Assessing the Impact of Information Assistance Systems on a Worker Level - A Pre-Study towards an Evaluation Framework

Abstract

A growing amount of information assistance systems is imple-mented within production environments as simple tasks are increasingly automated and more complex knowledge work is required by the staff. However, considerations to implement those technologies have mainly focused on productivity measures on the work process level, so far, putting aside hu-man factors concerning the affected workers. In our paper, we design and conduct a laboratory experiment to systematically assess both these aspects while using three different kinds of information assistance systems for the same assembly task. The insights from this pre-study build the basis for a first concept of a generalized evaluation framework to assess the impact of any kind of information assistance system on both productivity measures and human factors on the worker level. In the end, the role of such an evaluation framework for companies in the midst of technology implementation processes is considered to support its application in practice.