Time Shock, Training, and Knowledge Companions: How to Develop Smarter Workers
Excerpted from Business Rule Concepts: Getting to the Point of Knowledge (4th ed, 2013), by Ronald G. Ross, 162 pp, http://www.brsolutions.com/b_concepts.php
What people-challenges face your business today? What role should business systems play?
Time shock. As the rate of change accelerates, workers are constantly thrust into new roles and responsibilities. They must be guided through unfamiliar procedures and know-how as thoroughly and as efficiently as possible. The business pays a price, either directly or indirectly, if getting workers up to speed is too slow (or too painful). Time shock is like culture shock — very disorienting if you’re not prepared for rapid immersion.
Training. The flip side of time shock is training — how to get workers up to speed. Training is expensive and time-consuming. Yet as the rate of change accelerates, more and more (re)training is required. Where do you turn for solutions?
The foremost cause of time shock for business workers is rapid change in the business rules. At any given time, workers might be found at virtually any stage of time shock. Sometimes, you might find them completely up-to-speed, other times completely lost. Most of the time, they are probably somewhere in between. That poses a big challenge with respect to training.
The only approach to training that will truly scale is on-the-job self-training.
Knowledge Companions. Such built-in training requires smart architecture, where pinpoint know-how can be put right in front of workers in real time as the need arises — that is, right at the point of knowledge[1]. What that means, in effect, is that the relevant portion of the company’s know-how — its rulebook — is ‘read’ to the worker on-line, right as the worker bumps up against the business rules.
So a key idea that business rules bring to architecture is that operational business systems become knowledge companions for workers in the knowledge economy. After all, isn’t making people smarter the whole point of knowledge?!
Tags: in-line training, know-ow, knowledge companion, knowledge economy, on-the-job self-training, point of knowledge, Point of Knowledge Architecture, POK, POKA, rate of change, rulebook, smart architecture, time shock, training, worker training
Ronald G. Ross
Ron Ross, Principal and Co-Founder of Business Rules Solutions, LLC, is internationally acknowledged as the “father of business rules.” Recognizing early on the importance of independently managed business rules for business operations and architecture, he has pioneered innovative techniques and standards since the mid-1980s. He wrote the industry’s first book on business rules in 1994.