Abstract
Just 48 h after being trained, learners will recall only 30% of the learned knowledge. But could the knowledge workers and learners not just look up the needed knowledge when they need it? Employees usually receive training documents, business process models, and presentation slides, and have information in wikis and blogs at their disposal. However, to look up information the user has to interrupt work and concentrate on looking for a solution to the problem at hand. The same is true for other sources employees consult to fill their knowledge gap, whether it is searching the Internet or online forums or asking colleagues.
Current research provides evidence that knowledge workers spend at least 38% of their time searching for information. Because of all of this, users can be overwhelmed by the amount of available information and lose much time until they find what is relevant for them. If users resort to trial and error, they may need even more time. As a result, productivity drops, usage errors sneak in, and acceptance of the newly introduced software system is at risk. As a consequence we see a whole new productivity, efficiency, performance management, and even effectiveness challenge for the modern organization.
Because this is a whole new way of continuous improvement of the learning organization, the following sections will explain how such technology support for learning new processes and applications can be made available to process workers.