Sep 22 2021

The PACT ECA – A Content Inventory Framework

There Many Roads to Success – And Way Too Many Detours and Dead Ends

There are a thousand ways to do it right
and a hundred thousand ways to do it wrong.
Pick from the first column.
(Guy W. Wallace)

John said he first heard this from me when we served on the board of ISPI when Dale Brethower was President in 1999-2000. And then I guess he probably heard me repeat this several time, as the broken record I am on some thing. Maybe many things.

Most things in life – but not all – have great tolerances for variations in means to achieve a satisfactory ends.

Most Processes are somewhat Robust to variation in producing the Outputs that will meet Stakeholder Requirements.

Before TQM It Was Sometimes Known as VR – Variability Reduction

At least that what I learned from Quality experts at Motorola back in 1981/82. TQM – Total Quality Management was the new thing. VR was the old thing. Someone, maybe Bill Smith, told me so.

At Motorola, I supported Manufacturing, Materials and Purchasing, from my perch at MTEC – Motorola’s Training & Education Center – at HQ.

That 16 months taught me a lot about products, systems, subassemblies, WBS – Work Breakdown Structures, and MRP (Materials Requirements Planning … via computers) and MRP II (Manufacturing Requirements Planning) – so that when ERP Systems finally came around I was already thinking like that.

I began to see Instruction (or as I called it then: Performance-Based Training) in those terms: a Systems of Instruction for some targeted functionality presented by me by way of a T&D Path for a particular Target Audience. And the Path was made up of modular Instructional Products (T&D Events), where the modular components became T&D Lessons and in those T&D Instructional Activities.

All of those investments – of Shareholder Equity – were “housed” in an ECA – an Enterprise Content Architecture – that had this primary framework…