So what s an EPSS?

So what’s an EPSS?

Here’s a simple definition from Gilly Davis, formerly with PTS Learning Systems and one of the UK’s foremost EPSS experts: “An electronic performance support system delivers information online to the desktop which is specific to the user’s immediate need.”

The first point to note about this definition is that EPSS is online. That means, of course, that it’s not on paper, like a traditional procedures manual or job aid. What’s the advantage of being online? Well, paper documents are not only bulky and use up trees, they are also hard to keep up-to-date, while there’s only one copy of any electronic performance support document, and that’s on your intranet web server.

The second point about this definition is that the EPSS is delivered to the desktop. This is perhaps a little limiting, in that a laptop, palmtop or mobile phone will do just as well. However, an EPSS is of no use to an employee who doesn’t have constant access to a suitable piece of hardware.

Lastly – and this is key – the EPSS delivers information on a just-in-time basis. You get the information when you need it in order to perform a task, not on a just-in-case basis, as you would with a typical training event. And to make the contrast with training even clearer, we are talking about information and not knowledge, understanding or skill. Information is for reference – you use it and, more often than not, you forget all about it. That’s not to say that, if you refer to information often enough, some of it won’t stick, in which case it becomes knowledge. And if you apply that knowledge often enough to your job, it could even become a skill. What I’m driving at is that the objective of the EPSS is, by definition, to support performance, whether or not that requires learning. With training, the route to performance improvement is always through learning.

Let’s try one more definition for an EPSS, this time with more words. The source is epss.com: “An EPSS is the electronic infrastructure that captures, stores and distributes individual and corporate knowledge assets throughout an organisation, to enable individuals to achieve required levels of performance in the fastest possible time and with a minimum of support from other people.” They go on to make some important distinctions: an EPSS focuses on information and not merely data; it takes advantage of the relative ease with which humans can recognise rather than recall knowledge from long-term memory; it captures content in a format that leverages the computer’s ability to reason with a large number of facts, as in a knowledgebase or expert system; it produces measurable on-the-job performance improvements rather than other results such as the transfer of knowledge.