SumTotal Systems, the industry’s largest provider of learning and business performance technologies, services and processes, today announced that the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), a U.S./Canadian combined command that provides air defense for North America and United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), which conducts operations to deter, prevent and defeat threats and aggression aimed at the United States, its territories and interests, has chosen SumTotal to help drive a security readiness initiative for military leadership and other personnel stationed at NORAD-USNORTHCOM headquarters.
The NORAD agreement was signed on May 12, 1958, and has continuously provided the forces to “deter, detect and defend” Alaska, Canada and the 48 contiguous states from air attack. USNORTHCOM, formed by the Department of Defense in 2002, plans, organizes and executes homeland defense and civil support missions. The commands chose the SumTotal Enterprise Suite, including TotalLMS and TotalLCMS to help accelerate readiness of its personnel, who come from a variety of military backgrounds before being assigned to work on national security initiatives at NORAD-USNORTHCOM.
“Homeland security is new territory for even the most seasoned military officers,” said Lt Col Doug Johnston, Chief of Training & Education at NORAD-USNORTHCOM. “Personnel come to us with a variety of knowledge and experience, but all need to build some familiarity with the NORAD and USNORTHCOM missions and operations, which include aerospace defense, homeland security and civil support. Our goal is to build an infrastructure that delivers learning programs tailored to each individual in our organization, while compressing time-to-readiness for critical security leadership roles. SumTotal enables us to meet this challenge by automating the command’s education and training requirements, assignments and tracking and by quickly delivering targeted information to personnel based on their specific job roles.”
NORAD-USNORTHCOM will use SumTotal to build a multi-level learning approach, including general operational procedure familiarization training for all personnel; job- and task-specific training such as logistics, intelligence and other functions; and specialized training targeted at cross-functional teams of specialists that form during wartime to accomplish specific missions.
Longer term, NORAD-USNORTHCOM will use SumTotal to create and manage course content for just-in-time training. The agency also will explore expanding the initiative to personnel in subordinate headquarters, as well as providing additional remote access to training for personnel who need to familiarize themselves with basic security processes before reporting for duty.
“SumTotal has a long history of helping the US military develop successful, large-scale training initiatives designed to more quickly and efficiently achieve readiness at all levels,” said R. Andrew Eckert, SumTotal CEO. “Our extensive experience working in this marketplace, along with technology that easily adapts to the specialized needs of the military learner population and mission, will enable NORAD-USNORTHCOM to create strong, effective leaders to advance its critical national security function.”
