Back to basics

There are a lot of year-end lists being posted and one thing that’s been on many of them is Web 2.0. This is an interesting meme that has now reached the mainstream. I’ve been drawn to many sites and services that fall into the broad category, and after almost a year of Web 2.0, AJAX and all the others I’m frankly a little tired of the ongoing Deep Thoughts on the subject. Maybe I’m being obtuse but I think that the signal to noise ratio is off on this; one of these days I’ll have to get a look at the Gartner Hype Cycle on it just to satisfy my curiosity. Here’s my simple manifesto: Web 2.0 is a very useful set of tools representing an intriguing approach to interaction design, so let’s get on with it.

The intranet prototype I’ve been doing these focus groups on uses Web 2.0 constructs and approaches at the transaction and interface layers. What I’ve observed in every country I’ve been to is that Just Plain Folks are completely comfortable with using Web 2.0 constructs and interfaces.I have 2 cities to go, and I don’t expect to find anything unusually different by the time I’m done. The revolution is over and we’re the better for it.

Speaking of the prototype, it struck me this morning that degrees of hype and the distractions of shiny new things can make us lose sight of fundamentals. Case in point, I drew the original design concepts for our Employee Portal in the summer of 1998.

Back then we were in the heat of Web 1.0 and the future was going to be amazing! But…couldn’t do it. Why? We were missing a most humble enabler

Vote For The Recruiting.com 2005 Best Blog Awards

The voting has opened at recruiting.com’s 2005 Best Blog awards. Vote here – hopefully for Systematic Viewpoints, or any of the great bloggers that have been nominated, and thanks for supporting the community.

About Systematic Viewpoints

I worked with HR systems at one of the world’s largest corporations. These thoughts are my own, however. Now I’m looking to focus on Usability and interactions. Here’s the fine print:

This blog site is published by and reflects the personal views of it’s author, in his individual capacity. It does not necessarily represent the views of his employer or internal clients, and is not sponsored or endorsed by them. The purpose of this blog site is to assist in dissemination of information about enterprise HR system deployment, but no representation is made about the accuracy of the information. The information contained in this blog site is provided only as general information for education purposes, and blog topics may or may not be updated subsequent to their initial posting.

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Muchas Gracias

This morning I arrived home on an overnight flight from Bogota. It’s been a busy day catching up, capped by the very pleasant surprise that I’ve been nominated in recruiting.com‘s Best HR Blog 2005 category. Vote here!

A tip of the cap to good folks at recruiting.com and Jobster for this event and thanks to the kind person who nominated this blog. I’m truly excited and looking at the other nominees, I see that I’m in great company. The fact that we’re sharing thoughts and ideas is it’s own reward.

More about my travels after dinner!

Focus!

If I thought I’d be able to take it easy and catch up when I got back from travelling, I was sadly mistaken. There’s been a blur of activity, a lot having to do with our recrutiment workstream. They’ve been working to get Taleo out as a global standard for internal and external postings. Again, due to the size and complexity of our organization, deploying any global standard is a hige challenge. Recognizing that, the team was charged with creating something that links to not only Taleo but any de facto job board used within the company. I’m not confident that we even have a definitive list.

To the horror of the workstream lead I proposed that we proceed with a target state definition of an integrated career management environment and use that undoubtedly compelling vision as leverage to convince people around the company that the heavy lifting and pain that it will take to adopt this particular standard will be worth it in the end. I understand their pain, as an escaped technologist I know it would be in their intrests to simplify, not amplify. What I’m fighting is the emergence of a fat new silo created by lashing together a bunch of old silos. In any case I think she ultimately agreed so long as she can deliver something in March to satisfy the basic request. But now I have her attention while I create a picture of a critical part of the overall target state for self-service users.

Noted Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox post “Why Ajax Sucks (Most of the Time)” I’m in the love/hate camp with regard to Jakob. On the one hand I very nearly engaged him to speak to senior management when I was creating the business case for the latest version of the corporate intranet, on the other hand I sometimes find his positions unnecessarily orthodox/purist. In this case there are some spot-on issues – I watched focus group users struggle with some of the Ajax elements in the intranet prototype, especially around the use of the back button. This is something that needs fixing, like it or not. That said, I believe that the Ajax approach has much goodness, especially as it will apply to a thoughful self-service environment.

I’ve also been asked to put together a short paper for internal use on Fusion as a follow up to Open World. Given the current state, that should be brief.

Sunday I travel yet again, we’re taking our road show to Colombia, I come back Tuesday and then out again Thursday for Dallas and Mexico City. That’s the end of the intranet prototype tour, and I’m glad for it. I love to get out now and again but I’m just plain tired.

It’s a systematic world

Double Dubs has rebranded his excellent blog as systematicHR. We’ve agreed to confuse the world with our similar urls, because it just feels right.

