In Search of Subject Matter Excellence

What do you get when you cross a management scientist with a failed folk singer? The answer: Stanford professor Sam Savage. He's of a rare breed, an academic who was self-aware enough to realize early in his teaching career that only 10 percent of his mba students were "getting" the mathematical concepts he was trying to impart, and just 10 percent of them would apply them.

Dissatisfied with being only 1 percent effective, he honed and refined his presentation skills to include humor, stories and metaphors. Savage now offers his specialist knowledge on applying mathematical models for business decisions to major organizations as a subject matter expert (SME).

Savage is the kind of SME that every organization hopes to find, whether they need someone to contribute content to an instructor-led or technology-based program. He is a highly knowledgeable specialist and understands that the purity of the content must go hand-in-hand with ensuring that the recipients actually learn.

If an organization is lucky enough to find an SME who straddles both perspectives, the instructional design process should be smooth. Chances are, however, that companies will have to marry the expert's intellectual capital with their own focus on the relevance, clarity and appeal of the delivery. Working with an SME needs to be a dynamic relationship, not just a brain dump.

In areas in which information changes constantly—such as tax issues, government legislation or technology—an SME is an ideal contact because only a specialist has the time and interest to keep up with those modifications.

So where do organizations find these experts? And how do they ensure that they are getting someone who not only knows their stuff, but also understands how to apply this to the specific needs of their business and ideally will assist in, rather than detract from, the instructional design process? Well, companies can find smes right in their own business units.

The same general principles for success apply to both internal and external smes—it's just that while the former may save on fees, they might not be so eager to share their knowledge with others. The leveraging and circulation of intellectual capital within organizations is patchy and depends on the corporate culture, says Les McKeown, president and CEO of Deliver The Promise, Tiburon, Calif. As a CPA he has been an SME for 20 years and understands the mentality of both sides. He also offers training on how the SME/training dynamic ideally works.

"Trainers love to communicate whereas smes are defined by the knowledge they have that links to their perceived usefulness to the organization," says McKeown. "I work on employee orientation programs, which is a classic area in which internal SMEs are brought in. Many times I've watched HR folks fail to communicate clearly about compensation and benefits, not because they were poor presenters, but because they saw part of their role as encouraging employees to come to their office to ask about these things."

McKeown urges organizations not only to engender a culture in which information is expected to be freely shared between employees, but also to understand that most internal experts are not natural trainers. They will need a lot of guidance and feedback on what information is relevant, as well as how exercises, work examples and role playing engage an audience to ensure that the information is applied.



Early Involvement

The issues around involving an organization's internal SMEs in the instructional design process are similar to working with many external experts. Naperville, Ill.-based e-learning provider NETg, for example, has this down to a fine art. The company produces courseware that training managers can roll out internally, covering thousands of IT skills as well as business and professional skills. Two years ago netg earned ISO9001 status for its quality development process. Its advice, echoed by many others, is to involve SMEs up front so they can help outline the scope and goals of the project.

Given that NETg needs so many SMEs on an ongoing basis, where does it find them? "From many different sources," explains David Dufresne, director of IT product management. Dufresne's department is charged with creating some 1,500 technical titles, many related to certification. "We find that the academics are better suited to professional development courseware," he says, "So for IT we look to SMEs who are actual practitioners or professional trainers within consulting organizations who are training that content already."

NETg's development team consists of one or more SMEs, a curriculum planner who determines what goes into a course, a lead instructional designer who oversees all the isd elements and focus, and content writers, graphic artists and programmers to build the simulations and an overall project manager.

"When the development team is ready to start, the SME will lead a group training session lasting one to five days where we flesh out what the subject is about, the different elements that we need to cover and the goals we're trying to achieve," says Dufresne. "Each instructional designer is assigned specific learning objects that they're responsible for, and they meet with the SMEs individually to go through each of them."

A key piece of advice is to constantly ask the expert: What's in this for the person receiving the information? What do they need to know and act upon at the end of this course? At this point, companies may find that their smes have oversold themselves. No matter how "expert" the experts say they are, companies should never feel totally committed and allow things to continue when they are not getting what they need, Dufresne advises.



