Enabling Business Problem Solving from IT to the C-Suite

In a technology-driven world, an IT professional can feel overwhelmed by troubleshooting requests. When technical issues pile up the core of the problem is often overlooked. Thus, your IT professional or department gets trapped in a never-ending cycle of even the simplest of requests, such as teaching digital immigrants how to format headers in Word.

When it comes to operational business efficiency, you need the buy-in of upper management before incremental changes can be made. Ultimately, the solution you bring to the table must be less about leading the way with the latest software, and more about delivering value from the top to the bottom of the company. According to the Harvard Business Review: "[T]he CIO and IT must be seen less as merely developing and deploying technology, and more as a source of innovation and transformation that delivers business value, leveraging technology instead of directly delivering it."

Create an effective business problem-solving strategy before bringing the solution to the C-suite

Without an effective strategy, your potential solution is just an innovative notion. When building out your strategy, consider the pain points your department and the company as a whole are experiencing. Next, identify the skills your coworkers need in order to become more independent in their roles. When each member of the team is more independent, senior-level IT employees will experience a decline in troubleshooting requests, which will free those senior IT folks to deliver more strategic value. Finally, you can establish the resources for developing essential business skills. One way to accomplish this is through virtual training. This method of training is scalable, cost-effective and easy to implement.

Introduce the training solution to the C-suite

Now that you have your ducks in a row, it's time to bring your solution to the C-suite. This will give you an opportunity to discuss existing processes, the benefits of virtual training and any challenges your executives foresee with rolling out a new solution. There is no question that training new and existing employees can eat into the company budget, so be prepared to answer some high-level questions. This may include "Which departments or employees will benefit from training?" "What specific skills will they acquire?" "What is the short- and long-term investment?" Come with predictions for return on investment and decisions made on who will ultimately control the rollout and implementation of the virtual training program.

Measuring the success of a training solution

Implementing a new training solution is going to require ongoing reporting of its performance if you want to set your team up for long-term success. Finally, it's essential that you accurately measure your ROI. While reporting on employee performance is essential, you must gather real data—especially if you want to allocate more time and budgeting toward further training for your employees. Consider metrics such as the number of overall visits to the virtual-training site, the number of active participants, the number of webinars and classes attended and the productivity gains in minutes. If managers don't want to spend all of their downtime collecting data, they can partner with a virtual-training platform that has an ROI tool built in.

If you're interested in learning more about tracking your return on investment from virtual-training services, request a demo of our learning site and preview our ROI Calculator.