By any other name

Try as I might, I just couldn’t get a full day off on Friday. I declared a ‘Green zone for maintenance’, a bit of humor meaning I was headed to my physician and dentist for checkups. In between those stops and a dozen other things that piled up a a lot of mail came into my Blackberry. I expected a certain volume because we’re preparing for a killer week. We’re expecting very high traffic through the systems – 2-3 times more than we can handle – and it’s been ugly when we hit our peaks. Various parts of the infrastructure just fall over and nobody is entirely sure why. Our friends from Oracle are on hand to see it for their own eyes and help us figure out what exactly is blowing up.

But what caught my eye was a message from the folks who are trying to pull our multiple LMSs into a single global instance. They’ve hit a snag in the fact that we send everyone to the ‘Employee Portal’ when in fact not everyone who is a worker is an employee. Now, this isn’t a new phenomena, and in an earlier time I had to work with HR Legal to get some carefully worded language explaining that non-employees may be using this system for very limited reasons. As I recall that was driven by certain countries’ Works Councils. Upshot – they’re recommending we rename the Portal, removing all vestiges of the word “Employee”.

Now, my wife is an attorney in Tech and Intellectual Property and between sharing stories with her and my own experiences I’m not blind to the legal perspectives on semantics and implied meanings. But this is getting a bit fussy IMHO. I hope we can resolve this with another go at the disclaimer language. I’d love to hear if anyone else has dealt with this and how you may have resolved it before I go back in on Monday and take up the Good Fight.

In the meantime we’re expecting a minor blizzard here in the northeast US, so after I’ve dug out I’ll check back in tomorrow afternoon. Thanks, all!