Big Data and Performance Support

In late 2012, Andrew McAfee,principal research scientist at MIT’s Center for Digital Business and ErikBrynjolfsson, director of the Center for Digital Business at MIT’s Sloan Schoolof Management published the article “Big Data: The Management Revolution” in theHarvard Business Review. The authors suggested that the reason the “explosionof digital data is so important” is that big data can allow managers to, “knowradically more about their businesses, and directly translate that knowledgeinto improved decision making and performance.” (Editor’sNote: Registration with HBR is required for full access to the article.)

Organizations interested in thriving and surviving in today’s marketscertainly need to improve the effectiveness and speed with which their peoplemake decisions. Obviously, big data provides increased capacity for improveddecision-making by those who have access to it. This capacity is especiallycrucial in enabling an organization’s ability to identify market threats andopportunities with enough lead-time to adequately adapt. But there’s much moreto sustaining peak performance in an environment of change than effectivedecisions informed by big data.

Big data is not enough

Where McAfee and Brynjolfsson get it wrong is their belief that big datadirectly translates through managers to improved performance. Big data can’t goit alone here. More often than not, decisions carry with them the requirement ofchange. And change today is “short fused,” requiring employees to constantly unlearnand then relearn at or above the speed of change. This “learning agility” isthe defining quality of high-performance organizations.

Enduring competitive advantage is absolutely dependent upon anorganization’s learning agility—meaning its “ability to continuously undergonew skill cycles to prepare for new competitive cycles—consistently retoolingin order to maintain competitiveness.” (See InSearch of Learning Agility, in the References at the end of this article.)

The pursuit of learning at the speed of change compels organizations toturn their attention to the workflow and the requirement of deliveringimmediate, intuitive, intentionally tailored aid to employees at their momentof need. This is called performance support, and when it is designed,developed, and delivered properly it:

• Optimizes performance on the jobby ensuring that people have the support they need to perform effectively atevery changing moment
• Cuts by as much as 50 percent the time neededto achieve effective performance on the job
• Reduces the costs associatedwith on-the-job failure
• Enables continuous performanceimprovement and innovation

All of this performance-enhancing impact is beyond the realmof big data’s direct influence.

Optimizing performance on the job

How much performance waste is there in your organization’s workflow?Jonathan Spira, author of Overload! How TooMuch Information Is Hazardous to Your Organization, claims that we waste a lot of time recovering frommoment-to-moment interruptions to our work. According to Spira,the recovery time (e.g., the time it takes to return to the level of performancewe were experiencing prior to an interruption) can be 10-20 times longer thanthe original interruption. One of the key roles of performance support is to provideconsistent, two-click, 10-second recovery time. If you do the math, the savingshere can more than pay for the investment in developing electronic performancesupport system (EPSS) capability.

Besides interruptions, your organization most likely experiences waste from the effects ofinformation overload. This is where performers spin their wheels searching forand through the information they need to guide their work. Spiraestimates that in the United States alone a minimum of 28-billion hours ofproductive time is lost each year because of information overload. This too isa sweet spot for performance support!

Gloria Gery defined an EPSS as an “orchestrated set oftechnology enabled services, that provide on-demand access to integrated information, guidance, advice,assistance, training, and tools to enable high-level job performance with aminimum of support from other people.” An effectively designed EPSS solves thechallenge of “information overload” by providing performers, “immediate accessto just what they need, at their moment of need, in the form they need to getthe job done.” Performance support is the answer to the vast amounts of scatteredinformation in organizations today. Big data is only partially helpful here.

Cutting the time to effective performance

As mentioned earlier, big data provides an organization withthe capacity to make an informed decision to change. From the moment of thatdecision to when that change is achieved is the measure of “time to effectiveperformance.” An integrated learning- and performance-support strategy optimizesthe time it takes to achieve effective performance on the job. This setsorganizations firmly on the path to becoming an organization that learns at or above the speed of change. Standingstill isn’t an option in today’s market environment. Organizational survivaldepends upon its readiness to respond to the demands of change adeptly withspeed. Most likely you have enormous amounts of low-hanging fruit to pick inyour efforts to increase learning agility. Go for that, and then don’t give up!Remember, at the heart of it all is performance support.

Reducing failure costs

Atul Gawande observed in his book The Checklist Manifesto that “The volume and complexity of what weknow has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly,safely, and reliably.” If this is true for your organization, then Gawandesuggests you “need a different strategy for overcoming failure, one that buildson experience and takes advantage of the knowledge people have but somehow alsomakes up for our inevitable human inadequacies.” This is the fundamentalmission of performance support: compensating for what we don’t know, connectingus to the most current information we need to know, and guiding us along pathsthat we can’t remember, that are new or have changes, and avoiding the quicksandalong the way.

Enabling continuous improvement and innovation

By collapsing the time required to achieve competency and optimizing employeecapacity to remain current in their knowledge and skills, employees can devotetheir reclaimed time to making a meaningful contribution to their work and totheir clients, and to giving way to opportunity for innovation. In addition,principles of continuous performance improvement can be integrated intoperformance support. The end result? An organization that can respond to changewith ever-increasing speed, magnitude, and innovation.

Opportunity for learning anddevelopment organizations

Big data certainly is earning legitimate attention and funding withinorganizations. But frankly, it is an enabler of a much more critical capability—anorganization’s adaptive capacity. This too merits significant attention. It canbe a matter of survival. Take a look at today’s corporate burial grounds andyou’ll see the remains of what were once mighty companies that were unable toadapt ahead of their markets.

Organizational learning agility currently provides the learning industrya singular opportunity to contribute in a way and at a level we have not heretoforebeen privileged to do. Historically, we’ve struggled to demonstrate legitimatebottom-line strategic value to the organizations we serve. Today, more thanever before, we are needed at the corporate leadership table and we need tostep into the room prepared to help lead our respective organizations intoorganizational learning agility under the banner and capabilities of performancesupport.

References

Clark, T.R. and Conrad A. Gottfredson. In Search of Learning Agility: Assessing Progress from 1957 to 2008. 2008. https://www.elearningguild.com/publications/index.cfm?id=17

Gawande, A. The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009.

O’Driscoll, T. and Jay Cross. “In Her Own Words: Gloria Gery on Performance.” 2005. http:/www.internettime.com/205/08/gloria-gery

Spira, J. Overload! How Too Much Information is Hazardous to Your Organization. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2011.