TOTARA LMS TRANSFORMS THENEW ZEALAND STATE SECTOR

Widespread public sector adoption of open source learning management delivers powerful benefits.

The New Zealand state sector is undergoing its biggest transformation in a generation, including the Better Public Services change programme, and strengthening functional leaderships across all central government agencies. Globally, governments need to achieve more with less, driving the need for more innovative ways of working. We’ve put together this resource to demonstrate how open source technology is driving collaboration and flexible learning throughout the New Zealand Government, and how the same principles can be applied within governments worldwide.

A quiet, but innovative revolution has been underway among government and other public sector organisations in New Zealand over the past five years.

The Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI) is the most recent New Zealand Government department to implement Totara LMS. It has joined a Totara LMS public sector ‘club’ consisting of ten of the biggest government departments in the country, three of the largest District Health Boards, numerous hospitals, and other key public sector agencies and organisations.

The widespread adoption of Totara LMS to support their learning and people development strategies is transforming learning throughout the public sector.

Did you know… nearly 80,000 users access their learning via Totara LMS across 10 key government departments in New Zealand?

Who is using Totara LMS?

Organisations worldwide are using Totara LMS to drive performance and achieve impressive results. It is quickly becoming the LMS of choice within the New Zealand Government, and is currently being used by these departments and more...

And it’s not just New Zealand’s government making the most of Totara LMS - it’s also popular with other public sector organisations.

Why have government agencies adopted Totara LMS?

Collaboration and freedom to innovate

Widespread adoption of open source learning management system Totara LMS has underpinned many of the transformation efforts, state sector change programmes and success stories. During discussions with team members from several government departments, there emerged some clear reasons why Totara LMS was their preferred choice. The low cost of annual subscriptions for organisations with many thousands of users was a key factor, as public sector agencies need to show good value-for-money use of public funds and return on investment. However, there were three more compelling reasons:

1. Collaboration drives better outcomes and lower costs: the support and exchange of ideas and experiences among the Government Totara User community in New Zealand2. Freedom to innovate through customisation and integration - a powerful advantage of open source software3. A rich, growing feature set offers great value for money for organisations of all sizes

Government inter-departmental collaboration

■ Common goals ■ Content sharing ■ Same challenges ■ Joint experiences ■ Lobby future direction ■ Share costs (customisations)

Parliamentary Service

Health

Finance

Justice

TaxationSocial Services

Employment Services

“We like the flexibility of customisations which also means there is so much future potential!”

Ministry of Justice

Key hosting and integration considerations

Another important factor highlighted by Government users is the ability to select where the system is hosted. Totara Learning products are distributed and available via a specially selected global network of solution partners. For New Zealand Government agencies, the ability to have locally approved and trusted New Zealand Partners either assist with implementation into their own hosted IT infrastructure or in approved secure locally hosted environments ensures a high-quality and secure service. Furthermore, agencies can integrate Totara LMS with internal HRIS systems to automate workflow and reduce administrative overhead for smarter working.

For the Ministry of Primary Industries, security was top of mind when implementing an LMS, as well as a good user experience and cost efficiencies. They have achieved all this with Totara LMS. Firstly, they merged data from three other learning platforms and Catalyst IT helped create a single sign-on (SSO) Totara LMS solution integrated with MPI’s central authentication service, providing users with transparent authentication via Active Directory within the organisation and RealMe (New Zealand public identity provider) for external users. Kineo Pacific helped to theme the site and users have responded that the LMS is far more user friendly and intuitive than the previous solution. Managers have also given excellent feedback, saying that it has improved the face-to-face booking experience, moving from spreadsheets and email to Totara LMS’s inbuilt face-to-face system, which has saved administration time and made the process smoother and more manageable.

Functionally rich corporate learning solution

Totara LMS has enabled public sector organisations to fundamentally change the way they design and deliver learning experiences. The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, for example, has used Totara LMS to underpin its move to blended learning and offer wider

access to learning opportunities both for its internal staff and external user groups. New Zealand Customs has implemented a range of blended onboarding programmes tailored to different target groups, making development pathways, course opportunities and general progress information visible to both learners and managers so that they can take full ownership over further performance development actions.

There are many configuration options open to System Administrators in Totara LMS. Organisations can use as much or as little of the available functionality at any time placing control over both short and longer term strategies with the system internally, reducing reliance on external vendor support. This can lead to significant savings in running costs.

“Our LMS will change the face of learning and development for Customs. It will become the fabric of how we learn and measure performance.”

New Zealand Customs

Ministry of Primary IndustriesIN FOCUS:

‘Flexibility’ is cited too as a big advantage. Team members from the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment talked about the advantages of the ‘multiple approaches and flexibility’ of the system. The powerful ability to direct learning programmes at target groups and create reports to support compliance monitoring was highlighted as a key benefit for many Government agencies who need to demonstrate best practice in following mandatory regulation, such as the new health and safety regulations recently introduced in New Zealand.

New Zealand Customs is responsible for ensuring the security of New Zealand’s borders, and comprises more than 1,200 employees across the country. With a large, geographically dispersed team, New Zealand Customs wanted to make the learning

management process easier and more efficient while ensuring everyone adhered to the strict compliance requirements and regulations.

New Zealand Customs worked with Totara Partner Catalyst, who worked with Customs’ IT architects to uphold their stringent security requirements. Catalyst also facilitated the smooth migration of existing learning records from a legacy HR system to Totara LMS, as well as creating an on-premise solution with single sign-on (SSO) integration. The Program feature in Totara LMS also enabled Customs to create work area frameworks to direct learners to the most relevant learning content.

