We all know that selling a technology-based training project tosponsors requires more than charismatic sales skills. Your sponsor will requiresolid WIIFM (what’s in it for me) answers. You may need to justify your projectwith facts and figures, concrete project plans, and endorsements fromstakeholders.
If the technology-based training project you are pitching happensto be your first venture into the xAPI, the process may be a bit morecomplicated than usual. You will need to establish an xAPI infrastructure thatincludes added overhead costs. You’ll also need support from your ITdepartment.
To acquire the necessary sponsorship and funding, you will need toconvey a compelling case for introducing the xAPI to your sponsor. You willalso need to enlist the IT department’s help in establishing the xAPIinfrastructure and making your project happen from a technology standpoint.This article provides information to help you acquire and sustain sponsorship,and elicit help from IT to make your ground-breaking project happen.
Sponsors and stakeholders
Itis important to clarify what we mean by sponsor and stakeholder. A sponsor fundsthe project, agrees to the time frame, and provides access to the resources youwill need. A stakeholder is someone your project directly impacts. Whilestakeholders do not provide funding, you must bring them on board as wellbecause your solution is likely to affect them and the people who work forthem.
You will need to identify and engage your sponsor and stakeholdersearly in order to get their buy-in and then you must take steps to sustaintheir support throughout the project. The process begins with your sponsor, whomust see enough potential value in your project to get behind it. You can theninvolve stakeholders by asking them to provide input, expertise, and content,and by getting their reactions to demonstrations or prototypes to keep theminterested and ensure that your solution is meeting their needs.
Educate your sponsor
For this article, we will assume that youalready have buy-in from your sponsor(s) for your proposedlearning solution. However, your sponsor has concerns about the investment ininfrastructure the xAPI component of your solution requires. Your organizationmay already have a learning management system (LMS) and other technologies inits infrastructure. Why is more needed?
Your solution requires some enhancements to the learning-technologyinfrastructure to support the xAPI. These may include a learning record store(LRS), analytics software, and custom programming to link LMS user profile datato the LRS. This investment in infrastructure may come under a different budgetcategory or may need apportionment across multiple xAPI projects, which meansthat you may need to convince more than one sponsor.
You must be ready to articulate the benefits of investing inxAPI infrastructure. Some of these are:
- You can track and report on more meaningful data than theenrollments, completions, and test scores your organization may be currentlytracking with its LMS. Be prepared to discuss the existing business metrics youplan to impact, and what type of tracking you can incorporate in your solutionto impact those metrics.
- Your solution can be more direct than a traditionalcourse. Be prepared to discuss how you can build support directly into theworkflow and workplace systems. Use a straw man or prototype to illustrate yoursolution. For example, your solution might provide just-in-time performancesupport for a work task or procedure.
- You can leverage xAPI results data to uncover problemsand opportunities that emerge, even after your solution has been implemented. Beprepared to discuss any plans you have for continually improving your solutionby refocusing it on the obstacles and bottlenecks that emerge as workers usethe solution and as the work itself evolves.
- You can reuse the new xAPI infrastructure in futureprojects, positioning it as a new tool in your learning solutions toolkit thatenables you to design additional high-impact learning solutions.
- You should talk about the specifics of your proposedlearning solution, listing potential opportunities that may be lost by notusing xAPI.
Know what to ask for
Don’t expect your sponsor to know what you will need to besuccessful, so be prepared to ask for what you need. If you can’t articulatewhat you need in order to be successful, your sponsor may lose confidence inyou and you may lose your opportunity.
Prepare by estimating your solution analysis, design,development, implementation, and analytics costs as well as the cost of theadded infrastructure. Define your deliverables, milestones, and timeframes.Identify the resources you will need from the learning function, IT, and subjectmatter experts, as well as from key stakeholders and end users. Estimate howmuch of their time you will need and approximately when it will be neededduring the course of the project.
If your primary sponsor is willing to fund the learningsolution, but has reservations about funding the xAPI infrastructure, you mayneed to involve multiple sponsors. If you have other xAPI solutions in thepipeline, you may be able to split the infrastructure costs across projects. Theremay be other potential funding sources as well, so work with your primarysponsor to identify other potential funding sources.
Engage your IT department
Whenevertechnology infrastructure is involved, you will probably need to work with IT.You will need their buy-in and support to get your xAPI infrastructurepurchased, installed, and maintained.
ITis likely to be concerned with four basic questions: (a) does it meet securityrequirements, (b) can the network handle the added traffic, (c) is it reliable,and (d) can we support it? You will need to work closely with IT and follow theprocesses they have in place to arrive at satisfactory answers to thesequestions.
Forexample, you may find that a cloud-based LRS solution is less costly and fasterto implement than one hosted on the premises by your IT department. In thiscase, IT may need to understand what data is being collected in the cloudsystem, how the cloud system interfaces with on premise systems, and whetherthe entire architecture is in conformance with security policies. You can putyour LRS vendor in direct contact with your IT department to work through someof these issues. However, it is your responsibility to ensure that your ITdepartment’s data-security requirements are addressed.
In addition to pursuing the answers to these basic IT questions,you should provide some additional information to IT about the xAPI and itspotential benefits to the organization that go beyond learning.
Interoperability and platform neutrality
The xAPI is a generic method for tracking actions that take placein a system, or a collection of systems; it can track user actions and actionsperformed automatically by the system. Your IT department may be interested inthe xAPI, not just as it relates to learning programs and technologies, but forother non-learning applications as well. The xAPI is platform neutral. It can beused within the context of any operating system (e.g., UNIX, LINUX, WINDOWS,OSX), any application framework (e.g., Java, .NET), and any device (mobile, desktop,enterprise server.) You can collect data from one or multiple systems and storeit in an LRS. You can also mine data from one system and use it in another. Thesecapabilities help make systems more interoperable.
Leveraging data warehouses and analytics
The xAPI results are readily accessible in an LRS; they make datamuch easier to access than most proprietary learning management systems do. ITdepartments will recognize the benefit in being easily able to mash-up LRS-storeddata with other kinds of data, perhaps stored in data warehouses. Some examplesof dashboards that mash-up data from multiple systems can be found at ADL’s xAPI Dashboard Live Demos Index.
On-ramp to semantic data solutions
One of the most important features of the xAPI is the fact thatthe activity statements are easily read and understood by non-programmersbecause they are semantically based. (Figure 1) This provides a potentialon-ramp to integration with semantic web and other technologies, where eventsand status are described in human-readable form. Ask IT if semantic websolutions are on their roadmap.
Figure1: Semantically based statementsread like English sentences
Potential to accommodate a variety of needs, beyond learning
While the xAPI specification has emerged from the learningindustry it is based on activity streams, which are rooted in social-mediaapplications like Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus. It can and has been usedin many contexts outside of learning. IT departments might want to exploreusing it as a method for tracking system or user activities in a variety ofcontexts. Its simplicity and flexibility make it suitable for many purposes.
Conclusion
The xAPI has the power to transform the enterprise and ultimatelyimpact many aspects beyond training. You should not see first-time xAPIprojects as self-contained eLearning development projects. They involve addingIT infrastructure, so it is therefore key that you enlist support from sponsorswho understand the value of adding this infrastructure and can help get IT (andpossibly other corporate sectors, such as HR) on board with your solution.
In order to get committed sponsorship, you needto be prepared to educate your sponsor and address any misgivings they mighthave. We hope this article will help you gain sponsorship and support forestablishing your xAPI infrastructure and pave the way for your current andfuture xAPI projects.
