In a keynote address at the recent WinWriters conference, Jared Spool spoke about bridging the knowledge gap. I found his perspective to be interesting and useful. According to Jared perspective, there is a gap between what people know and what they may need to perform a task or achieve a personal goal. He suggested that there are two basic ways of bridging that gap. Passive devises are things like online help or learning systems where the person must read and comprehend to acquire sufficient knowledge to achieve the task or goal.
Active devises are things like wizards in software that guide a person through the process.
We can also use a combination of these devises. What all this tends to suggest is that to design a performance support strategy we need to understand the context of the task and how people are best able to acquire the knowledge they need to achieve it. When we focus on the reuse of content I think we run the danger of compromising to the technology and the content developers and in the process not meeting the needs of the performer.