There are 3 sides to every story.

In an impressive one-two combo, Jim points out how re-evaluation of HR-to-business alignment and priorities is an ongoing job, and then, hardly pausing for breath, he expands the recent discussions on HR-to-business alignment by reminding us of the CEO’s responsibility to invest strategically in HR. Spot on, we’ve indulged in a lot of HR bashing of late (and I’ve been one of the bashers). True, there’s solid grounds for highlighting disconnect between business goals and HR strategy but it’s also a truth that HR is ofttimes funded as a shared administrative service to be run using a low-cost model. This generates contradictory demands, like mandates to use common platforms and processes while insisting that regions and business units be flexible and responsive to local dynamics.

Add securing financial and program support from the corner office that reinforces the strategic partnership to the duties of the tactical-yet-strategic SHRO.

Walk, then run.

Michael talks about why Web 2.0 sucks, and Dubs wonders how to apply Web 2.0 to HR. Maybe I’m jaded but most enterprises haven’t yet figured out how to apply Web 1.0 to HR.

Please tell me I’m wrong.

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.

Folder-Tag mashups with muscle at Google

Google has changed another paradigm. A new front end to Google Docs and Spreadsheets is striking in many ways. First is a mashup of Folders and Tags – create a folder and it displays in a familiar left sidebar looking much like a Windows Explorer / Outlook folders view, click a folder and see it’s ‘contents’, etc. but they also behave like tags – select your doc and assign it to as many ‘folders’ as you’d like, search for tags, and so on.

Just yesterday I listened to Dave Weinberger on an IT Conversations podcast explaining why tags are inherently superior to folders in that they are attributes of the original item, being metadata they can be numerous without needing to be displayed, their inherent searchability, and so on. I love tags, so my first take on using this new Google mashup rattled my left brain a bit – why mess with the paradigm? I find myself explaining tags frequently when I discuss findability challenges in the enterprise. But folders are a concept that most folks grasp. Even though loads of people don’t quite get the Windows Explorer interface they are at least ok with the basic unit of the folder.

Google has solved one nascent problem – a lack of organizing tools around the document space – by giving folks something that behaves like the way they already handle documents. Looking closer, now there’s a higher level environment that has some attributes of the desktop – tools allowing me to manage and access my collection of stuff. They’ve just moved another step up the logical stack away from the application itself and provided a path to transition people from desktop to webtop. At the same time they’re allowing people to ease into the idea of tagging instead of filing by wrapping tags in a familiar look and feel.
This is a powerful little change that advances the state of their SaaS offerings and could expose tagging to a much broader audience. Whether you like the execution or not, it’s pretty damn clever. I wonder what the Blue Monster makes of it?

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.

As if on cue (originally posted 12 June 07)

Google Operating System reports today that Powerpoint attachments can now be previewed as slideshows in Gmail.

Well on the way, head in a cloud (origially posted 11 June 07)

[Postscript – 22 June 2007. Another nod to life in the cloud. Thanks to Google’s cached views of this blog I was able to restore the last few posts I made.]

When I left my last employer I made a strategic decision to continue my work with online applications. At the former workplace we used roaming profiles and server storage that was accessible remotely so the notion of my ‘stuff’ being portable isn’t new. I’d already dabbled with Google apps and Zoho as well as Open Office as replacements for MS Office apps. Primarily because of the integration points I decided to focus on Google apps with Open Office as a backup if I needed more advanced features. It’s a purely personal choice – your mileage may vary and this is not an endorsement of any one product over the other.

I don’t do heavy text formatting nor am I an Excel jockey; given that I have to say that the online apps more than sufficed. For text I used Docs or Notebook depending on my intent – Notebook served for quick thoughts, logging running tasks and lists. Docs was for longer or more formatted items, Spreadsheets handled my basic tabular needs. I didn’t have to revert to Open Office at all. I am eager to see Google’s presentations solution – I flex PowerPoint heavily and the feature set is important to me.

When I traveled in Italy I everything I needed was at hand (unless I couldn’t get connectivity, which was rare). I recently got a new PC that I put in another location and as I was setting it up I thought how nice it would be if all my ‘legacy stuff’ was online rather than being sitting on a drive somewhere else. That made me realize that I’m shifting my focal point. My best photos, most immediate docs, reminders and notes are all in the cloud and now I wish it was all there for me.

Of course this approach isn’t a universal fit. There are challenges around document compatibility, sensitive data, compliance and regulatory concerns for enterprises. But no doubt that these will be resolved and the fact is we’re well on the way to a model of data retreivability and worker agility that eclipses the one we’ve been using for the last 30 years.

We get it. (originally posted on 6 June 07)

Thomas kindly gives us an overview of how SAP applies user experience (UX) discipline and practice in their product cycle. I’m always happy when he (or anyone) gets excited about UX.

At my new firm we get it big time. Tomorrow morning I take an early Acela Express to Philadelphia for a kickoff of an HR Portal strategy project. With me will be one of our senior UX consultants to demonstrate how we use extensive discovery of usability factors at the very beginning of a project to help drive our strategy – user interviews, surveys, data analysis and expert heuristic evaluations. She has equal standing with our technology lead and that’s a rarity. When UX is invoked it’s all too often closer to the finish line and nobody wants to make changes.

Thomas also touched on accessibility. Personally I think this one will become a compliance issue for companies sooner than they think. I predict it will not be long before general commercial entities will be required to provide accessible enterprise services in the same manner as governmental sites are currently. It’s not hard or expensive to accomplish accessiblity unless you find yourself in a crash course to remediate. Best practices in accessibility can be integrated into design and coding standards so it is a natural part of the process. Bottom line, it’s the right thing to do.

Ready for action

My cycling trip through Puglia was nothing short of wonderful on all counts. The landscape, company, guides and people were completely enjoyable.

The US holiday weekend is approaching, and on Tuesday I start my new consulting job. I’ve enjoyed my respite and I’m looking forward to getting engaged again. I don’t know if my new comapny has a blogging policy; considering that they take a positive stand on the role of social computing and the potential of Enterprise 2.0 I’m hopful that I’ll be able to continue in a more direct manner.

A musical interlude

Yesterday I went to Iridium with my friend Ken. We saw Kenny Garrett with Pharoah Sanders. I have always credited Pharoah with opening my ears to jazz. Arguably a lot of things came first, but I will always remember a day when I was a freshman in college, driving around Albany in a beat up 1965 Pontiac. I was listening to a ‘progressive’ AM radio station out of Pittsfield Massachusetts (this was 1974 or 1975 and there was no FM on my old beater) and a tune started playing. It was a pleasant jazz tune and strong vocals, with lots of interesting percussion going on – shells rattling, drums booming . As I drove along it got more and more intense and compelling. Soon I was so amazed that I pulled over to the side of the road and listened intently as the music went completely out with wild saxophone playing and the vocalist yodeling furiously. It gradually came back, finally ending up back at the vamp and vocals. I’d heard Pharoah Sanders and my life was different. The next day I was at the record store and very soon I was listening to Coltrane, Dolphy, Davis and other groundbreaking musicians.

We couldn’t stay for the late set at Iridium, so we made our way to the door. Pharoah was there speaking to someone. I stood right behind him, and when he turned I said to him, “Can I just say thank you for 30 years of joy?” He looked at me and replied, “Have you been listening that long?” He smiled, shook my hand and moved on. It felt really good to be able to thank him for that day and all the things that have flowed from it since then – maybe it was the best part of the evening.