Natural Selection

To mitigate the risk of having to pull the plug when the project is already under way, companies need to select an SME with the same care as taking on a new employee. Aside from asking for resumes and references, companies must get candidates to clarify whether what they will be imparting is a consensus approach to the subject or their recommended best practice. Otherwise, a knowledgeable employee or external client may question the validity of the course content once it's rolled out.

But there's still the issue of how to most easily transfer the intellectual capital of the SME into thought-provoking, valuable content. The differences between a left-brain techie and a right-brain instructional designer are only too clear to Peg Maddocks. She's the director of Cisco System's Internet Learning Solutions (ILS) group, San Jose, Calif., and she echoes Dufresne's philosophy that SMEs should not just impart technical knowledge, but be a partner in the instructional design process. "That requires a mutual respect for, and understanding of, differences in communication and work styles," she says.

It's fatal for companies to use technical employees to write their courses wholesale because the final result usually takes too much time and effort to clean up. Maddocks has developed an innovative solution to that problem by forming a virtual team of 25 system engineers who have come off the road to work in the training department for a few years. The trade-off for them is that they're not accountable for sales during that time, and because there's less travel involved, they get to spend more time with their families.

The team spends up to half of its time in original business units to keep members close to their customers and the cutting edge of technology. Maddocks recognizes, however, that this model is a challenge for smaller companies in which the best people are most valuable doing their jobs rather than helping develop training.

"That's why we also need our instructional writers to know the technology, so they can use the correct language with SMEs and ask the right questions," adds Maddocks. "While it's important for them to present content that engages our internal clients, it's not enough for them just to understand adult learning theory."

Not surprisingly for a high-tech company, Cisco's ILS group uses technology to facilitate the communication between all stakeholders in the design process. Aside from the usual steps of using video and audio to capture the golden nuggets from its smes before the process gets under way, it uses a software product called Evolution—designed by Boston-based OutStart—as a content authoring tool and for rapid review of courses as they're being developed.

"Last year, we worked on a fast-track that required 60 people to comment on four courses," says Maddocks. "OutStart's platform allowed each of those people to remotely access the content and share their comments in real time, without affecting the original content. This collaborative online dialogue enabled us to complete the development within 24 hours."

While it's clearly valuable for instructional designers to know something about the expert's subject, it's essential that SMEs understand the business as well. NETg's Dufresne says his company develops long-term relationships with its smes. This means educating them on the terms the company uses, what the tools and end products look like and how they're used in the marketplace. But even that's not enough sometimes—particularly if the company is focusing on more general business skills.

Regardless of how recommended they come, companies must quiz SMEs on the duration, nature and relevance of their expertise to the company's business, according to Paul Di Modica, president of DigitalHatch, an Atlanta-based training company. "Check that they're familiar not just with your industry but your specific market," he says. "I do technical sales training for high-tech companies, not pharmaceutical or insurance companies, and I never cross over into business development. That way I'm a true expert, not a consultant who's trying to extend my marketing platform."

Di Modica warns about allowing intellectual insecurity or awe of the expert to cloud your judgment. While someone may hail from an Ivy League school and be associated with a brand-name organization or institution, that doesn't automatically mean she has the appropriate level of knowledge a company needs, Di Modica notes. "Look for SMEs with case studies that are parallel to your business needs rather than branded experts who may speak to your CEO's ambitions and aspirations for the business, but not its current reality," he says.

Trainer and SME Steve Koss has similar advice. In a reversal of the one-size-fits-all approach of some external consultants, Koss has found that many organizations call him in to replicate the successes he has had at the Bay Area's Oakland Coliseum and Denver's Coors Field.

Koss gets his clients to focus on what they need to achieve by posing three questions: What are you currently doing? What are you trying to do? What is not working? "The most effective SMEs," Koss says, "are those who ask a lot of questions rather than jump straight in with content."



Liz Simpson is a freelance writer for Training. edit@trainingmag.com