July, 2000
Volume 39 / Number 6
Special Issue of Performance Improvement
Performance Support Perspectives and Practices
page 7
Performance
Support in Internet Time: The State of the Practice
Discussion between Gloria Gery, Stan Malcolm, Janet Cichelli, Hal
Christensen, Barry Raybould, and Marc J. Rosenberg
Facilitated by Gary J. Dickelman
December 27, 1999, marked a reunion of sorts for a group of professional colleagues who have paved the way for, defined, and are actively engaged in the performance support practice. Gloria Gery, Stan Malcolm, Janet Cichelli, Hal Christensen, Barry Raybould, and Marc Rosenberg spoke via teleconference about the state of performance support (PS). They sought to uncover the latest trends—associated with the latest organizational performance pain—borne of the e-revolution, the monster enterprise systems (SAP, Siebel, Peoplesoft, etc.), and the emerging awareness that usability means business (pun intended). They addressed a number of questions on learning versus performance support, knowledge management, performance support models, the role of the Internet in performance support, enterprise application integration, and intrinsic performance support. This lively, insightful discussion will add to readers’ personal knowledge base and enhance their performance support activities.
page 18
Distributed
Cognition: A Foundation for Performance Support
by Jan D. Greenberg and Gary J. Dickelman
Over the past 10 years we have experienced a shift in thinking about cognition. It has shifted from being considered an isolated event that takes place inside one’s head to being considered a distributed phenomenon that goes beyond the boundaries of a person to include environment, artifacts, social interactions, and culture. At the same time, we have seen the emergence of performance support systems, environments that enable people to complete work with a minimum of training or learning in advance of doing a task. Such environments also transcend the boundaries of the person and include a variety of enabling artifacts, environmental factors, and social/virtual interactions. This article explores the roots and basic principles of distributed cognition, provides some examples of how this theory is being applied in learning- and performance-centered environments, and suggests how it provides a foundation for performance support.
page 25
Knowledge
Management in Pursuit of Performance: The Challenge of Context
by Duane Degler and Lisa Battle
Knowledge management has an increasingly visible profile within organizations. Much of the current focus is on the acquisition and storage of knowledge resources. Unfortunately, because most knowledge management solutions are developed to stand alone, the context of a person’s need for information when using business applications is often left to the individual. Performance-centered design, on the other hand, focuses on interactions between people and the tools they use to achieve outcomes. Many current designs provide context through task-based interfaces and link existing information to predefined tasks. This works as long as the knowledge base is relatively static and the tasks clearly specified. However, it does not work as well when designing for today’s knowledge workers, whose responsibilities are less structured. This article discusses ways to merge the best practices of knowledge management and performance support, so that knowledge can be integrated more seamlessly within working applications, and applications can be used to solicit knowledge as a byproduct of people’s work.
page 32
Performance
Support Engineering: Building Performance-Centered Web-Based
Systems, Information Systems, and Knowledge Management Systems in the 21st
Century
by Barry Raybould
With the meteoric rise of the Internet and e-business, web-based systems for consumers and intranets for internal knowledge management systems are becoming a major focus of software engineers and human performance technologists. Typical compensatory mechanisms for poor system design such as training and human support systems are becoming unacceptable and are not even an option for many e-business applications. Therefore, the ability to design software systems from a performance-centered viewpoint is becoming even more urgent. Given this situation, the major question facing organizations today is not whether to do performance-centered design, but how to get it done. This paper is a follow up to Performance Support Engineering: An Emerging Development Methodology for Enabling Organizational Learning (Raybould, 1995). Since then, the body of experience in developing performance-centered systems has grown significantly and practitioners have made considerable progress in elaborating the embryonic development methodology outlined in that 1995 paper. This article summarizes the convergence of thinking among various professional disciplines that has taken place in analysis and design methodologies, and describes seven key elements of the now-emerged performance support engineering development methodology. This process, or processes very similar to this, will be the foundation for designing performance-centered systems at the beginning of the 21st century, whether they be consumer web applications, intranets, knowledge management systems, business information systems, or any other systems designed to support work.
page 40
Performance Support on the
Shop Floor
by Jyrki J.J. Kasvi and Matti Vartiainen, PhD
Shop floor work tasks are becoming more knowledge intensive. In many cases, employees are no longer able to perform them relying on memory alone. This article presents lessons learned from four shop floor performance support systems implemented in Finland and in Denmark in the 1990s.
page 47
Literacy
Explorer: A Performance Support Tool for Novice Reading Facilitators
by Brenda Bannan-Ritland, Emily Egerton, Jen Page, and Michael
Behrmann
This article describes Literary Explorer, a web-based electronic performance support system designed to enable and enhance reading facilitation skills among parents, teachers, and tutors of elementary and middle school children with disabilities. Supported through a U.S. Department of Education Steppingstones to Technology grant, the Literacy Access Online (LAO) project is a unique partnership between George Mason University’s Instructional Technology Immersion program and the Parent Educational Advocacy Training Center.
Designed primarily by graduate students implementing a systematic design process, the performance support system is specifically targeted to help with one-on-one reading sessions, providing a supportive environment for both the novice reading facilitator and the child with whom he or she is working. Incorporating findings from reading experts, Literacy Explorer provides guidance, resources, and information on how literacy facilitators can integrate best practices in literacy skill acquisition into their reading sessions. This article provides a case study of the analysis of the performance problem and specifically details the design processes and documentation involved in the creation of the Web-based performance support system. Performance support and electronic performance support system are, respectively, the techniques and practices of creating performance-centered systems and the resulting electronic systems. The article closes with a review of the future phases of the project.
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