So what has changed? This is the first time in history that we see organizations demanding performance-centered systems - in the e-commerce world. Such systems first compete for attention, then must enable immediate business transactions. We've said for years that the performance in PS is business performance, enabled through human performance; now we see why. The e-business world may not be using the term performance support, but usability - a necessary condition for PS - has become the mantra and a common demand (Nielsen, 2000). Thus e-commerce systems provide powerful examples to help shape the demands of business owners around their need for performance-centered systems. The web alone does not enable performance, but it's role in e-commerce helps to surface PS as a significant business enabler.
PS practitioners can also take advantage of the emerging field of EAI because its outcomes enable us to create performance-centered interfaces. When the business processes, system navigation, and data of complex, diverse systems are merged to a single entity, greater opportunities exist for realizing PS in interface design. Today EAI concerns itself primarily with data integration. When tools emerge that integrate processes and superimpose user workflow onto communicating process- and data structures, then the opportunities for PS will be extremely rich and more results measurably rewarding.
While much of our discussion focused on enabling performance for work that is primarily system-mediated, we cannot forget just how much work is not. PS must step up to its proper role in providing a performance-based structure for a much broader range of tasks and jobs, such as bank relationship managers, high-end sales people, and brokerage branch managers. This highly generative work (that is not as simple as generating purchase orders on big systems) requires PS to embrace the notions of knowledge management - continuous capture, maintenance, validation - and dynamics, in terms of environmental sensors and agents of communication. In this context, PS manifests itself in bridging the gap between knowledge and performance.
Learning and the learning technologies remain important to PS, but it is clear that you cannot merely re-label training as PS simply because there is a related performance issue. Unless there is an explicit performance outcome, it's not PS. Business and IT departments have traditionally turned to training departments to close performance gaps, but have gotten training programs instead. It's time that the training function finds its place in the broader consortia of skills associated with performance - information design, human factors, knowledge management, interactivity, measurement, performance analysis, and the related technologies - and forges relationships with IT and business.
Finally, PS practitioners will continue struggling to remove the pain created by enterprise systems. Simple business tasks are rendered complex and difficult in the ERP world, where developers continue to forget the human being in the process. If the model that represents performance includes the human being along with the technology, then we will get closer to supporting performance: business performance, through human performance. In the meantime, many practitioners will continue to develop and bolt on extrinsic supports - both to enable performance but also to earn a seat at the development table. The seat alone gets you nothing, but as PS tools grow in sophistication and measurable effectiveness, the opportunities to create intrinsic supports and true performance-centered systems will continue to grow.
References
Nielsen, J. (2000). Designing web usability. Indianapolis, IN: New Riders Publishing
Pfeffer, J., and Sutton, R.I. (1999). The knowing-doing gap: how smart companies turn knowledge into action. cambridge, ma: Harvard Business School Press
Rand, A. (1943). The fountainhead. New York, NY: Bobbs-Merrill
