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 with me via teleconference about the state of performance support (PS). My goal was 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). Application integration practices have emerged to address the engineering challenges around enterprise systems that need to talk to one another. A potential bonus in these activities is the burden it removes from users as a single interface is enabled for complex, diverse systems. I asked the panel to what extent the PS practice benefits from such integration activities.
I also wanted to uncover what hasn't changed - or worse - where things may have reverted. Novelist Ayn Rand once wrote, "Thousands of years ago the first man created fire. He was probably burned at the stake that he taught his brothers to light." (Rand, 1943) These pioneers, who years earlier established sound electronic learning principles and protocol - the forerunners of PS - and have evolved them to a new paradigm that addresses performance, have seen their work subverted. Web-based training commodities have emerged that address no learning or performance needs, are bereft of the richness we saw 15 to 20 years ago in the computer-based training (CBT) revolution, but assume the labels of performance support. Even good technology-based learning materials are being labeled performance support. Our experts acknowledge and provide insight to these market-motivated inclinations.
The e-revolution has also spawned a flurry of knowledge management (KM) activities, so I asked what role KM is playing in the PS practice. How has KM influenced our thinking about PS systems engineering, the formal process of developing performance-centered systems? Have PS systems moved beyond simply anticipating performance problems with hard-coded supports, toward truly dynamic and adaptive systems that continuously support performance as environmental factors change? And is there a valid model for PS that is dynamic and adaptive as it includes both engineered systems and human beings harmoniously converging to expert performance and wisdom?
I hope you enjoy this lively, wisdom-filled discussion. Most important, I hope that its lessons enrich your knowledge of performance support in a new context that is a world changing in internet time, generating performance problems at the same blistering rate, and begging for the very relief that these pioneers provide.