Getting Started email - 14 Day Free Trial

You should receive this email within 24 hours of completing the registration process for the Free Trial. I've posted it here for convenience.

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Thank you for your interest in SHO Guide. I would like to offer you some guidance as you get started with this amazing tool. The first thing you should do is take a deep breath and stop trying to record on whatever application you're trying it out on… and follow these steps first…

How do we know you were doing this you ask? Well, let’s just say we know how tempting it is when you get your hands on this technology to immediately want to try it out in your environment (we all did the same thing). For those of you who didn’t, you would have eventually…

Here’s the key, there are a few tips and tricks that will get you started the right way… and with much less frustration.

Step 1: Make sure you have met the minimum system requirements:

· Windows 2000 SP4, Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista
· Minimum 256 MB RAM
· Minimum 500MHz processor
· Microsoft .NET 1.1
· Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or greater

Step 2: Print out the attached file “10 Tips for Creating SHO Scripts” and memorize it… or at least keep it close.

Step 3: Go back to the Transcensus website, login using your username and password.

Step 4: Go to the “Support” tab then “Resources” (if you’re not there already) and watch and complete all of the online training videos along with the QuickStart questionnaire which is attached and email it or fax it back to me when you’re done (This is extremely important so that we can continue to improve your experience).

NOTE: The videos may take some time to load the first time you run them.

We know this is a lot of free training but if you complete it, you will be well on your way to creating amazing scripts by the end of your free trial…

Step 5: Use the Support Forum to ask questions, you may find the answer is already there.

If you follow these 5 steps and your still having issues or need some help, don’t hesitate to email your question to support@transcensus.com we’ll get you an answer as quickly as possible, but no more than 24 hours. Good luck and we’re excited to hear how you plan on using SHO Guide.

Best regards,

Daniel Higbee

Mom, just click on the BLUE “E”… Yes… Double CLICK…. With the left mouse button… No the MOUSE is the … Forget it… try this…

Does this sound familiar? This was essentially the conversation I had with my own Mother (sorry Mom...) about a year ago. She has just purchased a brand new computer with Vista, replacing the ancient monolith that she had faithfully called me for assistance with nearly every month for the past 5 years. Now the calls became daily if not multiple times daily… Well, this went on for the first couple weeks and finally after setting up nearly everything “just like my old system” she would say I began to get some relief. Then… a new email address and online photos.

I had just started with Transcensus and was really going through the training on SHO Guide. I decided that night that I would record a script that would walk her through accessing her email and send it to her old email address. The problem was that I needed her to download the “player.” The player is a simple 1 Meg installation on our website and allows you to play “scripts.” Now this may seem simple but apparently she had already forgotten her password for her old email address so I couldn’t just send her a link in an email. Oh, no… I had to get her to open a browser, type in the website address and get to the right page to “download” the player. Finally, I ended up creating her new email address for her and doing a GoToMeeting to configure and create desktop shortcuts.

The point of this is… now that she has the player installed, I can quickly create a script and email it to her to walk her through (or do it for her) nearly anything including configuring the browser to block pop-ups, change Word back to 2003 style sheets and automate access to her email including opening the browser, entering her username password for her.

Now apply this to your job and training employees how to complete a task in a given software application...

This is the coolest technology I have ever used… www.transcensus.com/videos.htm

If only we could “download” the knowledge of our Subject Matter Experts…

“Subject Matter Expert (SME): An individual who, by virtue of position, education, training, or experience, is expected to have greater-than-normal expertise or insight relative to a particular technical or operational discipline, system, or process, and who has been selected or appointed to participate in development, verification, validation, accreditation, or use of a model or simulation.”

In today’s world of complex applications in the workplace and the need to quickly and effectively train new users, wouldn’t it be nice if we could download our SME’s knowledge and pass it around? I’m curious what and how you’re using today’s technology to deploy SME knowledge…

What methods or tools do you use to capture and author your eLearning courses?
What advantages or disadvantages do you see with each?
What would you like to see in an authoring tool?

Looking forward to hearing from you…

Daniel Higbee, Vice President Business Development
www.transcensus.com/videos.htm

“eLearning” you say, how will that help me?

I read an interesting article this morning in Chief Learning Officer magazine (if you don’t subscribe… you should). According to the article, eLearning investments will increase by 79% in the next 12 – 24 months. This comes as no surprise, as we all realize that primary focus of any organization in today’s economy is to “Get the most out of what I’ve already got…” as one customer told us.

How can we as software vendors, trainers, system integrators, project managers, and learning professionals really help our customers to get the MOST out of what they’ve got? After 16 years in Workforce Management Software (WMS) deployments, I have learned that what “they” have is generally sufficient.

