BAE SYSTEMS Virtual University
BAE at a glance
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- A global systems company innovating for a safer world
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- Dedicated to making the intelligent connections needed to
deliver innovative solutions to customers with technologically
challenging requirements
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- Prime contractor and systems integrator in air, sea, land and
space
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- Order book of £42.5bn (year-end 2003)
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- Sales of £12.6bn (year-end 2003)
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- Presence across all five continents
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- Over 100,000 employees worldwide
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- Wide breadth of activities
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- Within the UK, employees (including those in joint ventures and Airbus UK) are working in a variety of roles from leading edge, innovative scientists in the company's Advanced Technology Centres, to fitters and welders building the next generation of nuclear submarines or the Eurofighter Typhoon.
The Business Challenge
The rapid pace of market and technological developments in
the defence and aerospace industries have required the development
of new capabilities and partnerships, new innovative ways of
working, and greater organisational agility in responding to the
needs of customers and marketplace. A cornerstone of the company's
approach to addressing these challenges has been its ongoing
investment in organisational learning and the development of its
people, as reflected in the People Value, and the investment made
in the company's Virtual University.
The BAE HR strategy clearly reflects these challenges
by ensuring that BAE have the necessary talent, and they
create and sustain a performance culture, and that the company is
organised in the most effective way.
BAE SYSTEMS turned to Gatewest New Media and Autonomy Systems
to support the delivery of this vision into a working reality.
What is the Virtual University?
The BAE Systems Virtual University (VU) is an umbrella
organisation that brings together education, development and
knowledge from across the company. It establishes partnerships with
education, academia and the wider business community to ensure that
the company is recognised as a leader in UK industry and a forward
thinker when it comes to capability and individual development.
The VU is a gateway to know how; a dynamic library of
information that can be accessed by individuals from across BAE
Systems. The VU recognises that the growth of e-learning and the
use of internet based knowledge management tools is vital. The VU
plays a major role in collecting and making available best practice
and examples of excellence from across the company. It has become a
conduit for good ideas that might otherwise never be shared
company-wide.
Underpinning the Virtual University strategy is a scalable IT
infrastructure designed to deliver organisational learning and
know-how company wide and cope with numerous legacy computer
systems and complex networks. It was clear from the VU's launch
that if the company Intranet had not already been in place, the VU
would have had to create it.
E-learning and web technology were the only rational solution
to creating affordable access to a continuous learning environment
for over 100,000 employees, working at over 60 sites across the UK
alone, and many more abroad.
From the individual's point of view there was a lack of
visibility of "best fit" learning solutions across the organisation
and it was not uncommon for business units to source external
training solutions directly, at a significant cost, even though
another site already had a learning intervention that was fit for
purpose.
Every employee now has access to the VU and it's e-based
services from a desk-top computer or by visiting the nearest
Learning Resource Centre. The VU's L&D guide and its Integrated
Development Portfolio receives over 12,000 hits a day and remains
the most popular site on the Intranet.
Though important, courses are not enough. The VU's thinking
was that, to truly drive competitiveness through learning, access
to wider sources of learning - such as best practice, know-how,
research and even expertise, personalised to an individuals or team
needs, available at the right time - would be needed. Such thinking
was reinforced by a significant drive from the Chief Executive to
get more return on the investment the company had made in its
intranet. The intranet had been growing organically and was fast
becoming inpenetrable. It was a potential goldmine but users faced
information overload, unstructured information, timeliness issues,
and the complete inadequacy of the key word search engine to locate
the requisite information.
The Gatewest Value
BAE Systems turned to Gatewest to manage and support the VU's
information demands. Content management and governance is of
primary importance to an organisation that has millions of
potential Learning assets residing on many different systems with
different owners.
The VU uses
e-CHO (pronounced
echo) , the content management tool from Gatewest New Media, to
manage these learning resources.
Fit for Purpose
The e-CHO (pronounced echo) Content Management System is used
by key content owners within the Functions and Business Units to
manage their learning assets and has built in control to ensure
information is up to date and compliant.
The e-CHO system directly integrates into the VU's knowledge
Management System 'Autonomy' to ensure all learning assets are,
once published, accessable to all employees.
Following the success of the implementation, the e-CHO system
is now being used to develop AICC and SCORM compliant bespoke
e-learning and is being used to manage the VU's Active News service
which delivers real time news to all employees.
The project was deemed highly successfuly by Jenny Cridland,
Hr Director within Head Office. This has now led to the whole of
BAE Systems Human Resource function using e-CHO to manage HR
information across the company and extended enterprise.
Read about the HR deployment here.