Choosing the right eLearning technology
Consultants caution against purchasing learning technologies that do not support organizational goals and values. Kinetic Information, a research and professional services consultancy in Waltham, Mass, uses the acronym STOP to identify four key considerations.

Strategy
What is your KM strategy, and how does eLearning fit into it? Mapping existing corporate strategies to new technology objectives avoids scenarios in which the technology exists for its own sake.

Technology
Baggage exists in the form of IT investments already made. In addition to hardware and software, it includes programming skills and end-user training. Consider how much of your company's baggage can be leveraged by a new system and how much should be discarded.

Organisational Design and Culture
Is your organization a large, distributed, hierarchical structure in which pedagogy and attendance metrics are critical? Or is it an organic collaborative culture in which application of learning is more important than the learning process? Some eLearning solutions are highly scaleable and useful for producing tests and HR metrics. Other products capture ad hoc eLearning through support of asynchronous teamwork and creative joint discovery. Choose the tool that fits your culture.

People and Psychology
No matter how attractive a technology may be, it won't serve you well if the key players don't find it useful and attractive. Involving users in the acquisition phase will help create champions who lead others to the new solutions.

Source: Paula Boyle, principal analyst, Kinetic Information