Learning invests in planned experiences that are designed to develop an employee’s theoretical ability to deal with a given situation – providing they can remember what they were taught at the right time! Performance support attends to outside influence and is what people turn to for help when stumped by a situation or are faced with a difficult decision. While the mind and heart are the domain of learning and instruction, performance support resides on mobile devices.

Let’s look at a side-by-side comparison.

Do we need to choose between instruction and support?

The simple answer is no. A system that combines instruction and support is the most desirable of all – especially when so much is expected of us these days. For example, let’s look at two professional groups – doctors and pilots. Both rely on check-lists as a mechanism for mitigating errors and potentially life threatening catastrophe. Over the years, the technologies of both medicine and flight have grown increasingly complex. No one person can remember all that is required, no matter the length and quality of their training so, to support their memory and their training, they now turn to performance support. There are countless examples of how pilots have resorted to check lists to avoid a calamity – the pilots of the BA 747 hit by a volcanic ash cloud are a real life example as the to the power of a checklist . This is performance support. In the field of medicine, Peter Provonost, a critical care physician, concerned about line infections in the intensive care unit, innovated by providing a job process checklist. This is also a performance support tool. It was stunningly successful, with dramatic reductions in the infection rate. Standardization, on-the-spot reminders, consistent application and an empowered role for the nurse are made the difference.

Why is performance support so critical now?

1. Performance support delivers valued assistance, given the limits on human memory. If people could remember everything, then performance support would not be necessary. Memory can be categorized in two ways: long-term memory (LTM) and short-term memory (STM). Long-term memories are stored in the brain, whether they are recollections about sailing as a child with your father, the political history of Spain or the definition of anachronistic. The movement of information from STM into LTM, into meaningful networks, is called learning. It costs time and money to learn. Short-term memory is limited, usually to five to seven pieces of information. A good illustration of the limits on STM is the process of copying your credit-card number from your card onto a mail-order slip. Some people can remember and transfer four numbers at a time; others can capture five, six, seven, or as many as eight numbers. Because STM has limited capacity, and because moving data into LTM demands resources for repetitive practice over time, professionals concerned with performance have turned to performance support, recognizing many opportunities for aided performance. Even Albert Einstein recognized his limitations and relied on performance support. He admitted to not knowing his own phone number because he could look it up when necessary. It is hard not be affectionate towards a resource that delivers what you want, be it a phone number, how to assemble a piece of IKEA furniture or the criteria for conforming to a key piece of legislation affecting your business.

2. Performance support is short and sweet. No fuss, just focus. The doctor did not write a checklist for the thousands of things that must be done in intensive care. He directed attention to where errors were made, were lives were lost, and hospital stays were lengthened. While effective instruction is comprehensive and prepares individuals to handle the unforeseen, performance support is targeted to the task at hand. It is about content and resources that solve the immediate how for the task that you are trying to get accomplished.

3. Performance support is there when you need it, where you need it. Many of us already use a performance support tool on a daily basis. The sat nav in our car guides us to our destination, telling us the route and prompting us when to turn and even where the speed cameras are located. Gone are the days of having to memorise the route or struggle with an atlas on the front seat of a car. Our Sat Nav is our performance support tool for the car as and when we need it.

4. Performance support is all about your priorities. Whether you are a nurse working in an intensive care unit or an engineer called out to sort out a broken washing machine, having a tool that helps you through a process takes the worry out of the work. Performance support works by targeting your immediate concerns. What do I need to know so that I can solve this problem or answer this question? For example, a large insurance group used to have a 10 week induction course for its claims officers so as to ensure that they were able to deal with the intricacies of processing a claim. The complex rules applied to a hugely varied range of situations, and sometimes resulted in inconsistent or inaccurate choices by claims officers. By introducing a performance support tool that stepped the claims officer through each process, the mobile support tool eliminated much of the need for memorization. The performance support tool, by generating a customized checklist of requirements for each individual kind of claim, reduced the number of errors made in the claims process, shortened the claim processing time, and put let stress on the claims officer to learn all of the different requirements.

Performance Support – your mobile helper

Performance support is already with us now, from an electronic to do list on your PDA, to the SatNav that helps us get to the right destination in our car. It has not only changed our day to day world, but it is also making a huge impact on the world of training in business. Detailed technical training could become a thing of the past. Training might focus on the high level conceptual side of things with detail, especially on the technical side, being consigned to the performance support tool. Imagine a tool that tells an engineer how to fix a broken washing machine. He can scan the QR code on the side of the machine, and it confirms the model and type and instantly provides him with detailed diagrams of how to change the rubber on the inside of the door. No need to thumb through a manual or go on a week long course to learn how to do each and every step of the process for each and every possible machine he might encounter. No need to try and understand those complex drawings. Animations and video tutorials o the smart phone or tablet will show the engineer, step by step, what he needs to do to complete the task quickly and accurately.

