This area includes moving the discussion beyond the initial cost of the learning solution to encompass the long-term institutional cost of supporting, training, integrating, and maintaining and improving a new system, course, program, or other solution supporting learning.
Application Example: When recommending a solution, the learning engineering team provides data on the total cost of ownership (TCO), including the cost of change management (training administrators), cost of data warehousing (new infrastructure), and cost of ongoing maintenance and iterative improvement. A solution that is scientifically sound but has a prohibitive TCO for the customer or internal sponsor is considered an engineering failure. A longer-term role of the learning engineering team may be to help the organization develop new procurement policies that align with learning engineering principles and support better ROI, measured in organizational capacity and productivity, that is enabled through iterative data-driven improvement of learning solutions.