According to Microsoft[9], if you have 100 employees using a system that cost you $1,120,000 initially and requires a staff of 4 IT professionals to run it, the system must return an increase in productivity of 16% to break even the first year. Whether you spent this money on developing your own system or purchasing someone else's system, it is money well spent.
Collecting increased productivity from instructional designers depends on a number of factors:
Assume that the instructional designers in your organization spend approximately 60% of their time accomplishing some aspect of content development. Further assume that of this time, roughly two-thirds would be generally unaffected by content reuse. If the content reuse system you implement results in that employee becoming 15% more productive in these tasks, then the net result for that employee is a 6% increase in productivity overall.
For every organization, there is some training that is mandatory, some that is essential, some that is preferred and some that is optional. Mandatory training represents those training hours that must be delivered to meet statutory or contractual obligations. Essential training provides to the employees the skills and knowledge they need to perform their jobs to a minimum standard. Optional training provides the employees with the skills and knowledge to excel. In today's tough economic conditions, many organizations have been trimming back their training efforts to such an extent that they are beginning to see negative productivity results.
Faced with such realities, these organizations are faced with the challenge of providing a competitive, sustainable solution to obtaining quality training that facilitates excellence. An XML based code reuse system qualifies as an excellent example of such a solution.