficiency of e-learning content development over time.

The Orange County Teachers Federal Credit Union, with 1,100 employees, is using an LCMS as one component of an on-demand learning strategy. Instead of creating volumes of online content, the training organization uses its LCMS to enable content producers and subject matter experts to utilize many types of learning tools and collaborate. The training organization supports content creation by providing instructional design experience, authoring templates and content managers who monitor the timeliness and relevance of content.

These two different approaches, one directed at content developers and the other at learners, are fascinating examples of how organizations do, in fact, follow a maturity curve in how they create, use, and manage learning content. Orange County is an example of advanced LCMS usage as part of an on-demand strategy. State Farm uses its LCMS to address a basic content development challenge and will be well positioned to migrate to an on-demand strategy at a later time.