The question is… are they fully utilizing the features of the product they have? These are some of the questions that we generally tell our clients to ask themselves:

• Are we getting the full benefit of (insert product name), do my management, my supervisors and employees really know how to get the most out of it?
  ......I think we all know the answer to this one.
• Would there be a savings to our organization by simply increasing efficiency in data entry and reducing the errors currently being fixed by the “back office?
  ......Most likely an overworked, under compensated, Admin. Assistant named “Beverly” who’s seen it all… and is counting the days to Florida.
• How can I quickly get people familiar with additional features of our current products without another huge investment in time and training?
  .......They’re saying to themselves, “I can’t get them to use the basics and you think I can get them to use additional features…?”

These three are obviously the basics but they are crucial to understanding how to assist our customers and provide the most value for their investment in our products or services.

eLearning or Workforce Performance Systems (WPS) are the future and they can offer another level of support “At the moment of need”. There are some impressive products on the market today including SHO (Scripted Human Operator) Guide® which offers step by step guidance in the live application and what are commonly referred to as “simulation tools” like Captivate® or Camptasia®.

Find the authoring tools that work for you, incorporate them into your products, deployments and consulting agreements. If we give our clients what they want and do it in a professional and courteous manner, they will become a client for life.

Daniel Higbee – Vice President, Business Development
www.transcensus.com

Ambient Insight Report on Training

The training industry is currently in a state of significant transition. According to the Ambient Insight report, a number of factors are driving the rather dramatic changes that are occurring in the US, including:

• Steady decline of training budgets and training benefits


• Rapid decline of internal HR and Training departments in the US


• Steady reduction of internal IT staffs and IT population in US


• Migration of staffs and budgets out of legacy buyer organizations and into outsourcing firms
  

Ambient concludes that the old training industry—pre 9/11, dot.com meltdown, stock market crash, IT spending slowdown, downsizing and outsourcing—is gone forever. Organizations are adapting to a new reality in which greater emphasis will be placed on emerging practices and learning technologies, including location-based learning, process-embedded learning, cognitive and affective learning products and personal learning products.

By 2011, the most significant gains are expected in adoption rates of process-embedded learning, virtual labs, virtual classes and live mentoring. In contrast, classroom instruction, while still the most dominant training method as of last year, is expected to decline significantly within five years. Self-paced e-learning products and services are expected to experience declines as well.

Source: Ambient Research 2006 Snapshot of Learning Technology Trends in the U.S. Training Industry Report U.S. IT Training Market Growth

The Problem is finding the Right Information

Downtime due to an inability to find relevant, job task-specific information remains a huge obstacle to worker productivity. Consider these statistics from a recent IDC report:

• Knowledge workers spend an average of 15% to 20% of their time looking for information.
• Success rates are less than 50%.
• Unsuccessful searches in a company employing 1,000 knowledge workers could cost as much as $6,000,000 in time loss annually.

Another survey of technology workers , in this case IT professionals and programmers, concluded that 100% of those surveyed reported having to stop working at one or more times per day to find answers and look for solutions to job-related problems. Of those surveyed, 20% reported having to stop 10 or more times per day. When totaled, this equates to at least 50 interruptions per week.

The study concluded further that technology workers spend approximately seven hours per week looking for answers and researching solutions to problems. Over the course of a month, this represents more than 31 hours of technology worker downtime. When measured across an enterprise of 500 technology workers, the costs of worker downtime could equate to as much as $7.5 million per year—a staggering impact to profitability.

Addressing the Problem

So how is this problem being addressed? The answer is, simply, not very well. Despite significant research that confirms that most worker learning takes place outside of the classroom, organizations continue to rely largely on costly instructor-led training as a primary solution. A recent Training Magazine industry report provided some interesting statistics pertaining to how training budgets are being allocated. In calendar year 2005:

• $51.1 billion was budgeted for formal training.
• 70% of that budget was allocated to classroom instruction with live instructors.
• $13.5 billion was spent on training products and services, up $.2 billion from the previous year.
• 26% said that training budgets were up from the previous year.

Costs for continuous employee development are enormous. However, in spite of continued trends toward allocation of training budgets to formalized classroom instruction, the tide is now beginning to turn. There is significant discussion and debate in learning circles about the effectiveness of formal learning, and greater emphasis is being placed on more informal, process-embedded approaches to learning among industry thought leaders.

Performance support systems have, whether deserved or not, had the reputation of being rather costly to design and implement, which is one of the primary reasons for their only recent emergence as credible alternatives to established training paradigms. Furthermore, the rapid emergence of performance support is being fueled by recent advances in technology. This is allowing organizations to deliver highly effective, process-embedded resources in ways that were simply not possible just a year ago.

