FSI Training Delivery Solutions
Investment ID: 014-000000521
Overview
Program Title
FSI Training Delivery Solutions
Agency
Description
To meet the needs of the Foreign Affairs Community, FSI must offer training accessible from the cloud, and develop new curricula to enable our workforce to take advantage of cloud-computing capabilities. This effort to develop new curricula will leverage FSI s newly acquired learning management system Cornerstone, a planned Centralized Evaluation System, and existing applications and infrastructure (in the process of modernization) to reach the broadest audience possible to meet FSI s mission.
Type of Program
Non-major IT Investments
Multi-Agency Category
Not Applicable
Investment Detail
For close to two decades, FSI has utilized the LearnCenter as the Department's premier educational delivery platform. Over the last decade, the learning management system (LMS) has undergone extensive modernization and customization efforts, both to ensure that the LMS met the Department's technological and security standards, and that instructors had the feature sets necessary to promote better learning experiences for the student base.
However, it was determined that the LearnCenter was not wholly able to meet the needs of its user-base after several comprehensive reviews were conducted. The reviews revealed that the rate of progress made in the commercial sector had greatly outstripped FSI's ability to keep pace using a custom, in-house development approach.
Eventually, IBM's Cornerstone was identified as the most appropriate Custom Off-the-Shelf (COTS) product available in the market to replace the LearnCenter. In addition to its current educational feature-sets, Cornerstone would free up FSI IT assets previously tied to the LearnCenter to work on other endeavors, while IBM would deliver patches/updates on scheduled release dates. As a cloud-solution, it would also free up FSI server space and the maintenance costs associated with hosting an LMS.
While the LearnCenter would still continue to run in parallel with Cornerstone until such time that all legacy courses were completed or otherwise migrated to Cornerstone, that period of time should be fairly negligible, and the Department would still see financial savings due to the freeze on in-house development efforts.
In addition to the shift in LMS platforms, FSI is currently seeking to acquire a Centralized Evaluation System (CES) that would assist the agency in information collection and reports development. This would be another COTS product, designed to conduct comprehensive learning evaluations of FSI training engagement and materials. While an assortment of applications exist that help serve parts of this mission statement, a unified, cohesive solution would better serve the interests of FSI. This acquisition is still in the early stages.
However, it was determined that the LearnCenter was not wholly able to meet the needs of its user-base after several comprehensive reviews were conducted. The reviews revealed that the rate of progress made in the commercial sector had greatly outstripped FSI's ability to keep pace using a custom, in-house development approach.
Eventually, IBM's Cornerstone was identified as the most appropriate Custom Off-the-Shelf (COTS) product available in the market to replace the LearnCenter. In addition to its current educational feature-sets, Cornerstone would free up FSI IT assets previously tied to the LearnCenter to work on other endeavors, while IBM would deliver patches/updates on scheduled release dates. As a cloud-solution, it would also free up FSI server space and the maintenance costs associated with hosting an LMS.
While the LearnCenter would still continue to run in parallel with Cornerstone until such time that all legacy courses were completed or otherwise migrated to Cornerstone, that period of time should be fairly negligible, and the Department would still see financial savings due to the freeze on in-house development efforts.
In addition to the shift in LMS platforms, FSI is currently seeking to acquire a Centralized Evaluation System (CES) that would assist the agency in information collection and reports development. This would be another COTS product, designed to conduct comprehensive learning evaluations of FSI training engagement and materials. While an assortment of applications exist that help serve parts of this mission statement, a unified, cohesive solution would better serve the interests of FSI. This acquisition is still in the early stages.