Enterprise-wide Learning Management System

Federal Bureau of Prisons

The Challenge

The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) needed a system to identify training gaps in its work force, enroll the right employees in the right courses, and give managers a way to track progress—all on the fly. That's not easy in the large complex organization, where thousands of employees frequently move between its 98 institutions and six regions. Confidentiality regulations also require upper-level supervisors to have ways of tracking information on their departments within institutions without accessing information in other departments in the same institutions.

The Solution

Fulcrum is prime contractor for a project to design and set up a Saba-based learning management system that gives BOP the customized access to training information that it needs. Saba's role in the BOP project was project management, business analysis, system installation and configuration, and technical consulting.

Fulcrum's role in the project has been overall project oversight and specific technical development tasks. The technical development revolved primarily around helping to integrate the system to BOP's back-end data source. That necessitated a strong understanding of the Saba architecture (Fulcrum staff were formally trained by Saba) and included writing customized Oracle stored procedures and Saba scripts for loading and updating data. Additionally, Fulcrum staff wrote customized reports.

The Results

The first phase of this project is now in production, giving BOP's 38,000 employees and managers online access to courses and course registration. Upcoming phases will include the ability to track employee work skills and gaps, match them to training courses, and monitor employee transcripts.

Transcript data is tied to individual employees, so they aren't lost even when employees move. Access mirrors the organizational hierarchy, preserving managerial oversight while protecting employee privacy. Using a web-based interface, BOP employees and managers can access the learning management system from anywhere inside the BOP intranet. This enables the system to be deployed rapidly and let managers keep up with employee relocation.

In summary, the system provides BOP with what it wants most—a foundation for comprehensive work force development.