There seems to be two schools of thought when it comes to assessment in an academic environment: there are the ‘knowledge testers’ and the ‘skills developers’. While both are right in their own way, it is only through combining their approaches that a sustainable and performance-enhancing assessment process emerges.

Some recent research shows that performance measurement is the best way to boost performance and effectiveness – and this confirms the empirical evidence that is so well understood by those of us involved in performance management and so little understood, it seems, by some in academic circles. To boost performance we first need to benchmark the current level and then monitor development as we apply performance-enhancing processes to it.

In the early stages of academic development – the primary and secondary school levels – the process of education is to provide the pupil with data which, when contextualised, can be converted to information and, to a great extent, the pupil is expected to remember this as it forms the knowledge base for their future adult life. There is little focus on ‘academic skills’ (the application of knowledge within context), as the pupil must first establish a foundation from which to work. The assessment process at this stage must, therefore, of necessity focus on measuring the retention of information – in other words, ‘test what they know’.

Towards the end of secondary school, usually at around the age of 16 years, the focus of the educational process has to change from pure information collection and retention towards the application of that information within a context so that it can become embedded as knowledge itself. This is the initial development of fundamental but rather basic academic skills. If the pupil is heading on towards tertiary education at a college or university, these fledgling academic skills are the foundation on which that tertiary educational career is based. Clearly, therefore, the assessment process also needs to change from the measurement of retained information to the measurement of academic skills such as research, academic essay writing, the process of analysis, the weighing up of the evidence and the drawing of safe conclusions.

When the pupil becomes a tertiary-level student, this process must continue so that by the time they graduate with a Bachelors degree they have fully mastered the academic skills and can apply them rigorously, consistently and successfully. The assessment process at the tertiary level must, of necessity, focus much less on the retention of information and much more on skills development and the student’s performance in applying them.

If the tertiary assessment process is properly developed then the results act as a feedback loop for the students so that they can determine what skills they are weak in and can focus on the development of those specific skills. Similarly, the results can act as a feedback loop for the lecturers so that they can modify their lecturing/teaching to ensure that students have developed the right skills by specific milestones in their tertiary educational progress. If lecturers take the time to analyse the students’ results, they can determine whether they are teaching the right things at the right time and in the right way. Perhaps we should acknowledge that when a student fails a course, a programme or a degree in a university environment this is as much a result of inappropriate teaching methodology and misaligned assessment processes as it is of student ability, or the lack thereof.

Unfortunately, many tertiary education curricula are modularised and the courses are independent and self-contained elements in which the lecturer has to deliver specific and defined bodies of information. This tends to apply pressure to the assessment process and push it in a retrograde direction so that it focuses on ‘information (or knowledge) retention’. Of course, such a process is easier from the lecturer’s perspective as it requires less time to mark and, in situations in which group sizes are large, this can be a critical if undesirable factor.

But this has an unhelpful outcome as far as the students are concerned: it pushes them into retrograde learning behaviours in which they ‘study for exams’ rather than develop their skills. This, in turn, adversely impacts their performance in terms of academic skill development. The result, as often seen in university environments today, is for students to be performing like school pupils and failing to achieve academic maturity. If this is not rectified, then the ultimate outcome will be students with a great deal of information in their minds but who lack the skills to apply it as knowledge – and thus they are of little use to future employers most of whom want to employ graduates who can think and analyse and draw conclusions rather than just ‘know a lot of stuff but not how to apply it’. Indeed, if this situation persists, tertiary educational institutes will be failing both their students and society as a whole and that is the start of a vicious downward spiral.

If the institutions are getting caught in this vicious spiral then the logical outcome will be that their graduating students will find it harder and harder to gain appropriate employment – they will not be ‘fit for purpose’ – the institutions’ reputation will suffer and they will find themselves facing a declining number of applications for places. In the end, courses, degree programmes and even institutions will have to close. This will then make for greater competition for places at the remaining institutions resulting in an overall decline in student numbers to the general detriment of society.