How will Process-Embedded Learning Benefit Your Organization?

Perhaps some of the most interesting statistics on the benefits of process-embedded learning can be found in a 2006 report of IT learning technology trends produced by Ambient Insight, LLC, which arrives at the following conclusions:

• Rapid e-learning is too slow. Process-embedded learning is, by comparison, very fast.
• Process-embedded Learning products reduce content creation and maintenance costs by as much as 60-80%.
• Average cost of a help desk call in the U.S. is $125 per incident. Process-embedded learning can reduce help desk calls by 60% to 75%.
• Process-embedded learning eliminates lost opportunity costs associated with taking a user out of production to attend a training class or complete an e-learning course. 22
  

Following are additional benefits that one can expect from a process-embedded, performance-centric approach to worker instruction:

• Reduced learning time
• Higher levels of worker productivity
• Less reliance on others when completing job-related tasks
• Reduction in implementation costs
• Increased worker autonomy
• Better knowledge retention
• Better customer experiences

Introducing SHO Technology

At Transcensus, all of our combined learning experience has pointed us to the vital importance of connecting learning and readiness to the immediacy of performing the task. With the dramatic changes that are occurring in the IT training industry and the ever increasing need to embed learning within the process, performance support was clearly the right focus, but existing performance support technology solutions and methodologies were difficult to use, difficult to implement, and/or too expensive.

Software applications are challenged with these same issues. It often seems humanly impossible to do what we desire to do, even with advertised features of the software. Transcensus focused on both problems. We desired to put the "human interface" into software and provide moment of need performance support for the masses. Our focused effort resulted in the development of what we call SHO Technology.

Our patent-pending Scripted Human Operator™ (SHO) technology is an exciting innovation in software performance support and user assistance. It allows content developers to create truly interactive software instructional, assistance and support content that interfaces directly with windows software applications. No programming knowledge is required.

SHO content can be embedded directly within the workflow. While completing job related tasks, workers interact directly with the live software application they are attempting to use, instead of a browser, simulation window or other external training interface. In other words, the actual software application is the training interface. SHO technology can be thought of as a virtual instructor or tutor looking over the user's shoulder and offering step-by-step guidance inside the actual software application the user is attempting to use.

In today's economy SHO Guide can effectively reduce costs and improve efficiency throughout any organization with a heavy reliance on their employees use of software.

Please visit http://www.transcensus.com/videos.htm for a quick overview of what SHO Guide has to offer you and your company.

Daniel Higbee - VP, Business Development

Microsoft Dynamics CRM users...

Customer Relationship Management(CRM) Solutions

Organizations that use Microsoft Dynamics CRM will experience substantial productivity gains by employing the guided help capabilities offered by Transcensus SHO technology. The guided help content library for Microsoft Dynamics CRM was developed with Transcensus’ award-winning SHO Guide(R) authoring solution and includes dozens of basic scenarios or workflows for the typical CRM user.

Each scenario is captured in an interactive learning script that delivers step-by-step guidance directly inside Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online to assist the user in performing the task more efficiently with a corresponding reduction in errors. With this unique solution, users can be immediately productive with their CRM software without having to attend a training class or complete an online course.

To see this solution in action: http://www.transcensus.com/productdemo/1minuteoverview.html The content was optimized for a general installation of Dynamics CRM and is available upon request: info @ transcensus.com.

The "On Boarding" Challenge

I heard an interesting presentation from a major corporation a few months ago about the high cost of on boarding new employees. At this particular company, it’s not usual for a new employee to have to endure up to six weeks of classroom training in order to become certified to use the company’s applications. Six weeks! While I’m certain that the scenario described above is probably more the exception than the rule, it underscores the challenges that many companies face when on boarding new employees, especially in job roles where there is high turnover.

Imagine if you could cut the required new employee training by a third, or even by half or more. Think about how much this would benefit your organization. Results like this are possible with a Performance Support system (EPSS) like SHO Guide from Transcensus. Rather than focusing on techniques to help users remember how to perform a multitude of software-related job tasks, your classroom training, if it is even necessary after implementing a SHO-based EPSS, can be directed toward helping the employee understand how to use Performance Support resources. Such workflow-embedded resources can assist the employee, in a very repeatable and predictable way, with completion of their important job tasks. Besides, the reality is that the new employee is not going to remember much about the classroom learning experience. Studies have shown that only a small amount of information presented during a classroom session is actually remembered.

If this sounds intriguing, let us help you determine where there’s a good fit for a Performance Support system in your company. I’m confident that such a conversation will help redirect your thinking about ways to provide compelling on-the-job assistance to new employees.