SITA Case Study

The South African Government is its country's largest employer and consumer of IT products and services. It set up an organisation to consolidate and coordinate the State’s information technology resources. The State Information Technology Agency (Pty) Ltd (SITA) is committed to leveraging information and communications technology (ICT) as a strategic resource for government and enhancing cost-effective public service delivery.

The eLearning team is headed by Moira Blom, "We are a small team of programmers," she says, "but we are delivering to a wide audience both internally and externally. The company consists of about 3000 employees."

"We needed a midrange product with great performance but ease of use, one that would allow us to import our existing content and deliver quickly in volume: but all at the right price. Many products met our requirements. SITA and the Department of Defence trialed several products and came to the same conclusion: Lectora and CourseMill fitted the bill the best."

The teams looked at a range of larger solutions too, but discovered that they all took a long time to implement, some as long as five years. "With Lectora and CourseMill we were up and running within two months, and the tailoring time was minimal."

Moira's team has been using Lectora for about two years. Because eLearning is still in its infancy in South Africa, the team has been carrying out 'awareness' sessions and teaching how eLearning fits into SITA’s wider education picture. "We have been creating 'pilots' for our clients," explains Moira. "These allow us to give them something they can see, something that demonstrates how we can create sessions that are specifically tailored to their needs.

We have been experimenting with CourseMill for about a year, and we are just about to use it in our new assessment as part of the ERP project Service Projects."

Most recently, the team has been developing a course that assesses project managers: by asking and responding to a series of questions, it determines a candidate's competency for a task before they embarked upon it. "The greatest value of these products lies in their ease of use. They have proved to be versatile and very well integrated. It has been easy to load from Lectora into CourseMill and then to pull in other material. You just know CourseMill will take care of it."

"We are on the brink of a learning revolution with these products. We are testing their strengths in delivering quality and volume." Employing Lectora and CourseMill is helping the Government to achieve one of its key visions: to become a global leader in Public Sector ICT.

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