This case study report of a bank introducing a new training system reminds us that personalities, institutional policies, and previous commitments affect technological advances. People inside the bank wanted to justify installing an intranet, and seized computer-based training as the application that would make the intranet worthwhile. These people then further compromised, by agreeing to use an already-existing corporate television network to get additional political support, and turned the training courses themselves over to the human resources folks to get their buy-in. It shouldn’t be surprising that the result was a limited design, with usability as an afterthought. Unfortunately, the paper should provide additional detail, including what year this took place.

The paper doesn’t compare the benefits of video over data networks to video over internal cable television. Most confusing is the conclusion, which says that the network was “successfully rolled out,” but does not say whether this means that the intranet was installed and worked, or that students took courses on it, or that the students learned anything better than they had learned it before. This paper is of limited interest, mostly to those who didn’t already know that most organizational decisions are political, not technical.