Back to Fund-amentals: The Business Realities of Funding for Performance Support Projects    

Although electronic performance support systems (EPSSs) sound like exciting projects to technical communicators and instructional designers, many proposed EPSSs stay on the drawing boards because the organizations for whom they were designed choose not to fund them. In general, EPSSs require more up-front investment than traditional documentation and training. That additional expense, sometimes increasing up-front expenses by several times, could be enough to stop a project unless the designers can explain how the organization can benefit from this additional investment. In fact, most often, these organizations decline to fund the proposed EPSSs because the financial benefits of the EPSSs are not explained, and so the proposed EPSS is perceived to exceed the cost of designing and developing it. In other words, the businesses do not perceive that the EPSS is a good investment of their money.

Driscoll, Margaret and Colin Hynes. Technical Communication Online (2002). Articles>Content Management>Proposals