Friday, May 01, 2009

Name That Tool

I just got a FaceBook query from someone and I thought you all could help:

I'm looking for a tool you might have come across, but I don't even know what product/programming group it belongs to.  I want to be able to ask people a series of questions and correlate their answers with topic areas to indicate what courses they should take.

So if you say, yes I have signoff authority for travel vouchers, I could tell this tool to mark four courses.  I'd want to be able to do a couple things with the data before giving the user feedback.  I'm sure I could do a better job describing this, so let me know if I've been clear.

To me, this sounds like competence management as handled by an LMS.  But that's not really my expertise.

What tool do you think he's looking for?  Can you name any names?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Sounds a little like an expert system or even just a simple business rules engine.

It could be linked to a competency crosswalk, but it's not necessarily competencies because some of it is based on role/position/whatever that isn't really a competency (have signoff authority for travel isn't a compentency--understanding the corporate travel regs might be but that's different, isn't it?).

We have an "Individual Development Plan" tool (http://tinyurl.com/cfarw7) that one of our divisions uses to help students determine which courses are right for them. Is that the type of system you're talking about?

John D Roberts said...

I am FaceBook Query Guy.

Thanks. You're on the right track. We want people to tell us what they do so we get a view of their roles and responsibilities. In turn, we can correlate that with competencies (or in our case program learning objectives) which in turn point to learning tracks. "If you do X to Y extent, you must be skilled at M through T."

We might want everyone to take all the courses, but the responsibilities profiler (a bad tool name, I know) would show what's critical to whom.