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Training Battle Plans: U.S. Army: Centraized Maneuver
September 22, 2008
Structured and efficient delivery of effective learning programs is important to any organization; for the U.S. Army, it's mission critical.
By Margery Weinstein
Structured and efficient delivery of effective learning programs is important to any organization; for the U.S. Army, it's mission critical. The training that supports soldiers and Army civilians gets a boost from its newly updated Army Learning Management System (ALMS), and ongoing fine-tuning of courseware.
"The ALMS provides the Army with an enterprise, centrally managed system, which is a Saba-based application," says Technical Management Division Chief Frank Wyles. "It's accessible from anywhere, any time." What's more, he says, the Army's distributed learning needs are aided by the system's key functionalities that include the ability to conduct testing, scheduling, registration, and delivery of training.
"Prior to the ALMS, training as a whole was decentralized in the Army," says ALMS Project Officer Steve Eldred. "There was an overarching Army mission, but it was executed at various schoolhouses, which were functionally aligned," says Eldred of the schools that addressed areas such as artillery, infantry, and quartermaster. "There was little cross-platform functionality, and there wasn't much information sharing, reusability, or standardization."
This meant it was difficult to ensure that the tasks soldiers were asked to perform were described in the curriculum of the different schools in the same manner, and performed to the same standard. "Clearly, you're not going to shoot a weapon differently if you're in one branch of the Army from another, and you're not going to have different standards necessarily," says Eldred. "But having an enterprise system means we can elevate the visibility of the training beyond the proponent level to an Army-wide level, and that allows for a standardized approach to not only what soldiers have to do, but determining how well they did it, and the record the individual has of how well he or she performed."
This new, enhanced structure empowers the Army to more easily take on new distributed learning challenges, says Wyles. Before the LMS, a sexual harassment prevention training mandate meant each Army branch had to figure out for itself how to deliver the curriculum. "This could be by CD-ROM or individual LMSs that may have been peppered throughout the Army," says Wyles. The new delivery system results in savings of time and money as the pre-course e-learning modules soldiers complete sometimes eliminate the need for travel, or, at the very least, shorten the time spent away from their posts, says Bobby Kirts, chief of the ALMS Customer Support Center.
A few years ago, when Army personnel in more than 500 locations needed to be trained on a new form of network identification known as The Common Access Card (CAC), the initial rollout of the program took nine trainers 11 months to complete, says Wyles. This year, retraining on a CAC update wasn't nearly so difficult or costly. "Using the ALMS virtual classroom technology," explains Wyles, "they were able to train those same 500 sites with only three trainers in three months at a cost savings of approximately $1.3 million."
Despite many advantages, there was at least one difficulty associated with the ALMS implementation. "When you [roll out] an enterprise system, it represents a new way of doing things that wasn't invented there," Eldred notes, explaining that while that's true of change management at any organization, in the Army motivation to change stems from something different. "We're not motivated by profit, so you're not going to have a CEO saying, 'We have to cut costs, and, therefore, it has to be done this way,'" Eldred points out. "The Army is mission-oriented, so they're more reluctant to mess with success. The training of our army is one of the key things that make it outstanding." With successes racked up since the days of Valley Forge, asking officers to lean on more junior officers to make changes is sometimes a hard sell. "The motive to adapt may not be as strong as in a corporate setting," Elred speculates, "where you have stockholders demanding next quarter's profit margin."
The Army is already looking to future enhancements to the ALMS program, says Elred. To start with, the Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) would like to bring additional facets of the training process, including the data created during the training analysis, design, and development processes, under the umbrella of the ALMS, the system that currently is only capable of overseeing training execution. Says Eldred, "We'd like to see more horizontal integration of our system and other systems that service the Army at the enterprise level."
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