I've been hit

This morning I learned that my position is being eliminated and my team will be reorganized along with many others as part of a large effort sweeping our company to reduce operational expenses. Since my role had become 80% user experience/interface and 20% operational regarding the Portal, it was an easy target to hit.

I’m not certain how this will resolve. It looks like my package will carry me for a comfortable amount time, so it’s time to assess my future and plot a new course. If anyone has any suggestions, let me know at systematicviewpoints*at*gmail.com.

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.

Reader survey – what would you do?

We’re going to propose scrapping and rebuilding our careers site for external candidates. A few salient points:

• Taleo is on the back end
• Presence in almost 100 countries
• Diverse business lines, languages and competencies

Some things are obvious – easy navigation to listings through multiple conceputal paths, minimal marketing text while maximizing the expression of our core values and unique opportunities, accessibility considerations…but what are the deeper insights that will make for a compelling site? I don’t have a lot of depth in recruiting but my fellow HR bloggers or readers do, so please let me know what are the must-haves and what traps we should avoid. Add a comment or email me at systematicviewpoints*at*gmail*dot*com

Thank you!

My sweet Lord, what's become of my memory?

After more than a decade of legal wrangling, George Harrison was found guilty in 1981 of “subconscious plagiarism” for using music strikingly similar to the Chiffons’ 1963 hit, “He’s So Fine” in his own 1970 hit song, “My Sweet Lord”.

Am I in hot water? I see Jason Corsello’s post The End of Job Boards As We Know It? and I’m struggling to recall if I saw that last week or not…(probably yes to be honest, you’re in my RSS reader). Jason, honest mistake! Let’s call it a meme and move on? Please don’t sue me…

In any case, I still wonder what’s the driver. I don’t think it’s just the new-pretty-shiny factor, there must be a dissatisfaction with the status quo. See the comments on Jason’s blog to get some sense of that.

Thomas saw the light!

In my last post I made reference to Thomas’ reference to enterprise systems as akin to broccoli – not as much fun as ice cream, but way more nutritious. I want to comment a bit more about his post and the Redmonk Radio podcast he was on. Go read and listen, it’s good stuff.

Thomas, I enjoyed your posts and the podcast, even though it took me 3 days to get through it all! In the work you’re doing with the Design Services team you’ve experienced firsthand how empowering it is to take a user-centric perspective to solving business and application challenges. Folks new to the process usually come out revved up and excited. And you’ve discovered what fun we can have if we take that approach into as many situations as possible.

Thomas comments in the podcast how he imagines UI to be like fashion, and he’s on the right track. UI, like all graphic design, is subject to the tastes of time and place. I know many designers who have excellent usability sensibility but even with that in place it’s a single yet key component of the total experience. In the same way, it’s not about Web 2.o widgets or shiny logos. It’s about getting rid of some of the messy and annoying administrivia with elegant, unobtrusive interfaces that don’t call attention to themselves but blend into the process.

At our company we’re deep in the goal-setting process. As an aside – it’s interesting to be responsible for delivering the service as well as taking part in it. I have an exciting set of goals for this year. We’re to be change agents, sharing the secrets of user-centered design with our business relationship managers and the development teams’ business analysts. We’re to continue our work in enhancing the user experience past the user interface layer out to the training, learning and support materials, down into the service centers and voice response systems. We’re embedding our practice in the development lifecycle to ensure that it becomes part of the fabric. I didn’t expect it but this year it seems I’ll be a teacher.

The things that delight

Yesterday was my son’s 11th birthday. He got a few new games for his Nintendo DS, and when he went to check them out he yelled out for me to “check this out!”

In the setup of the DS you enter your birth date, and it very dutifully displayed a splash screen when he started it wishing him a Happy Birthday, replete with famous Nintendo game characters. Needless to say he was absolutely delighted by this simple bit of ‘personalization’.

Why don’t our applications do this? Why is it so hard to build anything beyond the most basic and broad personalizations into our systems? We know a lot about each user, and we can infer even more. Besides adding efficiency and eliminating unnecessary distractions, why can’t we delight our users? Until we have the same narrow-margin mindset that makes Nintendo and Amazon go our of their way to keep their users happy we will continue to be broccoli, as Thomas puts it.

Mobility revisited

In mid-2006 we launched our global “mobility” offering – not an expat program (which of course we have), but standardized guidelines for changing jobs inside the organization integrated with Taleo on the back end. It was a fairly simple bit of work intended to raise awareness around internal opportunities coupled with an attempt to improve on the Taleo search interface. We’re picking up again, and today I attended a kick-off with folks from North America, EMEA and Asia. Someone from LATAM is involved but couldn’t attend.

We have about 16-18 months worth of work on our high-level wish list just to start with, I’m excited about the more strategic thinking around how this fits into other offerings towards a set of career management tools – policy alignment, link and/or integrate with learning, development, talent, branding. I’ll report back on what gets priority.

2007 priorities

I’m still trying to work it out, but in no order:

• Complete UI alignments
• Schedule ongoing usability testing of key apps
• Standardize delivery and presentation of learning, ‘help’ and documentation
• Scope out a review of customer experience with the service centers and action the results
• Re-architect HR intranets to support personalized information delivery
• Strengthen the role of the usability team within the SDLC

I fully expect to find myself looking at this post later this year and being in some way amused by it!

Anonymous HR BloggerCon NYC 1.0!

Tonight I thoroughly enjoyed dinner with Double Dubs of systematicHR.com. Our wide-ranging converstion covered food, technology, food, cycling, food, HR strategy, food, Web 2.0, and did I mention food? We also talked about our blogging community and how we’d like to extend the conversation among us. I’m sure we’ll be woking on it. Dubs, if you’re wondering how I got this post up so fast, it’s via Blackberry on the train home…not too shabby, eh? Thanks for the good time, I’m looking forward to our next session!

The Other Systematic

About Meme

Dubs tagged me, so here’s 5 things you don’t know:

1. In a field crowded with HR cyclists, I’m another. A long time ago, after many years as a customer I was invited to be a guest leader with Vermont Bicycle Touring. For a few seasons I got pay plus tips to spend a week on inn-to-inn tours during autumn foliage, riding half days and driving the sag wagon the other half. Nearly left my day job.
2. My degree is in Commercial Art, from the pre-PC era. I was an Art Director for almost 20 years. I specialized in large catalog production and got involved in online commerce (on Compuserve, showing my age again) in the late ’80s. By the time the web got popular I was spending as much time with systems as designing. I made the formal transfer to development management in 1998.
3. I learned to code on a Univac 1108 in 1973. Punch cards, paper tape, Teletypes with acoustic coupler modems and no displays.
4. New York City is my favorite place.
5. Late in the last century I swore that I’d never work on PeopleSoft systems again. And yet…

I’ll tag brazenindustriousness, Romulus and Rich.