MindLeaders Merger with ThirdForce Creates Global Employee Development Brand

e-Learning leaders join forces to provide full service employee development and training 解决方案.

May 22,2007- MindLeaders, a leading provider of e-learning and employee development 解决方案, announced today that it has signed an agreement to merge with ThirdForce Plc.
ThirdForce is a leading provider of e-learning 解决方案 and 服务 to the education, government, hospitality, healthcare, retail, and commercial sectors. Together the two companies provide training 解决方案 to nearly three million learners worldwide.

“This merger was exciting from the very beginning”

MindLeaders clients and partners will soon have access to ThirdForce’s “Skills for Life”, assessments, and content for important verticals such as hospitality and healthcare. “This merger was exciting from the very beginning,” says Paul MacCartney, President of MindLeaders. “Each 公司简介 creates engaging 产品 that have significant value in the other’s market. The fact that we complement each other so well is going to create opportunities for healthy growth.”

ThirdForce CEO, Brendan O’Sullivan, agrees. “MindLeaders Personal Learning Service is an extremely effective way to deliver learning that achieves both individual and organizational goals in a way the competition simply can’t match. By combining MindLeaders broad product line with ThirdForce’s proven experience in Europe and key verticals, we’ll be able to offer the market an impressive alternative in an industry that has become pretty generic over the last few years. You can expect great things from us.”

Carol Clark, co-founder, President and CEO of MindLeaders for twenty-five years will join the Board of Directors of the combined companies to provide guidance and support for the future. Industry veteran Pat McDonagh, founder of SmartForce (now SkillSoft) and Riverdeep Interactive Learning is the founder and Chairman of the Board of ThirdForce.

About MindLeaders

MindLeaders is an employee and performance-improvement 公司简介 with over 25 years of experience in delivering e-learning and employee development 解决方案. MindLeaders provides personalized learning that supports organizational success. Their e-learning tools cover topics ranging from networking in an enterprise environment to personal use of the PC and from healthcare privacy issues to business skills. MindLeaders is based in Dublin, Ohio. About ThirdForce

ThirdForce is an established provider of e-learning 解决方案 and 服务 to over two million learners in education, government, healthcare, hospitality and commercial organizations worldwide. ThirdForce provides a wide portfolio of e-learning 解决方案 ranging from ICT Literacy to ECDL training and from Health and Safety Training to Care Induction. ThirdForce has offices in the UK, Ireland, Australia, and Canada.

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SumTotal Launches New Version of its Talent Management Software Suite

Ease of Use, Configurability and “Workflows” Highlight Newly Released SumTotal Version 7.6

August 8, 2007 – SumTotal® Systems, a global provider of talent and learning management 解决方案, has released SumTotal Enterprise Suite™ 7.6. The newest version of SumTotal’s award-winning software helps executives find talent, identify and fill gaps in a workforce’s skill set and recognize and reward employee performance

“In this release we added a number of components of functionality based on customer feedback; however, the major areas of focus were ease of use and configurability,” said Dave Crussell, chief operating officer of SumTotal.

Usability enhancements to SumTotal 7.6 include an array of intuitively designed features for employees to tap as they “drive” their learning experience, including supercharged search, easy-to-use course registration panels and customer-designed displays. SumTotal 7.6 challenges the industry’s standards by giving users a more streamlined way to launch learning and measure performance when and how they need it.

By providing HR and training professionals with software that can be tailored to the way employees work, SumTotal’s executives feel the newly released software suite will become the foundation for managing workers through every stage of their career. SumTotal designed its new suite to give its customers what they said they needed to manage employee learning, performance and compensation.

SumTotal engineered its newest talent management software suite with hundreds of “workflows” (or methods, procedures and processes) that mirror the way its customers develop, assess and reward talent.

“For example, while most companies think about succession planning in the same way, they often have unique processes for identifying critical roles and searching their respective organizations for the right successors,” said Marcus Wasdin, SumTotal’s vice president of marketing and product management. “SumTotal 7.6 offers workflows that more closely match the way senior-level executives and their HR and training teams want to identify candidates and groom them for higher-level responsibilities.”

Highlights of SumTotal 7.6 include: 1) a variety of performance-management capabilities for evaluating employee goals and reviewing succession plans, 2) new workflows for assigning training based upon a 公司简介’s unique organizational structure, 3) a learning content management system that supports the latest edition of SCORM 2004, a collection of standards and specifications for web-based e-learning, and 4) enhanced language capabilities to meet the needs of customers across Asia and Europe.

“We believe SumTotal 7.6 makes what many considered a leading talent management solution, even better,” added Wasdin. In a May 2007 Gartner report, titled “MarketScope for Employee Performance Management Software, 2007,” researchers wrote that “SumTotal now offers a talent management application suite that encompasses learning, performance, compensation, and succession management.” The report noted that SumTotal’s software had both solid and strong performance, compensation and succession management capabilities. Gartner’s research report stated, “Customers feel that SumTotal has been flexible in meeting their specific needs.”

In fact, many of the new capabilities users will find in SumTotal 7.6 are a result of SumTotal’s product management team taking customers’ top suggestions and building those into the new release.