Performance support can be absolutely and totally integrated into the training challenge. It can provide more essential information than can be retained by anyone attending a training session and is readily available at the very moment it is needed thanks to the smartphones and tablets that are now increasingly common in the business world.

Eureka! I knew there had to be a proper use for these clever little devices, other than playing Angry Birds, that is.

And there’s nothing wrong with that!

And they might have a point. Google have just celebrated their 10 billionth Android App download while the number of downloads from Apple’s AppStore is expected to pass 20 billion within the next couple of months!
Companies are often left bemused as others race to get their App out to the market but, in the same way many businesses ponder the benefits of blogging or twitter, but the answer that often gets left unanswered is “Why?” “Why do I need an App?” and “What will it actually do for my business?”

The answer is simple – if you can’t think of a reason why, then don’t bother until you can.

The whole point of a Business App is to help the user achieve something specific, and to do it QUICKLY using a tool, be it a smartphone or tablet, that they carry with them all the time. That might be to complete a task using the App itself, or it might simply be help them to achieve something else by supplying them with knowledge to help them complete that task at the time they most need it – when they are actually doing it.

While many ‘end-user’ Apps such as games or news updates can be justified as simply engaging the user and keeping your company name in their thoughts, there is another type of App which can bring measurable benefits to your business. This is the Performance Support App. A Performance Support App is one which provides your employees with essential information and guidance to help them carry out their tasks according to your procedures for best practice.

The benefits of these Apps can be immense in so many ways and include:

• Reducing the need for large training budgets
• Improve knowledge retention in support of existing training programmes
• Reduce demand on already stretched helpdesk resources
• Ensure company compliance reducing the possibility of fines
• Improve effectiveness and customer service
• Improve productivity and efficiency
• Increase sales conversion rates and profitability

You can start to see the full scope of the benefits of having an App just by looking at staff training. It is generally accepted that attendees can forget up to 80% of what they learn within two weeks of the training. Add in the cost of travel, accommodation and expenses for multi-day training courses, which can be close to half the total cost of the training, and you have the recipe for a very expensive and ineffective programme indeed when multiplied by a large and diverse workforce, especially if some of those are mobile or working remotely.

Any company with a large in-house training requirement should therefore look at how an App can help by both reducing cost and improving performance.

To start with, instead of a three or four day training course, shorten it to one day with a morning session to communicate the important business messages and an afternoon session of training on how to use the new App. The result is vastly reduced waste of valuable training resources, improved morale due to less waste of employee’s time, less impact on normal business by taking employees away from their normal roles for less time, and improved performance because those trained now have all that information to hand exactly when they need it. They don’t have to remember the new information – they just have to remember how to access it on their App next time they need it.

Hopefully that will give you food for thought when thinking about why you need a Company App. Simply having an App for the sake of it won’t bring you anything other than difficulty justifying the expense. Look first for a business problem that can be solved, a large training or communication expense that might be reduced, or a business objective that an App might help to achieve.

Over the coming months, we’ll add to this series with some more specific examples of exactly how an App could benefit your business. So, next time your company is discussing having its own App, you’ll be able to answer the most important question of all – Exactly what the point of it actually is.

The ‘tablet’ be it the iPad or the Android tablet is already becoming a widely used device in the world of business. None more so than in the world of learning and performance support. As we suffer from information overload, people are now looking for simple ways of accessing concise and relevant information at the point or time of need.

The tablet, with its 10 inch screen – which has great multi-media capacity – and easy access to Apps is at the forefront of this information revolution. Apps are already beginning to stem the flow of information overload – as they place information into accessible visible containers. According to the French information technology company Atos – middle managers spend 25% of their time searching for information. Apps, with their container structure, are enabling business users to strip away some of the information noise and allow them to refocus on the job in-hand.

Aside from the Apps that have appeared in the hundreds of thousands to guide us to local restaurants, update us on the latest football scores, or tell us where the nearest public toilet is located – Apps are already beginning to contribute significantly to the world of business.

