Response: OJT is Dead; Long Live Training

I've got to rant. Recently, I was forwarded a link to a blog post by Anne Thomas Manes that poses the notion that SOA is dead. After reading this post, I had to respond:

Obituary: OJT 

OJT met its demise on January 1, 2009, when it was wiped out by the catastrophic impact of the economic recession. OJT is survived by its offspring: mentoring, coaching, experiential learning, Observational learning, and all other training approaches that depend on “hands-on” efforts.

Once thought to be the savior of business, OJT instead turned into a great failed experiment—at least for most organizations. OJT was supposed to reduce costs and increase agility on a massive scale. Except in rare situations, OJT has failed to deliver its promised benefits. After investing millions, businesses are no better than before. In many organizations, things are worse: costs are higher, projects take longer, and work is more fragile than ever. The people holding the purse strings have had enough. With the tight budgets of 2009, most organizations have cut funding for their OJT initiatives.

It’s time to accept reality. OJT fatigue has turned into OJT disillusionment. Business people no longer believe that OJT will deliver spectacular benefits. “OJT” has become a bad word. It must be removed from our vocabulary.
The demise of OJT is tragic for business. Organizations desperately need to make training improvements to their work force. Training is a prerequisite for rapid integration of people and business processes; it enables situational development models, such as mentoring; and it’s the foundational architecture for experiential and observational learning. (Imagine shifting aspects of your business to the cloud without training between on-premise and off-premise work.) Although the word “OJT” is dead, the requirement for training is stronger than ever. 

But perhaps that’s the challenge: The acronym got in the way. People forgot what OJT stands for. They were too wrapped up in silly debates (e.g., “what’s the best job?” or “Skilled vs. Unskilled”), and they missed the important stuff: training.

Successful OJT (i.e., training) requires disruption to the status quo. OJT is not simply a matter of deploying new people and building friendships with other employees; it requires training. And it requires a massive shift in the way business operates. The small select group of organizations that has seen spectacular gains from OJT did so by treating it as an agent of transformation. In each of these success stories, OJT was just one aspect of the transformation effort. And here’s the secret to success: OJT needs to be part of something bigger. If it isn’t, then you need to ask yourself why you’ve been doing it.
The latest shiny new buzz-word will not make things better. Incremental training projects will not lead to significantly reduced costs and increased agility. If you want spectacular gains, then you need to make a spectacular commitment to change. Like Bechtel. It’s interesting that the Bechtel story doesn’t even use the term “OJT”—it just talks about training.

And that’s where we need to concentrate from this point forward: Training.

Yes, that's a parody (not the real blog post). Interesting, no?

In my mind, Ms. Manes' post was nothing short of a call to arms for evangelists, marketing types, and the media to come up with a shiny new buzz-word (or words) for orchestrated enterprise services. SOA (the term) is dead, so we need a new term. Something new to write about - to market, to hype.

We don't need no more stinkin' buzz-words.

My apologies if you find this offensive, but if I were working for a business that decides on a budget based upon media hype (or denouncement, as the blog post suggests), then I don't want to work for that business. Business decisions - and by extension business cases - need to be based upon solid, quantifiable information, not hype. A business cannot hope to survive by investing millions (as the post claims) in unwarranted, unsubstantiated claims of vendors and media. I have a higher (and experienced-based) expectation of the budgetary decision process.

What about you? What do you think? Does your experience indicate that the arrival of a project proposal on a business manager's desk with the moniker SOA make the proposal DOA? I would hope not!