“We took our customers’ top requests ranging from enhancements to the way companies deliver learning to supporting the latest technology,” said Wasdin, “and we built a solution that’s focused on they way our customers develop their employees, instead of creating software that attacks, in a very tactical way, an HR or training manager’s to-do list.”

Along with the addition of 250 workflows for managing performance and learning, SumTotal 7.6 also offers a number of technology enhancements, which include support for database platforms like Oracle 10g and SQL Server 2005.

“SumTotal 7.6 will give executives as well as HR and training teams a way to seamlessly assess employees’ skill sets and deliver the learning experiences that will increase job performance,” said Crussell. “Best of all for our customers, we feel we’ve designed our newest release in a way that reflects how they and their respective organizations prefer to work.”

About SumTotal Systems, Inc.

SumTotal Systems, Inc. is a global provider of talent and learning management 解决方案. SumTotal deploys mission-critical 解决方案 designed to align goals, develop skills, assess performance, plan for succession and set compensation. SumTotal’s 解决方案 aim to accelerate performance and profits for more than 1,500 companies and governments of all sizes, including six of the world’s 10 biggest pharmaceutical makers, six of the 10 largest automotive companies in the world, four of the five branches of the U.S. Armed Forces, three of the world’s top five airlines, five of the six largest U.S. commercial banks and two of the world’s top five specialty retailers. Mountain View, Calif.-based SumTotal has offices across Asia, Australia, Europe and North America. For more information about SumTotal's 产品 and 服务, visit www.sumtotalsystems.com.

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Building the Business Case for Remote Support

By John Ragsdale, VP of Research, SSPA

August’s Topic of the Month for SSPA Research is Remote Support. When asked in the July issue of the SSPA News which title you most wanted to see this month, the winner with 80% of the vote was “The ROI for Remote Control 解决方案.”
SSPA Research defines remote support platforms as the bundle of functionality used to take control of a customer’s desktop via a secure internet connection to diagnose and resolve issues. Leading remote support platforms are expanding, with new features added in each release. Core components in most platforms include:

• Remote desktop control. Agents can access the customer’s equipment via a secure web connection, and take control, performing functions as if they were sitting in front of the machine.
• Web chat. Agents may chat with a customer using a Web chat dialog during the remote control session, freeing up the customer to take a call or perform other work, with the agent prompting them with the chat dialog when additional information is required.
• Web collaboration. Some platforms also support Web collaboration, allowing other agents to join the remote control session to provide assistance.
• Screen sharing. With screen sharing, the agent can view the customer’s desktop, with an option to allow the customer to view the agent’s desktop as well. This allows agents to walk customers through procedures they may be struggling to attempt on their own.
• Session monitoring. A new feature now available with some platforms, supervisors can select a remote control session currently in progress to see how the agent is handling the situation. Useful for quality control monitoring or to keep tabs on new agents.
• Customer log files. Different platforms offer various diagnostics that can be used to pull complete log files of a customer system for real-time or historical analysis. Log files typically are sent to the agent as a text file at the end of the session and attached to the case.

The SSPA Recommends

Creating an ROI model before initiating a search for new technology is definitely a best practice.  Understanding the likely payback helps prioritize projects, and also gives companies an idea of appropriate project budget.  In technology areas with practically guaranteed ROI, such as remote support, vendors typically offer an ROI audit to help you benchmark your current performance against other companies within the vendor’s installed base, and help estimate projected cost savings.

When preparing an ROI model for a remote support project, SSPA Research recommends that companies:

• Evaluate your current metrics program.  If you don’t have benchmarks for current performance, you can’t track improvements and calculate accurate cost savings.  Be sure you have current statistics for key metrics detailed in this article before continuing.
• Include both hard and soft metrics when modeling ROI.  While hard metrics, such as escalations or average talk time, offer obvious cost implications, don’t forget to include important soft metric performance and goals, such as customer satisfaction or loyalty.
• Have realistic expectations.  ROI is easy to achieve, but beware the “law of diminishing returns.”  A 公司简介 with highly trained and productive agents, an effective, mature knowledgebase and strong case workflow will not receive as dramatic an ROI for remote support as companies with little or no knowledgebase available, and few formalized case handling processes.  This doesn’t mean adding remote support will not prove cost effective, but the period of time to realize full project ROI may be 12-18 months instead of 3 to 6 months.
• Train, incent and reward to promote adoption of remote support tools.  Lack of user adoption is the biggest cause of project failures.  Simply put, the technology can’t pay for itself if no one uses it.  Be sure to include links to launch remote support from within the agent desktop used for incident tracking, and update knowledgebase articles to advise agents to initiate remote support sessions where applicable.  Also, monitor agent use of remote support tools (usage reports included with remote support platforms), and provide additional training and coaching for low adopters.

About John Ragsdale

John Ragsdale is Vice President of Research for the SSPA.  Ragsdale spent 10 years managing tech support operations before moving to Silicon Valley where he held product management and marketing positions at eService and CRM vendors. He spent 5 years at Forrester Research as VP and Research Director before joining the SSPA.

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