Business applications are moving beyond simple personal productivity applications to include enterprise infrastructure such as CRM and ERP. Developers have moved their focus beyond the personal user and are launching tablet applications to meet enterprise demand, and CIOs are now examining the various ways in which software is evolving to conform to the tablet platform. There are, however, some hurdles that will need to be jumped through by businesses as they embrace this latest technological revolution. They need to approach their assessments of the business benefits in the same way that they evaluate any other software, based on functionality and business process integration, user factors, system integration, management and security, application architecture and vendor viability.

It does seem that the revolution has already begun. According to Gartner’s latest forecast, worldwide media tablet sales to end users will total 63.6 million units in 2011, a 261.4 percent increase from 2010 sales of 17.6 million units. Media tablet sales will continue to experience strong growth through to the end of 2015 when sales are forecast to reach 326.3 million units. By the end of 2014, the installed base of devices running new lightweight mobile operating systems like Apple iOS, Google Android and Microsoft Windows 8 will exceed the total installed base of all PC-based systems.

This revolution is not being driven by IT departments but by senior managers and business leaders. Managers are finding legitimate business uses and redefining processes for ‘ready at hand’ moments where other computer types are not as well adapted. The uses range from CEOs distributing material for board of directors meetings; sales teams are embracing them in client-facing situations to help close more business; sales and marketing leaders are using them as dashboards to their business; and marketers are building campaigns around them. They are even used as performance support tools from the world of medicine through to the manufacturing shop floor. The clip board and reference books are being consigned to history – and being replaced by tablets.

According to Gartner at their latest symposium in Australia the top 10 commercial business applications of the tablet are:

• Sales automation systems for customer collateral, sales presentations, and ordering systems
• Business intelligence including analytical and performance applications with management dashboards
• Containerised email to separate corporate messaging environments from personal email
• Collaboration applications for meetings
• File utilities for sharing and document distribution
• General corporate/government enterprise applications for CRM, ERP, SCM and messaging
• Medical support systems for doctors, nurses, and physical therapists
• Hosted virtual desktop agents to provide secure remote operations of traditional desktop applications and environments
• Social networking applications with intelligent business insight
• Board books for secure document and report distribution

So it will be no surprise to you in the future – that we will all be taking tablets with us to support us in our business roles and help us solve problems.

In a world where there are literally thousands of apps available to the visitor of the app stores – standing out from the crowd is becoming more and more difficult. It’s tough being a mobile app developer given the competitive nature of the business and the proliferation of apps that are emerging from darkened rooms. Already there are many very good apps languishing in the stores where few are finding them. Some of the latest renditions seem to be missing the point – as developers overload them with features that actually make them less appealing to the user.

Surely one of the big reasons that apps have become so popular is their simplicity of having very focused objectives. Users have come to expect an app that is designed to perform a particular task, in a singularly competent and efficient manner. The developers of these apps have spent a lot of time defining what it means to deliver a good experience performing a specific task, and making that the primary focus of the development effort and the user experience.

The very best apps stand out as they focus upon performing a task simply and easily, without putting a lot of features or options in the way. As the old Ronseal advert used to say “It does what it says on the tin!” Load the app, and you can instantly accomplish the task at hand with ease with no distractions, no noise, no complicated navigation, no excess information. It just does what it is primarily designed to do. These apps are not designed to have the same multi-functional range of uses that traditional desktop software has provided – they are focused tools that are dedicated to performing one or two specific functions.

As developers struggle to get their App recognised from the crowd at the App store – they are beginning to lose their way. Some developers are moving away from a focused approach. Apps that I have used and loved are gradually losing their childhood simplicity and are turning into rather complicated teenagers as multiple features are added by the developers. Instead of making the app better at performing the primary function, they add new capability just in case the user might find it beneficial. The net effect being that, gradually, the app loses its original simplicity and usability that drew us to download the application in the first place leading users, in many cases, to simply give up.

Perhaps one of the reasons for the confusion is the Power User. One the one hand, simple apps are just what the iPad, tablet and smartphone users are looking for. However the lack of features hamper productivity for power users making them switch to a netbook/pc for full software functionality. Should power users expect their apps to perform the same functions on their mobile/smart devices ? Are they ruining the joy of the simple focused tools? If you want powerful functionality use the right tool for the job.

I am not saying that adding features to tablet/smart device apps is a bad thing, as it brings them closer to netbooks for features, functionality and productivity. The challenge I think is doing it in a way that seamlessly integrates with the ‘touch’ user interface, making it both usable as well as functional. That’s one advantage suite software offers on the PC – multiple tools that work together and have a homogenized look.

The app market is still in its infancy – apps are still frustrating, either because of a lack of, or an overabundance of features. Here’s hoping they find a happy middle ground of focus and functionality.