Back Home

I’ve made it back to New York. Tokyo is a fascinating city, I enjoyed it very much. We stayed until Sunday morning, which gave us some time to sight see on Saturday and get a bit of the flavor of the city. On Friday we ran two intranet usability sessions which were very much on a par with all the others to date. I must say that I’ve experienced far less regional variation in the response to our prototype and types of issues raised than I anticipated. The anecdotal evidence points to people (at least those within my company) being more similar than different. While I treasure differences around the world it’s assuring to see that in some way the web has enabled us to provide people tools that can be used with a degree of consistency globally.

I was able to chat up one of our senior HR people and some of his team, although it was not a full a session as I’d hoped. But just being there and meeting them ensures that future telephone exchanges will be more productive. In mid December we’ll cover some sites in Latin America which will wrap up our ‘four corners’ tour. For my part I see that our HR self-service deployment has greater complexity than I’d realized. At one level we have enough flexibility in our systems to allow for local variation but there will be many challenges as we go along regardless. I wonder if it’s ever possible for an organization our size to move to truly global standards? I believe it would have to be more of a command-and-control environment, and I’m not aware of many multinationals that successfully operate in that manner. In any case there’s much to do and now I have a few more personal connections with which to do business.

Across Asia

I’m now in Tokyo, following a 24-hour stay in Singapore. We held 2 usability sessions for the intranet and I spent the time in between the sessions with HR. We have a greater self-service deployment in Asia than EMEA, and the folks I met with are keenly interested in doing more. The discussions centered around how to promote self-service when it’s not mandated, which translated means pulling the plug on other channels. They were interested to know what supporting communications plans we were using in North America to promote self-service. I contrasted Asia with North America in that Asia has typically provided a higher level of service through their generalists and service centers compared to NA. So the challenge is more correctly how to promote self service when it’s clearly a step down from the existing channels? I maintain that the existing ‘solutions’ including the one I manage, are missing the mark. I see more and more clearly the need to create a custom, process-driven interface to the multiple systems we use. This runs counter to our common wisdom of ‘buy, not build’ but I don’t see anything that can present these services in a coherent manner.

After a fantastic seafood dinner at an open-air restaurant on the South China Sea, we boraded our flights to Tokyo, our last stop on this outing. I’ve napped and hopefully will be awake for dinner tonight. It’s November 24th in Tokyo, Thanksgiving day for the US. Our Japanese offices host a Thanksgiving dinner for American expats and visitors, which I find charming – and I’m greatly amused that my first proper meal in Japan will be a traditional Thanksgiving turkey dinner!

Upgrades and travel

As I noted below we went through with a Tools upgrade to our PeopleSoft Portal a week back. As soon as our North American users got to work on Monday morning performance took a severe hit, logins took in excess of 2-4 minutes if you could get in at all. We’ve been running at capacity for a while while additions to the operating environment are put into place. Load testing in advance of the upgrade showed that we would lose about 10% of our capacity thanks to the larger code base of the newer version of the Tools. I don’t yet have a post-mortem analysis of what went wrong, I’ve heard a few things from my technology team but it’s not a final verdict yet.

With that in play, I’ve started my usability tour. On Wednesday I was in the London where I spent time with HRs for the UK and the technology team that runs our EMEA systems. These went well, and the HRs are quite hungry for self-service although not as delivered by PeopleSoft. To hear their management speak of it there are still data quality challenges and integration issues that keep them from giving a go-ahead. I see where Michael has posed a question about data quality on the discussion forum, certainly for us it’s a topic that arouses passions, although I’m not yet close enough to it to speak in an informed manner.

Dinner and a few pints followed with my tech colleagues, and I had a few hours on Thursday morning to run around and visit some of the classics in London: Big Ben, Covent Garden, Parliament, Picadilly.

That evening I met my colleagues from New York in Dusseldorf. Friday was back-to-back meetings. In the morning through lunch I worked a focus group of German employees on a new Intranet prototype. After a hearty lunch I spent time with one of the senior HR people for Germany and one of his staff. Unlike the UK, they see self-service as a farther goal. The main challenges for them are the number of manual processes they still support and the need to complete a project to iumprove data feeds to and from their payroll vendor. They’re looking to rework their country HR Intranet site, and I hope to work with them to get the content under a management system so we can work towards personalized delivery.

My colleagues and I have stayed the weekend, sightseeing and eating. The food is wonderful but shall we say robust. The weather has been cold and misty, but we’re managing fine.

Tomorrow one of us goes home to NY, and I go to Singapore with the other. I’ll update after that.

Back to business

I’ve been in London and Dusseldorf this week, and having some problems logging in. With Michael’s help that seems to be right again, so I’ll gather my thoughts later in a followup post.