September, 2001
Volume 40 / Number 8
Special Issue Performance Support
Beyond Level 4: Tying HPT to Valuation of Intangible
Assets
by Diane Gayeski, PhD
For human performance technology (HPT) to achieve greater
recognition in the mainstream business world, performance consultants need to
develop interventions that go beyond demonstrating the return on investment for
individual projects. Instead, they should frame their work and conversations
with clients in terms of building long-term systems that enhance the client
organization’s value of its intangible assets.
Traditional HPT consulting models focus on identifying
and remediating individual performance gaps (such as poor manufacturing quality,
slow repair times, or lagging sales of a product). While senior management
certainly is concerned that models address these issues, senior-level staff are
more occupied with stock price and long-term vigor and valuation of the company.
There is a consulting model that can be used with clients and stakeholders to
identify barriers to long-term organizational performance and to help companies
choose solutions that are framed in terms of enhancing the overall valuation of
the organization.
Performance Improvement: More Than Just Bettering the
Here-and-Now
by Ryan Watkins, PhD, and Doug Leigh, PhD
The scope of return on investment (ROI) for today’s
organizations no longer hinges solely on short-term profit and customer
satisfaction, but instead also includes measurable indicators of both the
internal and external value added by the organization. To ensure that
organizational activities benefit all stakeholders, organizations must not only
consider the betterment of existing processes and products, but they must also
demonstrate progression toward required performance. This is accomplished by
defining, committing to, and striving toward useful and valid results. By
justifying problems to be solved in terms of the relative costs and consequences
(a front-end perspective of ROI), professionals can make data-based decisions
regarding interventions so that they add value to both the system (society) and
the subsystems (organizations, departments, teams, and individuals) it
comprises. Doing so better ensures that organizational solutions work to close
or prevent gaps in results without having unintended side effects on other
subsystems.
Knowledge Management: The Bedrock of Enterprise
Strategy
by George H. Stevens and Scott M. Krasner
American companies have invested more than $1 trillion in
information technology in the past 20 years. For the past 10 years, many
organizations have realized progressively smaller ROI. This is because
performance improvements made possible by speeding the number and accuracy of
transactions have already been realized.
Competitive advantage belongs to organizations that apply
technology not to transaction processing,
but to managing the collective knowledge of enterprises. Indeed, all enterprise business strategy
relies on the systematic acquisition and management of knowledge. This article
describes the scope of knowledge management, its goals, components, and
outcomes. It further describes the fundamental relationship between effective
identification and use of existing knowledge and the creation and re-use of new
knowledge, both of which are elemental objectives of knowledge management, and
the ability of an organization to create and execute an enterprise business
strategy.
Online Strategies to Improve Workplace Performance:
Lessons from the WWW
by Ruth Colvin Clark, EdD
While much attention is focused on the use of the
Internet and intranets to deliver e-learning, there is much for HPT
professionals to learn from commercial dot-coms about other ways to use
technology to support human performance. This cybertour provides a quick glimpse
of a number of sites that can be adapted to improve workplace performance,
including—
·
Decision support
·
Communities of practice
·
Online performance feedback
·
Knowledge management
·
Cybertours
·
Online reference and job aids
·
E-learning
Instructional Design by Template
by Leslie L. Orr
info@ispi.org
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