Scenario of a larger training organization:

According to Microsoft[1], 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:

• How much of the designer's time is spent actually developing content, as opposed to time spent developing curricula?

• How much of your content would actually get reused? In some organizations, the quantity might be almost nil and in others it could approach 50% or even more.

• How many repetitive training operations do your designers perform in order to get content to the students?

• Do your designers have the willingness and ability to change their methods?

• Does your organization possess the infrastructure and the commitment to design or customize, implement and use the content reuse system?

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 $(1/3)*.6*.15=3\%$ increase in productivity overall. Using the above example from Microsoft, this organization could spend $(0.03/0.16)*\$1,100,000=\$206,250$ and break even in the first year.

As mentioned above, it is also important to note that this kinds of content repository works best as an entrprise implementation: a repository used by anyone who has need of accurate and consistent content, not just training. For larger organizations, training can take the lead with this new technology and prove its benefits and efficiencies to the rest of the enterprise. It should always be the intent to have one shared repository, or at most a very few repositories used by different organizations within the enterprise.

The following graph shows the annual savings by the percentage of reuse of content for training. The following assumptions were made:

• Burdened rate = $100/hr.
• Hours per year = 2000
• Number of employees³= 50
• Percent of time spent creating content = 75

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 their training efforts to such an extent that they are beginning to see negative productivity results⁴

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 content-reuse system qualifies as an excellent example of such a solution.