Performance support: worker information systems - includes related article on performance support example

RELease 1.0, August 24, 1993

On the other side, if an expert system can make a decision, it should. If it can't, it should collect the right information to help the user decide appropriately. Many performance support systems include expert systems as part of a broader arsenal of capabilities.

Performance support is built using traditional tools, but with the user's task in mind. That is, you organize the data to make it easier for the user to accomplish something specific. While tutorials tend to run in a specified sequence and help is usually indexed and searchable but with no sequence at all, performance support ideally follows the sequence of the task but is flexible enough to accommodate a broad range of situations and sequences as they happen.

For example, a spreadsheet can make data manipulation easier, but a performance support system such as Hartford's UIW (page 11) reminds the performer what factors to consider. flashes reminders if values are left out or are out-of-range, and so on. It is inherently content-rich and task-specific. A pr support tool such as MediaManager (page 15) guides a pr agent not Just through the data about media contacts, but through the entire process of finding appropriate contacts by topic, calling them, making appointments and following up with confirmations; the performer can follow her own sequence, but the steps are displayed On the screen in windows.

The performance support marketplace

Long-run, performance support is essential to any well-designed application used by humans: It's an embodiment of the processes and procedures that add value to any company's raw materials or basic functions. There are three primary market segments:

* custom systems, which presumably contain competitive advantage. They can be built by outside consultants or in-house. Greg Long of RWD, a performance support consultant, notes that they are best done through a joint effort of in-house business/content experts and outside performance support experts (of. expert systems). (page 8; vendors, page 14)

* generic applications, which are basically business content software, such as planning a conference, orchestrating a move (we know about that ones), handling public relations or managing people. (page 17)

* tools, many of which are traditional "help" tools, such as hypertext, multimedia, user interfaces, groupware tools and the like. (page 20)

Ultimately, performance support will become mainstream, the province of all system builders. At that point "performance support vendors" will either be leaders in specific content niches, or suppliers of tools and expertise to application developers and corporate customers.

Why now?

You could view performance support as Just a marketing construct -- a way to position a collection of nifty new technologies: hypertext, case-based reasoning, multimedia, expert systems. Partly true, but that doesn't invalidate it as a concept. It's about how to use these technologies to build useful systems for the real world, rather than about new technology per se. (Case-based reasoning itself is mostly a packaging of expert systems and text retrieval through pattern-matching.)