Upgrades

My technology team is a week away from moving a Tools upgrade for the PeopleSoft Portal to production. With 300,000 users and 18 integrated applications, it’s been quite a dance. The toughest part is getting a green zone when we can absolutely take the Portal (and most of the integrated apps) down and make the changes, then rouse tech and business people in the middle of the night on a weekend to test and approve. Since we’re global there’s only an hour and a half during per week that is outside of someone’s normal working hours, which of course isn’t enough for this task. But this is Comp season, so lots of people are working weekends. Overall, it’s not pretty.

Next we want to upgrade the application itself from 8.4 to 8.8 or 8.9. I wonder what happens after that – Fusion, I guess – so that could be our last major PeopleSoft upgrade.

Portal squared

Twice in as many working days I’ve been asked about the relationship between my company’s plans for an enterprise information portal and the HR portal. I typically respond that they are complimentary, the services portal brings access to applications (doing things) and the information portal brings access to information (learning/finding things) and the interesting part happens where the content is married intelligently to the application. Clearly there’s a growing appetite to see these work together.

Logistsics for my travel continue to be ironed out. The actual reason I’m travelling is related to another project, so even though I’m going to get added value by taking time in each location to work with employees and HRs I need to makes sure I’ve included local management or I risk alienating them with an “I’m from Corporate…and I’m here to help” type of approach. Again, I’d really appreciate hearing what you’d do about either getting or giving advice on how people of all types manage HCM applications and services.

User Experience

We’re deep into self service. I’m now responsible for the user experience. We use many applications – PeopleSoft HRMS, internally developed applications for compensation and talent, other vendor’s products for recruiting, time and attendance and more. There aren’t many standard processes. There are multiple service centers. Is this a headache or a green field?

It looks like I’m going to travel to a number of cities in the UK, Germany, Japan, Singapore, Australia, Latin America and the US to run focus groups and usability sessions with HRs, managers and employees. I’d like to hear what you’d like someone like me to ask. What would you like to have changed? What should we fix? What should we never, never do?

Thanks for your input!

Business as usual?

At some point last night I heard that there was a “credible threat” to the NYC subway system. I commute on suburban rails to midtown Manhattan where I take the subway downtown. This morning as I drove to the station I considered taking an alternate route through Brooklyn, but I ended up following my usual pattern. This made me wonder about my motivations. I’m not particularly moved by the sentiment expressed as: “If you stop/change your daily routines then the terrorists have won”. I thought of changing my route to avoid high-traffic (and presumably high-value to a terrorist) stations to mitigate my personal risk, yet I have a growing notion that like burglars, terrorists will avoid areas of obvious enforcement. This morning when I arrived at my terminal and entered the subway I saw no visible police presence. At my end stop on the subway there was a cluster of police officers but not the more heavily armed Atlas force nor the National Guard and Army personnel sent in to augment the effort.

Where does this leave me? I don’t consider myself a fatalist but I do need to show up at work and I either ride trains or lay out an enormous amout of money and time to drive into the city and park. It seems that many of us have reached the conclusion – well, what else can I do? We take risks every day in our lives and have become inured to most of them. And still, the images of London and Madrid are following me today.

More on Lifetime Support

Third-party companies are seeing opportunities to provide better support for companies considering Oracle’s new Extended and Lifetime support models, as described in InformationWeek.

Monday morning quarterbacking

Back in New York! So what are my after thoughts? First, the size of this event was challenging, the general estimate I heard was 37,000 attendees. That made initial introductions a little like speed dating – “Are you Oracle? PeopleSoft? JD Edwards? Apps? DB?” It made it hard to figure out who to network with. I was thinking about ways to make it easier for us. At the trade show, EMC (the storage and enterprise content management company) was handing out big, numbered pins that people were wearing like license plates. The hook was that somewhere out there was another attendee with the same number. Find them and win something! That made me think that Oracle should put RFI tags in the show badges that would light up when someone with a similar customer profile approached. Or maybe just color code them somehow – keep it simple.

If I didn’t say it already, I’ll say it again – the messages were remarkably consistent:

• Oracle is moving to standards-based platforms and products
• Oracle will provide flexibility and choice between their and other company’s products when architecting business solutions
• Fusion will be best-of-breed from their entire product portfolio
• We’ll support you as long as you want until Fusion, and even after that
• Oracle has a laser focus on the customer’s needs

I have little direct background with Oracle, they were always a commodity component (the standard database layer) in my applications. So I’m taking their claims at face value until proven otherwise. With my arms folded, I guess. I took away some good connections with individuals who are doing the same things, that I can share ideas with. And for all the good messages and rock-star keynotes what I ultimately I saw for the here and now were basic, incremental changes to the HRMS, EPM and Portal applications, and a lot of hesitant customers wondering how this will play out. If they do it well, we could get a lot closer to the kind of systems and usability that we hoped we would get (and usually didn’t) when we purchased PeopleSoft apps. If not, I expect a lot of folks will take them up on their ‘lifetime support’ deal.

Now it’s back to day-to-day efforts. Today it’s getting a plan and support together for rounding up some standalone intranet sites that provide mandatory training and attestations and getting them into a LMS and front-ending it through the portal.

Thursday

Sorry for the delay in posting. Thursday was my last day in San Francisco, and the first day I sat through an entire session. It was “Oracle’s strategic direction for Portal technologies for Peoplesoft applications” run by Rich Manalang. He provided a decent overview of where the direction appears to be heading –

Wednesday

I did get a hot soak in last night and my tired legs feel much better today, and it’s a good thing because today was the day to put on our ties and act like senior managers at the full-day Leader’s Circle session at the Marriott. Breakfast and lunch provided more opportunities to meet some folks and compare notes. I’ve collected a lot of business cards on this trip.

Tuesday

Connectivity has returned:

This was something of a play day. As part of the Leader’s Circle, networking events took most of the day. Choices during the day were to play golf at Half Moon Bay or baseball at CFS Park, home of the San Francisco Giants. I know less of golf than I do of baseball, so I opted for the latter. It seemed like it would be cool to hang out on the field and the dugout of a major-league stadium.

When I saw that for some guys this would be a bit more serious – at least one fellow brought bats – I decided to participate as a spectator and let them have their glory. There was food and drink, tours of the park including clubrooms, batting and pitching cages, the broadcast booth, etc. and an overall relaxed, genial atmosphere. Had some good conversations and took the first bus back.

I spent about an hour drilling into some detail on the Portal with Rich Manalang and talked with some more of the vendors than yesterday. I had to leave at 4:30 to make a round trip to my hotel to get changed for the evening events.

First I spent somewhat less than an hour at a party hosed by Accenture. I met up with one of my favorite consultants, met his colleagues and was around long enough to see my colleague from Singapore. But I had to leave for the remainder of the Leader’s Circle dinner. I had missed cocktails and the keynote speech which was given by Bob Dole. I’m told he was quite good and gave a self-deprecating humorous talk. I was at a reserved table where I had good conversations with a fellow from an HR services provider. After dinner we had our pictures taken with the senator and I’m back on the BART to call it a night. I’d really like to soak my feet in a hot tub right about now.

Stymied

I lost connectivity at my hotel last night and didn’t have the time to figure out why. I’m posting this with my Blackberry’s browser while I wait for Larry Ellison’s keynote. It seems the Blackberry browser must have a character limit in fields, because when I tried to paste the text I wrote on the BART home last night it errored out. So stay tuned for Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s reports.