Should we worry about the children?

My ‘conference friend’ Rich has a cool new job – good stuff, Rich! I started to reply to something he wrote but it got so long I figured I’d better put it here instead.

Read Our Future Colleagues Have MySpace Accounts for the context first.

Rich, If you’re a dinosaur…I must be petrified. New grads coming into the workplace are closer in age to my children than to myself. My kids (13 and 11) are growing up wifi; not just laptops but PSPs, Sidekicks and Nintendo DS and the observations about handwriting, spelling, jargon – are on point, but in my opinion it’s more reflective of our struggle to adapt, just like the dinosaurs.

Younger folks have always integrated technology and information pipelines better than older generations. Further, If I can use my kid’s educations are any kind of benchmark, they’re getting a lot more knowledge and academic challenges thrown at them at an earlier age than we did.

The ability of any given youth to function socially still boils down to the individual level. My daughter would appear to be a poster child for ADD-style overload. She’ll be texting in her room with the TV, laptop and sometimes video iPod (with one earbud inserted) going. Yet she got amazing grades last quarter and is a social butterfly with a large circle of friends. My son is a different archetype – he’s much more of a loner, with few friends but deep passions that he explores fully offline and online. One day he casually told me he corrected the Wikipedia entry on a book series he was reading – he’s the 11 year old. He couldn’t understand why I was amazed at that.

I do see one commonality that worries me, it’s less about social engagement and getting out than it is about our increasing inability to be alone with ourselves. I see people filling up time that was formerly contemplative with some other form of connection – cell phones. Better than 50% of people I see driving, walking dogs, out for a stroll are on their phones. I don’t fear a future where life is experienced from behind a screen but one where nobody is comfortable being alone with their thoughts.

Group Topic – Does HR add value?

Thomas has asked us to give our perspective on a Deloitte/Economist survey indicating that a majority of business executives do not see HR as playing a role in business strategy.

No big surprise in my experience. I see a lack of understanding between the HR and business management worlds as articulated by Jason, Evil HR Lady and others. I agree that HR needs to think and speak in business terms. If there’s any comfort in shared pain, it’s not just HR that has this challenge, IT is often feeling disconnected while business management feels that IT just don’t understand what they need. Both functions end up being treated as commodities as a result, boxed in by management’s experience as to where they can extract some value from the functions.

How did this happen? It depends on the culture of an organization. Sometimes it was never there, sometimes it was skewered by solutions that were more painful than the prior methods, where transformation meant laying off generalists and claiming benefits realization on paper, while managers became less effective because they had to get out in the rain and pump their own gas under the banner of self-service.

I find business heads desperately want to understand what motivates their workforces and they tell me they need to be more agile and reactive to changing market and global conditions, only to find that policies are too slow to be changed, data is of poor quality and hard to manipulate, and HRs are simply being reactive. I see examples where workforce planning is at best an annual mechanical exercise, lacking in meaningful business dialogue that could result in partnership.

What’s an HR to do? Get out of your office and understand your business. Know the financials inside out, know what each leader is expected to add to the bottom line. Shadow managers, have long discussions with the business and sector heads. Get in their heads and under their skin. Then decide from there whether you can help them. Demonstrate your value in the P&L language they speak. They’re the bosses, and they won’t give you a seat at the table, it must be earned.

Are they kidding?

The Taleo blog reports on a report from Money Magazine on the best jobs in America for people looking for change in their careers. They present 4 meta categories that resemble daytime television programming: Young & Restless, Returning Parent (they really mean “Mom” but that wouldn’t be very PC), From the Military to the private sector, and my favorite – Over 50. I have thoughts about the selections, especially (ahem) the Over 50 category but the real issue for me is the coarse-grained categorization. Given the tensions of the journalistic format I can understand the desire to make this snappy.

What really surprises me is that this same broad brush is picked up by Taleo:

“For recruiters, this is a nice piece of research to help target a specific candidate pool. Looking for Sales Reps? Find moms looking to return to the workplace. Need a Field Service Engineer? Identify someone retiring from the military, and so on.”

“Proactive, targeted candidate sourcing and the use of automated solutions can go a long way towards filling open positions with talented employees who will stay with your organization.” Link.

That’s targeting? This is the opposite of what Enterprise 2.0 promises. We shouldn’t use our tools for incredibly broad generalizations that slot candidates based on generalized demographics. These are important categorizations but by themselves they have no more depth than a sound bite. Being in the over 50 category and coming off my fresh experience in the market I’m offended when I’m contacted for positions that have no bearing on my experience or career trajectory but are the result of some sloppy match based on a single data point about me. At least no one suggested (yet) that I should consider teaching, pension administration or medical records coding – all great choices for an Old Guy, apparently.

Thomas should send Taleo his copy of the Cluetrain Manifesto.

Department of Redundancy Department

TechCrunch reports on Useless Account, an amusing little bauble that gently spoofs the dubious value of account creation. It brings to mind a similar reality, that in our mixed environment we drive our users to create profiles out the wazoo. I take the unpopular opinion that we don’t have a real golden source for individual’s profile info. Of course, the HRMS is the main entry point for employee data, which then feeds the data warehouse which turns around and feed anything else that is interested. But who am I today?

• If I’m a candidate, I’ll create a profile in recruiting system
• If I land a position I’m asked to create an application
• If I’m an officer I’ll create a Talent profile
• If I want internal mobility I go to recruiting and create a profile
• I’m regularly asked if my directory info is correct and sent to update it as necessary
• If I use the LMS I have a learning profile

It goes on and on…is there a set of shared, core data? Of course. Could they be merged? As of now, it could get ugly. Each “view” has nuances that merging them would potentially destroy. Yet it’s reasonable to expect that I shouldn’t have to do that same data entry bit over and over again.