It is, therefore, in the enlightened self-interest of all tertiary education institutions to refocus their assessment procedures to ensure that graduating students have the essential academic skills and know how to apply them – this means that lecturers must resist the temptation to assess on a ‘retained information’ basis and must demand that progress is made in academic skills. One way this might be achieved is for the institutions to more clearly define what skills have to be practised and displayed at each level and to rigorously apply these standards and benchmarks. This will require a coordinated assessment strategy within the institution with the acquisition and delivery of these standard skills at each level being prerequisites for progress to the next level. An example of this is, of course, is the dissertation that most undergraduates have to write – failure in the dissertation module means a failure to graduate. Finding someway of doing this at each level in a degree programme must be an imperative if the assessment process is to drive performance and thus deliver the desired outcome of students well equipped for the outside world.

It seems that the management response to social network applications and other collaborative tools falls into two categories: ‘how can we use this to promote the business’, and ‘employees shouldn’t be accessing these sites during working hours’.

Using Enterprise 2.0 to assist in the promotional strategy is the subject of the final post on this subject and I’d like to try and deal with the myths and misconceptions that have grown up about employees having access to social networking sites during working hours. Based on some research down by my students, the vast majority of companies that allow or require their employees to have access to the internet for their work also ban them from accessing certain websites – usually the social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo, the video and photo sharing sites (YouTube and Flikr) and the microblogging sites (Twitter). The justification for this generalized ban on networking sites of one sort or another is that the employees will spend too much time on the sites when they should be working and this is to the detriment of their performance.

When asked whether they have evidence of this, managers usually respond with a variation of the statement “it’s obvious that’s what they would do, that’s why we ban it”. When specifically asked whether they have (a) allowed employees free access to networking sites, (b) have monitored their performance before offering the access and then after allowing access, and (c) then monitored performance after the access was disallowed, the answer is almost always ‘no’ to all three – usually followed by some justification along the lines of “why should we waste time checking something so obvious”.

Of course, their behaviour and actions are based firmly on an unchecked assumption for which there is not a shred of evidence. I suspect they would be shocked to discover that there is strong behavioural evidence that the ban is almost certainly having an adverse effect on the performance of their people. In fact, I don’t think they could bring themselves to accept they are wrong. Now, I am not so rash as to claim that they are provably wrong as I have not done the necessary ‘controlled’ research but the available empirical evidence does suggest that the hypothesis that ‘access to social networks actually boosts performance of employees’ could well be right.

This hypothesis is based upon a simple, well known and well understood principle of performance management – one that is used for enhancing performance of athletes, performers, actors, musicians, students and many others but one that the business world has failed to grasp: that increasing the levels of performance is based on repetition of the performance interspersed with periods of rest and recuperation and that it is these periods of R&R that enable the lessons learned to become embedded and reproducible. We all know that sustained high performance is both physically and mentally impossible for very good physiological and psychological reasons.

If this is then applied to the performance of employees, it becomes obvious that if we want long-term high performance it is essential that employees be allowed (even encouraged) to take a break from their current activity to allow the brain to process the activity just completed and to ‘re-charge’. I suspect that if performance was tracked correctly during the working day then it would form what Charles Handy called a sigmoid curve with clear peaks and troughs and it is during these troughs that employees need a ‘change’ from what they are doing. Currently, they are likely to use the time to go for a ‘natural break’ or grab a cup of coffee, and only when the brain has processed the previous period’s activity will they start again. So, in fact no one delivers a steady performance and to provide a needed ‘change’ to encourage them to take a break and then get back on track is enlightened self-interest.

Frankly, the wisdom of crowds on this (or is that herd instinct) is wrong on whether allowing access to social networking sites will damage performance and they could be equally wrong on another aspect: that if access is granted, employees will spend too much time on non-productive activity. I have to say that when access if first allowed, this is probably true but after a short while the employees will self-limit their usage and there will be minimal disruption.

