E-Performance at Work: Organizing and Presenting Information
By Tony Karrer and Elizabeth Gardner
Previous articles from TechEmpower looked at various e-performance issues. Again, the high-level concept is this:
E-Performance: Use of technology to improve human performance
E-Performance = E-Development + E-Interaction + E-Support
Now, we look at an e-performance approach that is both relatively simple and often overlooked: The strategy of organizing or reorganizing content, and making that content easy to access and use. The following examples show how four organizations are using technology to do exactly that.
Case A: 21st Century Insurance
Marnee Downing, corporate training unit manager at 21st Century Insurance, faced a problem common in many organizations. Policies, procedures, guidelines, tips, and so forth were continuously being updated via a series of memos from various sources. Each individual was responsible for knowing the relevant information. Unfortunately, information was stored on a shared drive, by memo date and in memo form, so finding and retrieving information was a chore. Making matters worse was the fact that a single memo might address several unrelated topics.
Of course, users needed to access the information in a very different way. “What is the latest policy on RV rentals?” “Wasn’t there a memo last May about that?” They would have to search the shared drive for the relevant memos. And tough luck if you fell behind on your memos or were out for a while—or worse yet, if you were new to the job.
Put simple: It was a classic case of form following form rather than form following function. Owners were providing information in the way that they created it—not how people would want to use it. At the same time, the memo form is considered sacrosanct. Memos are viewed as the authoritative source on what to do, so they must be kept intact: “When in doubt, read the memo(s).”
Many of us can probably find parallels in our own organizations. How about content in a learning management system (LMS) with resources presented by medium? Granted, medium is a secondary search field that may be useful for people who want things available immediately online or are willing to wait for training. But rarely does a user care if something is WBT, online video, print, or instructor-led. Most users have just one question: What do you have on the topic I care about?
At her company, says Downing, “It was clear that the structure of memos was not effective and that some better approach was needed.” Unable to lose the original memo structure, she reorganized access to the information. Now, a layer exists on top of the memos, which are organized according to categories that correspond to how questions arise on the job. The list of topics link to the memos themselves. For example, if you needed to find information about RV Rentals, you would find that topic, which would link to the related policies, procedures, and so on. “The result has been significant reduction in the effort to look things up in the memos,” says Downing.
TechEmpower heard about this kind of layering from several practitioners. The great thing is that, often, it doesn’t take a lot of sophisticated technology. In this case, the complexity was in defining the taxonomy (content organization that makes sense to the end-user according to task). Once the taxonomy had been defined, Downing’s team created a single hierarchy of tasks that pointed to the relevant documents. Of course, the same information could be presented in different ways. In our example, RV Rentals, the relevant content might be “pointed to” from both the Rentals section and the RV section. Cross-linking in these solutions and multiple views are often used. Again, the fundamental question is how the content is used.
Case B: Los Angeles Department of Water and Power
Rose Garcia, corporate training manager at Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), described another situation common in organizations. Because employee orientation meetings usually occurred as many as 30 days after the start of employment, LADWP had given the new employee’s manager primary responsibility for conducting the orientation. The problem was that if a long period passed during which no one was hired, a manager would forget how to conduct the orientation, with the risk that policies, procedures, and other important information could be communicated inconsistently or not at all. Also, the requirements varied depending on the new hire’s job function and organization, so the manager faced the added challenge of having to adapt the presentation accordingly.
How could Garcia bring some consistency to the process? Her answer was an information bank with online job aids for managers to use as part of new hire orientation. “All you need,” she says, “is for managers to know where to go to find the site. Once they get there, it walks them through the process.”
The online job aids start with a list of job functions and organizations, which leads managers to an online checklist. The checklist guides them through every step that they must cover, and points them to the forms, templates, and other resources that relate to the different elements of the checklist. Rose Garcia doesn’t own the steps for a manager, nor does she own the forms. Instead, she has created a tool that managers can use—without training—to guide them through the tasks that they need to perform.
The relatively simple job aid has several benefits:
· It helps managers cover exactly what needs to be covered for a particular employee, from parking rules to compliance issues.
· As managers complete items, they (and sometimes the employee) initial that they’ve been reviewed and completed. These confirmations are forwarded electronically and in hard copy to HR, which helps the department monitor compliance.
· Because LADWP now has an effective way to get more done early on, group orientation meetings have decreased from two days to a single day. Not only that, the organization ensures compliance more quickly. Employees are now compliant based on the manager’s actions rather than having to wait for the orientation meeting.
Case C: Southern California Edison
In many organizations, the resources available to individuals for development activities are fragmented. Some of these issues would disappear if there were a single, universal LMS within the organization. But what if no such system exists and none is on the immediate horizon? That situation is what Steve Bussard, project manager for IT Training, and other training managers confronted at Southern California Edison (SCE).
“There are a variety of different groups offering different kinds of resources, including training,” Bussard says. “It was often hard for an employee to find out what resources were available to them.”
So the problem was two-fold: Six different training groups provided different multiple types of training, often with overlapping audiences; and there was no easy way to identify and access resources. Both situations are very common. For example, in many organizations, receiving training from at least three different organizations: one group provides manager/leader training, another group provides function-specific training, and likely another group provides compliance training.
To tackle the problem at SCE, two of the training groups collaborated in an effort to help make sense of the resources for end users. They started the design and implementation of the “Learning Network” portal.
