Adam Girard

Adam Girard, VP Training, Deutsche Bank

Adam Girard , vice president of Deutsche Bank , is considering bringing e-learning entirely in-house.

DigitalThink hosting the courses externally and handling all registration and tracking requirements , IS needed only to contribute a technical liaison who encrypted passwords and checked security issues , bandwidth and connectivity demands , according to Adam Girard , the vice president responsible for the online learning center for the bank's global technology and services department.It was a due diligence process.Since 90 percent of what we were doing was external , we needed very few interactions with the technical staff , he says.

That plan sits well with KPMG's Bartholomew , who says he tells clients that information services should be involved initially so that consultants and vendors alike can get a good understanding of a company's long-term infrastructure blueprint and map out their training plans accordingly.
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We are paying a slight premium for external services , Girard explains , so we may host and track everything internally in the future..

Adam Girard, vice president of Deutsche Bank, is considering bringing e-learning entirely in-house.DigitalThink hosting the courses externally and handling all registration and tracking requirements, IS needed only to contribute a technical liaison who encrypted passwords and checked security issues, bandwidth and connectivity demands, according to Adam Girard, the vice president responsible for the online learning center for the bank's global technology and services department.It was a due diligence process.Since 90 percent of what we were doing was external, we needed very few interactions with the technical staff, he says.

That plan sits well with KPMG's Bartholomew, who says he tells clients that information services should be involved initially so that consultants and vendors alike can get a good understanding of a company's long-term infrastructure blueprint and map out their training plans accordingly.It's good to know everything you can about the infrastructure : capacity, caching devices, what upgrades are planned and when, and what network distribution traffic controller they have in place, Bartholomew says.

More complex e-learning projects in Deutsche Bank, however, have proved to need more attention from IS.The bank internally hosts a series of technical and financial modules (with courseware provided by NetG and Intuition Publishing, respectively) that have a dedicated technical staff to deal with server maintenance and other standard support needs.And the bank is now exploring the possibility of rolling all its learning projects, including classroom learning, into a larger, centralized learning center, which could possibly mean that externally hosted learning would one day be administered completely in-house.Deutsche Bank's rationale for the move is in part financial.

I received this wonderful note from Adam Girad from Deutsche Bank:

We really liked the idea of the discussion groups and the Ask the Tutor' capability that DigitalThink provides, said Adam Girard, Deutsche Bank's assistant vice president of training and development. DigitalThink courses have a built-in interactivity that other online companies do not offer.'.

Building the School

Once Deutsche Bank had settled on DigitalThink as a solution, the next step was actually creating the virtual university.With Deutsche Bank employees providing input- Gimbl himself served as the subject matter expert for a business ethics course - and DigitalThink providing a model for Web-based instructional design and the actual course production, a test version of the learning center was deployed within 1 month.

The success of the test deployment convinced Deutsche Bank that it had made the right choice.