he intervention gained approximately $1 million in “saved sales” each year, and the time it took new clerks to become comfortable with their jobs was reduced from 90 days to 30 days. The intervention was designed by the training department as one step in their strategic plan to becoming a “performance improvement” department. The training, advertising, public relations, and documentation groups at Apple Computer are now coordinating their efforts to provide information to the company’s 20,000 salespeople. One specific outcome has been the creation of an on-line database on new products called Apple’s Reference Performance and Learning Expert (ARPLE). “The PR, advertising, documentation, and training departments pool their information to eliminate redundancies before sending the information out to salespeople. It wastes less time and money on the corporate end, and saves the salespeople from wading through useless information” (Geber, 1994). ISVOR Fiat, the subsidiary that provides training to the international conglomerate Fiat, has recently found a decline in interest for traditional classroom training among its internal clients. Not only has it embraced new forms of media production, such as multimedia and video, but it has also worked with one of the authors to expand upon its services to include knowledge capture and engineering and design and documentation of corporate meetings. The training department at a utility also transformed its mission, changing its name to “professional development resources”, and adding to its repertoire the creation of sales aids, a database of company expertise, and the facilitation of “brown bag” information lunch seminars given by company employees (Gayeski, 1993a). Other organizations are re-structuring key roles and departmental teams related to communications and learning. Among the clients of one of the authors, one national r...