Because the Learning Network was somewhat experimental, Bussard says, they wanted to “make sure that the organization was flexible. Part of the goal was not only to show what was available, but to simply have a single location to access a wide variety of resources.” The resulting sections included such groupings as skill and interest assessments from third parties, conferences and seminars, special interest groups, research services, professional development areas (e.g., leadership or functional), mandatory training (e.g., corporate safety), and end-user application training.
To up the ante, the Learning Network “needed to run by itself,” says Bussard. Without any time or budget to keep the Learning Network current, he needed to ensure that links didn’t point to things that would change often. Otherwise, end-users would find that the Learning Network provided more errors than assistance.
To guarantee that people knew about the site, Bussard and other members of the project team made a considerable effort to spread the word. They promoted the site by sending email, handing out cards with the URL at various events and in-house conferences, and conducting a limited “road show.”
As in the previous examples, the underlying technology was not complicated. SCE simply made smart use of its existing portal software.
Case D: Toyota
Toyota, too, faced a situation in which they had an information source and wanted to provide more effective access to it by end-users. This situation had an interesting twist, however.
Any time a Toyota instructional designer was developing a course, he or she would search for related resources. Often, resources were not in an electronic format, but were videotapes, DVDs, magazines, course materials, and so forth. Toyota simplified the search for resources by creating a library that housed them in a common area. But that only addressed part of the need. Toyota wanted to make it easy for instructional designers to determine what resources were available—from their individual desktops rather than having to physically visit the library and hunt through the stacks.
At first glance, this example may seem different because the assets are physical, but the issues are very much the same. In fact, Toyota’s situation demonstrates even more strongly that the actual format or modality of a piece of information is a very separate issue from how you present it to end-users. Chuck O’Keefe, associate dean for curricula, operations, and strategic research at University of Toyota School of Retail Professional Development, explains, “While the assets remain physical, it is technology that enables users to quickly identify the resources they need.”
Each item in the library is catalogued not only with basic information, such as title and date, but also with additional metadata. In many ways, the metadata is a duplicate of what you would know about the item by having a physical copy in your hand. For example, a DVD cover and insert typically include a brief description of the contents and a list of segments on the DVD. That type of metadata appears in Toyota’s electronic catalog. It’s as if they have the resource in question right at their desk.
Better yet, instructional designers can sort easily through the metadata electronically. When starting the search process, developers are presented with a grid of nine ways to search, including subject, course, keyword, or format. Once the search approach has been chosen, the process is pretty much what you would expect: A search by keyword generates a list of all of the library entries, by title, with that keyword anywhere in the metadata. For example, if an instructional designer was searching for competitive comparison data between a Lexus model and a BMW model, he or she could search using the keywords Lexus and BMW and find a list of assets with that comparison. From each listed asset, the user can then click to see all of the metadata about it. If a DVD were on the list, the user could click through to a list of segments. The user can then order the asset or go to the library to check it out.
O’Keefe says, “Over time, these assets will more often be digital. But for now, we are dealing with a legacy of physical assets that are used day-to-day by our instructional designers.”
As for the nine ways to search, they were chosen carefully, based on how instructional designers commonly look for information. That is why Toyota ended up with some search options that you would not expect, such as “Day Openers”—assets, often videos, that are used most frequently.
While in theory this list of initial search options could grow, in practice it has not changed—nor is there really an expectation today to change it. TechEmpower speculates that this sort of tool often remains stable simply because once the user community has learned the interface, change can be detrimental.
To build its electronic catalog, Toyota used a popular library software package called inMagic. It supports cataloging, the printing of labels, and checkout and check-in of materials. Of course, a similar approach can be adopted using a wide variety of technologies. Several LMSs, content management systems (CMSs), and knowledge management systems (KMSs) include functionality that can simulate aspects of the cataloging. But the physical check-in, checkout, and printing make the librarian’s job much more efficient, and this software is perfectly aimed at this application.
Toyota also made a small change to the instructional design process. As instructional designers use source materials or create assets not currently in the library, they now donate the materials or assets to the library, and appropriate metadata is assigned to the resource so it can be identified easily in the future. Thus, the library grows and becomes more valuable over time.
Case E: Your organization
Are you open to looking for opportunities within your organization to present resources in a new and better way? If so, a good place to start is with the themes we heard across a wide variety of organizations and solutions:
- Look for information sources that are not easy to use by the consumers of the information.
- List the ways in which users commonly access information.
- Looking at the above task list, ask if the current organization supports those tasks or fights the user.
- Look to see if you can create a new layer on top of the information—a layer that reorganizes the content and thus provides users with better access to it.
- Consider whether multiple paths to the same information are needed to allow for a variety of tasks.
- Limit the list of search mechanisms and present it in a way that is immediately recognizable.
- Identify common searches and make them very easy to conduct.
- Look for simple technology solutions—basic Webpages, search engine software, or your existing LMS, CMS, or KMS.
Bottom line: costs versus benefits
How do you choose content for which there is genuine payoff? For example, when do you know that the effort expended cataloging items is worth less than the value of better retrieval? Keep in mind that the value of retrieval should not be measured only as the time you spend to retrieve it. Sometimes, having fast access to information makes a big difference in the result.
To be sure, determining if there is payoff is somewhat tricky. The primary factors in calculating such costs and benefits are