We’re thinking about creating a new environment – for current workers it pulls in the proper bits from the various systems and lets me use them like Lego to build new composite profiles. For new hires it’s the starting point, a core set of ‘About Me’ data in an interface full of webby ease of use that hides the complexity and provides a way to peel off a copy of my basic info and model it for the intended purpose. I could keep those versions so I can reuse them as needed. This would live in the intranet context and not project a message that says “I’m an HR application, run away!”. Right now it’s a whiteboard exercise, to be followed up with a few mockups and ROI exercises to see if it floats.

Chaos theory

In the last few weeks the year-end pace has picked up. Everyone I speak to at work is very busy, and a lot of it is unplanned activity. Many of my colleagues sense chaos and distraction, but I perceive connection. In my direct line of work I’ve written charter documents for a couple of small but strategic initiatives around our organization. My seeding of using BPM as our foundation is beginning to win converts with the right influence. Talk is about organizing around business services rather than application teams. My roadmap for 2007 is heavily weighted towards end-to-end user experience. Yesterday a colleague showed me a mashup of our locations in a Google map.

In my matrixed world, our CEO has expressed interest in blogging and online chats and I’ve been asked to help shape that effort. I also asked to step into a situation where an executive had a bad experience with a webcast we produced. I’ve joined our enterprise collaboration architecture domain.

Something is happening – all these strange attractors have a theme, and true to chaos theory they don’t know they’re going to coalesce. Thomas Otter would say that it’s getting very enterprisey around here, and Andrew McAfee would smell the Enterprise 2.0 goodness of the ingredients. I’m going to take a try at writing the Grand Unified Theory. It’ll be interesting to see which predictions come to pass.

On Friday my family and I go on a 2 week holiday. Best to all, be happy and safe!

UI, UX and findability

Amazingly, I now have a rollup of over 30 internal apps with target dates for migration to the standardized UI. Getting there was easier than we feared, most of the development teams were fairly receptive and the pushbacks could be anticipated – resources, overloaded work slates and budget. My team is central and funded as an expense so we were able to position ourselves as additional, no-cost resources per project. The timing issue got easier when we made it clear that we were happy to work in existing release schedules and if they needed all of 2007 to get there, that was fine so long as it wasn’t open-ended.

Next stop, another 10 vendor applications. My mileage will clearly vary. I need to spend some serious time analyzing the Portal upgrade approach and coming to a go/no-go on that.

This Tuesday I participated in a World Usability Day panel on managing the usability function within the enterprise. I met a few folks from my own organization and we are trying to maintain a dialogue. This is an emerging theme, last week I was contacted by another person internally who said she’d been trying to find me (not me personally, but whoever does what I do) for that past two years. A community of four has emerged.

Findability in the enterprise typically sucks and it’s compounded by the timidity that we have about allowing people to manage information about themselves and their expertise and even further repressed by lack of rewards for sharing knowledge. Social networking is the only way to manage this right now, but I’m hopeful that we can leverage blogs and wikis to create sturctures that help lubricate the process. But creating community in an organization is hard. Anyone with thoughts about that? Please share them, I need help with this.

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!

Deck the halls

Mostly off topic…my life has been inundated with PowerPoint. Starting with a summary presentation of the strategy meetings I detailed last month, one by one they increased and soon I was juggling decks from all sides, including from my school-age children.

I’m reasonably adept at PowerPoint, and I believe that in the right hands it can do some very cool things. Musician David Byrne has done some interesting work using it as an artistic medium. However, in the case of most business applications, I tend to agree with Edward Tufte’s sardonic assessment of the cognitive limitations that template-driven PowerPoint imposes. One of the better examples, by Peter Norvig, is here.

The next presentation I had to deliver was at a benchmarking group. Mulling over my topic and this love/hate relationship I have with PowerPoint, I decided to try a presentation modelled after the “Lessig Method”, named for Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, whose presentation style of using slides with short phrases or even single words has gained some notice. More about that here.

Generally I don’t work from detailed speaking notes. I usually present on subjects that I’m close to and am relaxed speaking freely about. My slides are typically milestones of what I’ll cover verbally. In this case I created my deck by essentially figuring out how my rap would go by rehearsing it a few times and pulling out lots of key words and phrases per Lessig’s approach. I ended up with 50 slides for what would probably have been 10 or 12 if I’d used the typical title-bullet-transition approach.

Sad to say, it didn’t resolve my PowerPoint angst. My presentation was very well received, right up there with highly entertainment-oriented ones where I’ve pulled out all the multimedia effects. I was asked by a reviewer at my office if he could have a copy so he could steal it for his own presentations. Yet at the same time I can’t escape feeling that perhaps it was well received only because of it’s novelty, a break from the bullets. And the impression that I get from the presentation style, and others I’ve seen like it, is that of ‘MTV for meetings’ – lots of quick cuts, flashing screens and only tiny amounts to digest in one bite. Well, if that’s my worst burden, I’ll deal with it.

My daughter in middle school has been using PowerPoint for a few years, they teach it in school these days. For my son’s 10th birthday she made him a presentation instead of a card – with photos, clip art, animation, sound and timed transitions. And now my son is getting the same instructions she had a few years back and together we created a deck for his research project. And he demanded backgrounds, type effects and cool transitions too.

I used to be in graphic design. Maybe I still am.

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!