Global Reach Brings Home Customer Success

Anyone who has a family member who has gone through a career switch will appreciate just how difficult it is to adapt to a changing market place. That is part of why we were interested in knowing more about what Nortel Networks has learned regarding re-inventing itself, and about being able to respond to future changes in market conditions.

Hugh McCullen, Director of Multimedia Solutions Nortel Networks Information Services took some time to speak to us about Nortel’s new corporate strategy.

"Nortel is a very different organization now than it was five years ago. No longer simply a purveyor of boxes, we now sell total solutions. Solutions that are designed to meet not only the operational needs of our clients, but also those of our clients' clients.

As part of this new relationship, customers require that effective training materials be made available for our newly released products, BEFORE those products are even shipped.

Faced with diminishing market windows themselves, these clients require the ability to be totally trained and up to speed on our newest available products as soon as those products come through their door. This offers them significant competitive advantages within their own market place.”

This “High Touch” approach to business is just what Nortel needs to differentiate itself from an increasing list of competitors in the “box market”. The strategy also plays directly to Nortel’s existing strengths.

1. The ability to design and build the best network components in the industry;

2. A global corporate network with servers and switches located in every corner of the world;

3. Experience in managing a culture of continuous employee retraining;

4. The need to dramatically escalate internal and external training activities while facing a
75% cut in corporate training budgets,

“Why", you might ask; "is a 75% cut in your training budget considered a strength?" Our answer is, because it makes it a certainty that doing things the old way, is no longer an option.

For Nortel the old way meant flying human instructors around the world to face rooms full of Nortel or client staff. These students were provided with mountains of paper documents and the ability to observe, and participate in, the hands on manipulation of Nortel products.

Hugh McCullen said that, “At first we thought that we couldn’t teach ‘hands on’ courses from a distance, but then we realized that for most of the class time, students were watching the instructor manipulate the equipment. When students did manipulate the equipment themselves, they were doing so through a terminal. We call our new approach, ‘hands-in’ training. The student can manipulate the Nortel product from their local terminal even though, student and product, are located half a world apart. Similarly the instructor can 'look over the student's shoulder' by watching what they are typing on a terminal screen situated at the instructor’s location. The instructor can even conduct a private conversation with that student while they observe what is happening on the student’s terminal.”

Hugh went on to say, “The old way was burning out our instructors. They spent so much time travelling that they had no time for their families and personal life and no time to refresh their skills in order to prepare for new training activities. Now instructors can go home to their families at night and have a much more normal life.”

Nortel’s experience with continuous staff training allows them to fully understand both the value and the process, of purpose driven training. This understanding encompasses the methodologies for evaluating the results of training plus the ability to optimize their delivery mechanisms in order to achieve the best results for the investment made.

Finally; how does being an industry leader in network components, and having a global corporate network, assist in becoming a leader in global training?

For the answer to that question, ask yourself this: How would you go about servicing the communication needs of your own organization without the knowledge and authority you needed to reconfigure your network for the job at hand. Nortel’s network is worldwide and their control over that network is superb. When they have a training requirement in Singapore and an instructor in Ottawa, they can reconfigure their network to optimize for the use of bandwidth and for the quality of the student's learning experience.

We asked Hugh if Nortel's capabilities were designed exclusively for global corporations and he responded, "It's not the size of your company that counts, its the size of your vision. Whether you need an eLearning strategy that reaches across the globe of just across the country, your requirements are the same.

* System Performance - The Right IT Infrastructure
* Content Delivery - The Rright Applications
* Content Development - Tools to Empower the Subject Matter Experts
* Content Promotion - Tools to help you engage your audience
* Validation - Realtime Feedback from Learners
* Visualization - Visualization of the Applications to deliver immediate value.

Nortel is your the comprehensive supplier for all of these essential aspects of distance training programs, plus we have the capacity and the reach to grow where ever our clients grow.

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