by Site Staff
December 20, 2005
As the head of Avaya University, Suellen Roth understands how her organization supports the enterprise. About four years ago, Avaya, a leading provider of communications systems, applications and services worldwide, had to meet a tough timetable for new product launches to retain and expand its share in the Internet protocol services market. To accomplish this, the company needed to rapidly align learning to quickly changing business priorities.
As a result, Avaya University was born, thereby significantly increasing the company’s ability to deliver enterprise-wide learning solutions that drive business performance and growth. Roth tied Avaya University’s operations even closer to the objectives of the enterprise in her role at the head of the 13-member executive team within the organization’s Business Interlock governance structure.
Business Interlock is Avaya University’s structured set of processes and relationships that aids Roth and her team in prioritizing and targeting investments for optimal impact, in the context of both business strategy and available resources. This system is comprised of three main groups. The first of these factions is made up of senior business leaders who operate the university’s steering committee and are responsible for setting strategy, assessing results and prioritizing investments. The second group includes the CLO and other learning leaders who manage the transition of enterprise objectives to educational content that will provide the necessary skills and behaviors to the Avaya workforce. The third unit is the Avaya University professionals, who actually design and distribute the finished product, and manage resource allocation and budgets. The overall goals of the Business Interlock teams are to increase learning delivery scale and reach (both internally and externally), support Avaya’s stratagem of rapid technology introduction and management development, and deliver superior learning content.
Roth and the Business Interlock team also have developed and implemented a three-tiered metrics system to gauge success of learning programs and their impact on the business. These include business-focused measurements like sales results, close rates and efficiencies, datadriven business insights and organizational and operational metrics.
One example was a three-part credentialing program designed to build core competencies and establish standardized approaches among sales staff. This initiative was devised to support Avaya’s transition from selling products to selling solutions. The pilot group for this program showed an average increase in the sales funnel of 10 percent and an increase in its sales close rate of 5 percentage points, compared to the rest of Avaya’s U.S. sales force.
These efforts toward alignment between learning and the business are observed and appreciated by Avaya’s senior leadership, such as Donald K. Peterson, the company’s chairman and CEO. “We created Avaya University explicitly to enable our people to continuously execute toward business strategy,” he said. “The goals of Avaya University are simply another manifestation of the company’s goals. And, as the most recent annual report from the University shows, because learning is closely aligned with our business, we have been extremely successful at producing measurable business benefits based on our world-class learning and workforce enablement programs.”