Electronic Performance Support Systems - Evaluating and Implementing IT Based Training in Organizations
Year: 2011
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Many organizations are challenged with upgrades in their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems and to cope with continuous change.Some organizations therefore seek to invest in Information Technology based training that can reduce cost and speed of training and learning.This study analyses and evaluates investments in Electronic Performance Support Systems (EPSS) that can help organizations to cope with continuous change.The study has been conducted with a case study design at [COMPANY], where Customer Support is facing an upcoming upgrade of their ERP system SAP in February 2011.Currently, [COMPANY] utilizes user-guides to train their employees to cope with SAP upgrades but find this method too costly and time consuming.Thus, they requested recommendations for how they should invest in IT based training tools, called EPSS.There exist an amount of EPSS on the market of which the researchers have chosen to evaluate four.The first one is traditional word based user-guides and the three others are EPSS that are integrated with the ERP or other applications.These three systems are called SAP Productivity Pak (SPP), SupportPoint and Tata Interactive Systems and vary greatly in functionality and layout.The study consists of three research questions that are structurally linear but have been studied in an iterative manner throughout the process.Feature Selection identifies what features in EPSS that are most valuable for the overall performance of the system.Product Evaluation evaluates and compares the relative performance of the EPSS based on the identified features.Finally, Product Implementation identifies risks with implementing the EPSS, but also gives recommendations on how these risks could be handled.The three research questions have been answered by using triangulation of research methods where demonstrations, own trials, observations and interviews have been used to gather the desired information of each EPSS.The long-term recommendation is that [COMPANY] should invest in SupportPoint since this EPSS outperforms all the others.However, a short-term recommendation to start using SPP is given as well.This is since, even though SPP is not implemented yet, [COMPANY] already owns an enterprise license of this EPSS.This short-term solution is motivated by the short time that is left until the next upgrade of SAP, together with the long time that is related to brining in a new product and supplier, such as SupportPoint.The implementation recommendations given for any of these EPSS are much similar and are mainly related to organizational issues rather than product specific issues.First of all we would like to thank our supervisor Magnus Holmén at Chalmers University of Technology.He took on the challenge to supervise us even though we at the time were living in two different cities in Australia, Sydney and Gold Coast, a long way from Gothenburg.Holmén has been a valuable resource for us and provided input in critical phases of our study.Secondly, we want to thank our supervisor at [COMPANY] in Melbourne, Andrea Richards.Richards has given us all her support even in the toughest of times.The long distance supervising has been characterized by VoIP meetings that sometimes caused frustration as the technology refused to cooperate.Without Richards patience and commitment, this project would have been much harder to finalize.Another valuable individual has been Andrew Selkirk at [COMPANY] in Stockholm whose engagement has helped us during late evenings filled with technical problems.We are also grateful for all employees at [COMPANY] that participated in observations and interviews.Lastly, we want to thank Panviva and Tata Interactive Systems that provided us with information about their products.As a final comment we want to stress that we are pleased that the work with this report went so smoothly due to the long-distance between Holmén, Richards and not at least ourselves.
Authors: Mikaela Lundqvist, Henrik Pettersson
Language: English
Subfield: Management Information Systems
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2136684811