New Zealand Customs now benefits from many more online development opportunities for its dispersed workforce. Totara LMS also supports the organisation’s new self-service approach to learning, enabling staff to manage their own learning and progress towards compliance requirements.

“There are lots of good features that can be used to suit the requirements of different business user groups.”

Ministry of Justice

New Zealand CustomsIN FOCUS:

The power of collaboration

Underpinning the widespread adoption of Totara LMS is the emergence of the ‘NZ Totara User Group’. Existing and prospective users from many different organisations meet every month, usually at a government location or a Totara Partner premises. The group spends at least a half day on sharing, collaborating and learning from each other as well as from invited speakers, all with the aim of getting the most out of their solutions. Totara’s open philosophy has been embraced by this community of users, recognising that they have common goals and challenges, so together they can be more effective in attaining their objectives. In working together, these government departments can share ideas, success stories and what hasn’t worked for time and cost savings and more creative solutions to common challenges. With governments worldwide under increasing pressure to deliver more for less, the collaborative approach championed by the New Zealand Government is a prime example of the results that can be achieved through working together.

Government learning professionals working and learning together

Attendees of the Totara Government User Group were initially just from Government departments; however they’ve opened the doors to wider public sector and health agencies and even ‘guest’ organisations who may be considering adopting Totara Learning products. Desley Simmonds, Community Manager from the Accident Compensation Corporation, says that ‘they are a bit more relaxed now about letting in others to share the meetings with them’. Some LMS site administrators come prior to setting up their own sites too as a means of ‘getting started’ and reducing their implementation learning curve.

The group sets the agenda with the issues they want to discuss, and sometimes that means inviting in a speaker. The style is informal and trust is high. As practitioners they keep it collaborative and promote as much knowledge sharing during the event as possible. Sometimes attendees will even agree to ‘shadow’ each other in their own organisations to learn more. Apart from practical presentations, a highlight of the meeting is the ‘Knowledge Café’, when participants get into groups to discuss a challenging topic, which can range from a ‘futuristic’ scenario or strategic ideas for resolving specific business goals, to their most desired future Totara LMS and Social features. This can result in joint initiatives, as the group agree to work on ‘mini projects’ from time to time.

“As a portal to collaborative practice, Totara LMS has facilitated collaboration in many projects.”

MBIE

Ministry of JusticeIN FOCUS:

The New Zealand Ministry of Justice is the lead justice sector agency in New Zealand, and supports the country’s judiciary. With over 3,500 employees across New Zealand, they needed a learning platform that engaged learners and met the needs of the business simultaneously. They were looking for a solution which would provide a blended onboarding experience to new recruits, support high levels of traffic, integrate with current HR systems and offer a custom-branded, multi-device theme to deliver consistent learning across 103 locations.

The Ministry of Justice worked with Kineo Pacific to create a Totara LMS called THRIVE, which is now a central learning platform for all employees. It is custom branded with a responsive theme, meaning employees can now undertake multi-device learning. It also works seamlessly with the Ministry of Justice’s existing HRIS software, and the audience functionality in Totara LMS has improved the learning experience with more accurate user data. Since its launch in July 2015, usage of the LMS has increased by over 100%, and THRIVE has helped break down silos created by distance and a lack of access to training, with around 80% of employees accessing the platform since its launch, and 64% returning to do more than one course.

Influencing future features and functionality

At a tactical level, the collaborative ideas and discussions from the Totara Government user group provide great feedback for Totara Learning’s product development team and its global network of Partners. Attendees can leverage the community to identify common challenges or requirements and work beyond individual agencies to advance ‘upstream customisations’ that they may decide to work on. The user group is currently piloting Totara Social to facilitate inter-organisation knowledge sharing, implement informal learning and to explore ways in which structured social sharing can deliver productivity and performance improvements that can save time and money and deliver a higher quality of service to citizens. Overall the observable trend in the group has been to see members’ growing knowledge and expertise in Totara product configuration and blended learning design best practice. As well as helping newcomers to the community, deeper, more strategic and technical conversations are taking place, which only helps to advance the benefits these public sector agencies are deriving from their use of Totara LMS.

New Zealand’s use of open source learning technologies provides a replicable framework for adoption

Totara LMS is being used right now throughout the New Zealand Government to support collaboration, sharing and innovation across the organisation. The organisation as a whole has taken a collaborative approach which has built expertise and facilitated sustainable development across departments. This has ensured that the New Zealand Government can continue to demonstrate compelling returns on investment for their use of learning technologies.

And it is clear how open source technology like Totara LMS can be used to support this collaborative approach in other governments worldwide. Other governments around the world can learn from the success achieved in New Zealand, enabling them to start reaping similar cost savings and productivity improvements. Adopting an open, collaborative philosophy built on open source platforms has proved a resounding success for the New Zealand Government, and we believe that this can be replicated around the world for more cost-effective, flexible and open learning.

ProspectivePublic SectorUser seeking advice

Wider Community Sharing

Government Agencies

Feedback to Totara Team

Government Totara LMS User Group

■ Common goals ■ Content sharing ■ Same challenges ■ Joint experiences ■ Lobby future direction ■ Share costs

With thanks to the Totara Partners supporting these Government and public sector groups:

To find out more about how Totara LMS is being used in the public sector worldwide, take a look at our government case studies at www.totaralearning.com. If you would like to discuss your specific requirements, please contact us at enquiry@totaralearning.com.