2003 IMTA Proceedings - International Military Testing Association

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An important part of the framework is that it incorporates the need for greater costefficiency
in the development of performance support solutions. It does this in two ways;
firstly, by identifying measurable performance goals during analysis against which
improvements brought about by different performance support mechanisms can be
measured. In this regard it adopts the lessons from studies in the field of human
performance technology (Gilbert, 1996, Robinson and Robinson, 1995, Rosset, 1999).
Secondly, it incorporates the growing trend towards encouraging and facilitating reuse
and sharing of digital assets. The view associated with this trend has so far been confined
predominantly to learning content (Douglas, 2001, Gibbons et al 2000). In the military
this trend is associated with the sharable content reference model (SCORM) from the
Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative (see www.adlnet.org). In the
framework, we extend reuse thinking to the reuse of problem analysis knowledge.
Figure 1: Model for enterprise software system based on performance analysis and
evaluation
By successfully defining a technology-supported framework for reusable performance
analysis knowledge, solutions to organizational performance problems or new
performance requirements will be specified more clearly and open to wider scrutiny via
the internet.
The AOOPA framework is one part of a more general framework that incorporates
analysis, change intervention and evaluation. The AOOPA software prototype is one part
of a model for an enterprise information technology system to support the more general
framework (see figure 1). In the enterprise IT system, analysis and evaluation knowledge,
and support solutions are organized into digitized components and shared among webenabled
communities of stakeholders. Performance analysis sets the baseline in
determining what roles exist in an organization, what goals they must achieve and how
the achievement of those goals can be measured. The packaging of this knowledge into
digital components that can be accessed online will help reduce the replication of effort
that can occur when disparate groups look at similar problems at different times and are
unaware of existing knowledge. Part of the reason for this situation is that there are no
centralized stores of such knowledge and it is usually communicated in the form of large
integrated documents in non-standard formats.
45 th Annual Conference of the International Military Testing Association
Pensacola, Florida, 3-6 November 2003