In a study sponsored by Safari in late-2002, a full 100 percent of technology workers reported that they had to stop their work several times a day to either look for information to do their jobs or to provide information to co-workers needing help. The study concluded that “the data shows technology workers spend an average of seven hours per week—more than 31 hours per month—looking for answers, researching issues and solutions for problems, and helping colleagues do the same.”
The study found that by providing content directly in the workflow, workers could save 3.3 hours per week for “a monthly time savings of 13.5 hours or just over four labor weeks per year.” This essentially cut lag time by 50 percent, and on average, saved more than US$6,000 per worker, per year.
Remarkably similar data was released in a recent IDC study. Books24x7 cites an IDC study, which found that “knowledge workers spend 15 percent to 20 percent of their time actively looking for specific information; however, these searches are successful less than 50 percent of the time.” Just calculating the time spent in the unsuccessful searches, the study found that “these unsuccessful searches could cost a company employing 1000 knowledge workers $6 million in time lost.”
Where does the time go?
Technology and knowledge workers consult a wide range of content sources when they search for information to do their job. Those sources include the Web, trade books, co-workers (local experts), newsgroups, content portals, manuals, online documentation, e-learning tools, and electronic libraries.
Many e-learning experts write extensively about the predominance of such informal learning tools in the business environment. According to some industry estimates, informal learning accounts for 90 percent of the way people learn in an organization--as opposed to formal training, such as classroom events and courseware-based e-learning. Clearly, it’s worth making it easier and faster for workers to find the information they need.
For example, Lotus reports that “about 42 percent of the knowledge that professionals use to get their jobs done comes from other people.” This is called prairie-dogging--workers pop out of their cubicles to solicit information from the local expert. When a worker is consulting another worker, both workers lose productivity. That means that 42 percent of the time spent consulting with a co-worker is now doubled. Embedding as much contextual content as possible in the workflow is the solution to this productivity drain.
Simple math
The goal of all performance technology is to increase productivity. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, productivity is “the ratio of the output of goods and services to the labor hours devoted to the production of that output.” In other words, productivity is the number of workers multiplied by hours per worker multiplied by products produced per hour.
Basically, there are only three variables that you can manipulate to increase productivity: the number of workers, the number of hours worked, and the output of that work.
It’s broadly accepted that achieving productivity gains by increasing output is becoming difficult to achieve. Productivity technology that automates rote tasks has been the most common method used to increase the output of any business process. Also, smaller increments of improvement now are being garnered even with the most sophisticated productivity technology. Hiring more workers is rarely an option, particularly in a recession. That leaves the hours worked as the only variable that can be manipulated to increase productivity.
Currently, the need to increase amount of actual hours an employee spends working is driving an economic imperative to define precise workflows. Indeed, in the presence of a relatively finite work week and a shrinking workforce, optimizing the workflow is the only way to increase productivity. Therefore, reducing the lag time in the workflow is the primary method of optimizing productivity.
A matter of time
According to Ultimus, a leading workflow supplier, 90 percent of the time required to do work is lag time and only 10 percent is actual task time. Personal productivity technology helps decrease task time, but task time is a very small percentage of a process. Even if the task time is reduced by half, only a 5 percent time savings can be achieved. This influences suppliers to focus more heavily on decreasing lag time. Workflow automation and workforce optimization technology is designed to reduce that lag time.
Business process management (BPM), workflow management, business activity monitoring (BAM), and workforce optimization software also are designed to reduce lag time. BPM and workflow technologies have been able to achieve significant gains in productivity by reducing lag time. The ROIs based on time saved are impressive and often average above 50 percent.
Staffware, another leading workflow management supplier, maintains that 95 percent of all business processes require the intervention of people. Consequently, workflow management technology is, by definition, human performance improvement technology.
One way you can reduce lag time is by sophisticated task routing, exception handling, and workload balancing. Business activity monitoring software excels at this. If one worker is unavailable or unable to complete a task, the task is routed to another worker. Of course, such task trails are closely monitored and productivity metrics for individual workers are tracked.
The primary way to reduce lag time, though, is by dramatically shrinking the learning time needed to perform tasks properly and quickly. This includes shrinking the time spent in formal and informal learning. New workflow technologies do this by embedding, or fusing, the information and support needed by a worker directly in the real-time workflow. BPM, business rule engines, and workflow technology are used to create specific workflows for specific workers based on their job-role. Workflow-based e-learning is fused in that workflow.
The goal of all workflow-based products is to squeeze the cost out of flow by reducing the time spent on tasks and business processes. Workflow-based e-learning is targeted directly on the time aspect of productivity metrics. The ROI of workflow-based e-learning is simple: multiply the number of hours a worker saves by finding information by the hourly wage of that worker.
To be sure, there’s a fundamental difference between the metrics used to measure conventional training and workflow-based e-learning. In conventional training, the time spent on training activities is a direct loss of productivity (lost time) that may or may not be recovered later in increased output.
Traditional training analytics attempt to measure the learning transfer from the training experience to the job. Was the worker able to transfer the knowledge to the job performance? The metrics are complicated and the process used to analyze them has traditionally been time-consuming and expensive. Statistics show that very few companies even attempt training analytics beyond near-meaningless course completion metrics.
A new type of analytics has emerged to automate this complexity and is commonly referred to as workforce analytics. The metrics for this type of analytics attempt to map the correspondence between formal training events (classroom or courseware-based elearning) expenditures to the output of productivity. For example, were more goods or services delivered or did sales increase in the presence of training? The results to such questions are described as key performance indicators. Saba, Docent, and PeopleSoft all market new workforce analytics technologies.
The metrics of workflow-based analytics are not couched in learning outcomes or KPIs, however. Instead, these metrics use a very simple metric; time. Did the work get done faster?
There are three major ways that workflow-based e-learning optimizes productivity by reducing lag time:
Reducing training time reduces lag time
Suppliers are targeting time spent on formal education and training as a lag time variable that can be reduced.
For instance, the AWD/Knowledge Enabler is a task management modeling tool that claims to automatically guide a user through a series of predefined steps necessary to process an item of work, which reduces keystrokes and training requirements.
An another example, Honda has purchased 3800 Nomad Expert Technician Systems from Microvision. The Nomad Expert Technician System is a wireless wearable computer system with a head-mounted display device that beams an image directly on the retinas of technicians. The system provides mechanics with access to manuals, procedures, mentors, and repair information while they work on cars. According to Honda, “the information is superimposed directly on their vision at the point of task, head-up and hands-free.” Beginning in January 2004, Honda will distribute the Nomads to its Honda and Acura dealers, as well as independent repair shops in North America. Honda’s training facility in Torrance, California performed a series of tests on batteries 39 percent faster using the Nomad system.
According to Microvision, learning embedded in workflow not only mitigates the need for formal training but reduces the time it takes to do common tasks. They cite an ambulance company in Seattle that was able to cut 57 percent off the time it took to repair brake systems. That company was also able to cut the time it took to do emission repairs by an astonishing 70 percent.
Do the math
There are more than 1500 Honda and Acura dealerships in the United States with about 18,000 mechanics. Additionally, there are over 50,000 Honda-certified independent mechanics. According to U.S. Government Census there are some 25,000 new car and truck dealerships in the United States. On top of this, there are another 160,000 so-called “after-market” auto repair shops. All of these shops charge customers hourly rates for labor plus materials. Using real-time workflow-based e-learning, these shops should be able to reduce a customer’s labor charge by about 50 percent. So be sure to find out your mechanic uses this technology. If so, check your bill.