website, and navigates through a maze of phone prompts on the carrier's 1-800 help line. He caves in frustration and contacts a customer service representative to help him understand how much financial support he can expect from his family's health insurance policy.
The insurance representative retrieves the customer's information in the account database. He then launches a separate application to locate detailed policy information. Unable to find any specifics to address the customer's question, the representative searches through a help desk knowledge base, the company intranet, and eventually asks a more senior representative for his help in locating the relevant information.
Gloria Gery, an HPT consultant, felt that this inefficiency was unnecessary; senior staff should not have to be involved in finding information that should be at the fingertips of all call center representatives. As a training manager at Aetna in the late 1980s, Gery observed that training interventions were often used to teach workarounds that could have been avoided with carefully designed work interfaces and the introduction of support to assist employees when and where they needed it. As Gery argued in her 1991 eponymous book, rather than training employees beforehand to cope with inadequate tools and processes, it would be better for performance technologists to provide the workers with ''individualized online access to the full range of . . . systems to permit job performance.'' Gery called these performance interventions electronic performance support systems (EPSS).
Based on her initial work, Gery proposed three categories of performance support systems in a 1995 article (see Table .1). These three types differ in the level of integration between the support system and the users' work interface. For instance, external systems have minimal integration and therefore require the learners to stop what they are doing, find information in the EPSS, learn it, and then return to the task at hand. Meanwhile, intrinsic systems are so integrated into the work interface itself that users do not have to interrupt their workflow to learn. Gery described this as ''They simply feel that they are just doing the work.'' While Gery originally targeted EPSS as an intervention to address the alignment of software and associated procedures, a number of authors have since expanded the scope and potential application of performance support. Barry Raybould, for example, contended in a 2000 article for Performance Improvement that performance support is a continuum that includes constructs ranging from those embedded in the work itself, such as menus, dialogs, and onscreen instructions, to those that are separate from the work, including tutorials, computer-based training, peer support, and help desks.
In 2006's Handbook of Human Performance Technology, Steve Villachica and his colleagues proposed a broader definition of performance support to include ''an optimized body of integrated online and off-line methods and resources