Facilitating Compliance Training in Highly Regulated Industries
November 03, 2008
By Dawn Poulos
Organizations in industries tasked with overseeing strict compliance requirements, such as pharmaceuticals, financial services, aviation, public safety, and government, find the regulatory oversight process difficult enough within a single, small division where training and compliance personnel can, in some cases, still get away with isolated tools and processes for developing and delivering content. However, the addition of multiple authors, contexts, and audiences increases the resources required for version control and audit trails, especially when there are multiple delivery formats required. (i.e., presentations, Web courses, manuals, etc). On top of this, compliance training involves the management of employee certification programs, competency assessments, re-certifications, and a quality record-keeping system. Any inadequacies in the process puts the regulatory teams at risk for delays in delivering the most-up-to-date and accurate materials across the board, or much worse, non-compliance.
When scaling compliance training agendas to corporations with tens of thousands of employees dispersed around the globe or across numerous government divisions (such as the military), compliance teams are opting to streamline content management across the enterprise. Technology comes into play so that content comes from a global pool of "trusted source" content based on the following criteria:
• A "single source" platform where content is created only once and and stored in an open, format-agnostic XML format. By creating and storing content as XML, learning content can be effortlessly distributed and reused across any type of learning materials, including general training handouts, programs, manuals, online courses, presentations, and mobile application.
• Simple change management where an edit to existing content automatically propagates that change to all learning products where that piece of content appears.
• On-demand customization to provide the ability to push out new compliance-related data to critical employees and customized it to their own individual job requirements. And conversely, the ability for a team to pull together its own training materials on- the- fly by pulling pieces of data from the company’s single-source of content.
• Ease of localization to reduce translation costs by ensuring that only one version of content requires translation, no matter where that content appears—in print, online, or even embedded within media images or media.
When dealing with critical regulatory content, compliance team leaders need the guarantee that their training content is up to date and timely. Training materials must be consistent at every learner touch point and delivered on-demand, especially when geared toward the most common compliance-related curricula such as:
• Internal controls
• Certifications
• Standard operating procedures
The underlying trend is a focus on content reuse, even if the data comes in a variety of languages and complex formats, so the global audiences receive universally consistent materials. A breakdown in any of these programs can lead to a backlash, such as spiraling training material costs, inaccurate records, and slower rollouts of new training information.
Handling these programs goes beyond traditional document management, and regulatory training teams have to consider several content factors when managing their company's learning content:
• Multiple authors
• Multiple content sources
• Multiple languages
• Multiple audiences
• Version control
• Audit trails
• Distribution
• Reporting (i.e., customized reports for analysis).
Because compliance training often ties into performance management, combining the fast turnaround of content reusability with the abilities of critical employees spread out within a large organization was difficult to do in the past. It's even trickier when the organization is tasked with strict guidelines for monitoring, reporting information, and providing updates to everyone in a timely manner. The creation and dissemination of the most up-to-date information throughout an organization (in minutes instead of days) is critical in highly regulated settings where a new ruling may require a systematic document update worldwide in a single day.In 2009, look for more large-scale compliance program implementations (on the small-scale, too) linking enterprise content management to the training team. Tying together enterprise content management and learning content management reflects the realization by more and more organizations that they can immediately leverage the brain power of people throughout the organization and ensure that other teams have the skills, behaviors, and up-to-date information to perform their jobs and avoid non-compliance.
Dawn Poulos is vice president of marketing for Xyleme. With the nod toward highly regulated industries and their complex compliance training requirements, join Xyleme, NetDimensions, and Cushing Anderson of IDC on November 6 (9 a.m. PST/noon EST) for their co-sponsored Webinar, "Reusability 2.0: Simplifying Compliance Training." With a panel of leading compliance training practitioners at Cathay Pacific Airlines and TACTICS Consulting, learn real-life examples of how top industry experts, from airline training executives to ISO 9000 content developers, are solving the complex requirements of developing and delivering compliance training. All attendees will receive a complimentary copy of IDC's Analyst Connection on compliance training. For more information, visit www.xyleme.com/webinars.
|
RSS