In addition, by granting access to social networks, the company would be demonstrating their trust in their employees and it would give the employees a feeling of empowerment and this is, in the longer term, the foundation for a vastly improved performance. The problem is that it is longer-term and it does mean that managers will have to trust and empower their employees and not just pay lip service to the notion.

Finally, there is empirical evidence that enterprises should adopt their own social network application and use it as the interface between the employee and the intranet. This is a powerful tool for increasing collaboration and communication within the company and becomes a useful tool for accessing the tacit information that is embedded in the brains of the employees.

Frankly, it appears to be enlightened self-interest for enterprises to adopt social network programs and to allow access to social networking sites. And unless there is valid and reliable evidence and proof to the contrary, claiming it would damage performance seems like hearsay rather than reality and is more a reflection of management funk than careful thought. What is for certain, however, is that engaging with Enterprise 2.0 tools is going to require a whole new management paradigm!!

If you would like to engage in a discussion with Alasdair White on this subject, then please feel free to email him. In the mean time, a final post on this subject will look at the dangers and realities of using social networking tools for the delivery of marketing communications.

The overriding problem facing all enterprises when it comes to information systems and ICT is the assumption that they are necessary and one should be able to use all the applications and technology available. The truth is rather different: ICT and its associated applications are simply tools that are best suited, in the first degree, to carrying out repetitious, rule-based and essentially transactional activities with a greater degree of accuracy and untiring attention than can be provided by humans. Technology is about achieving orders-of-magnitude improvement in productivity.

The second degree of usage stems from the technology’s ability to support applications which allow the user to manipulate data in small or large tranches. This ability finds its place in spreadsheets, word processing and graphic design programs. These activities are much less transactional and much more knowledge-based than those in the first degree of usage.

For the majority of enterprises, these two degrees of usage form the primary usage and application of ICT and other usages are a distraction and, possibly, a hindrance. For these enterprises, Web 2.0 is not something they can make good use of and, beyond email and an informative (or possibly, an interactive) website, they should not expend scare resources of time or money on considering Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

Where Enterprise 2.0 technologies come to the fore is when an enterprise can re-caste its operating or structural model to include networked activities. By this I do not mean simply having email or a website, but to genuinely need to network so as to operate. Dispersed Structural Models and their further development, the Deconcentrated Structural Model, have as an operating principle a number of operations that need to exchange data and/or are not co-located. These, then, require ‘networking’ to achieve operating efficiency and as soon as that happens, and especially when it happens in non-co-located structures, the tools that make up Web 2.0 technologies and can be applied as Enterprise 2.0 applications come into their own.

As mentioned in a previous post, Enterprise 2.0 is about communication and even more about collaboration and I contend that there are few enterprises that can really make good use of them. Having conducted some empirical research in enterprises within Europe and Asia, I am of the opinion that Enterprise 2.0 is really only useful when those involved in the enterprise’s internal collaboration reach a critical mass or are not co-located. Quite what that critical mass is is not something I have yet determined but reviewing the efficiency of teams leads me to think that there has to be more than seven people involved in a collaboration (or perhaps five if spread across a number of locations) before using electronic collaboration applications makes sense.

Beyond a critical mass of users, it is also necessary to consider whether the users are sufficiently attuned with using electronic collaboration tools. There is strong empirical evidence that suggests that those who are aged in their forties and above (the majority of managerial-level employees) are less than fully committed to ICT as a collaboration tool and find that engaging with the technologies places them well outside their comfort zones. They are happy enough to use email and some may feel comfortable with EMS (enterprise messenger systems) and up-dating central databases but microblogging, social networking applications, and wikis are well beyond where they want to be. Of course, there are a wide range of enterprises in which usage of such technologies is culturally affirmed, but I contend that the actual number of such is actually very small as a percentage of the total number of enterprises.

In the next posting on this subject I’ll look at Enterprise 2.0 applications and their impact on performance – and especially the ‘perceived’ negative impact on performance – and the resulting need for a new management paradigm.