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!

Clear vision

I’ve spent a fair amount of bandwidth moaning about how difficult to impossible it is to get to mashup nirvana with a mixed HCM vendor environment, so don’t miss Jim Holincheck’s post Really Achieving User Centricity if you want a clearly articulated vision of how I would like to deliver services. Thanks, Jim!

Go/no-go

Tomorrow I’m reviewing an upgrade approach with my technology team (the one I used to manage) for moving the PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal from 8.46 to 8.9. I need to dynamically mix transactions and content with awareness of context, person, function and process. Having measured the delivered functionality against my needs for almost a year I’m pretty sure that I’ll decide to pass.

I’ve been in a love/hate relationship with this product since I deployed 8.3 three years ago. From the very start we needed to modify it to do things that it can’t easily do. I run one of the largest implementations on the planet and have pressured Oracle to be more forthcoming with me about the road map for the Portal line and Fusion, but I don’t get a lot to go on.

Right now I have a very expensive, slightly intelligent link farm. Bottom line is I’m not inclined to take the time and budget for an incremental upgrade that isn’t going to bring me a whole lot of business value. The most likely scenario for 2007 is I’ll tweak the UI and look to replace it entirely in 2008-9.

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.

An Event

I’ll be participating in a panel discussion at the NYC World Usability Day event on November 12, the subject is User Experience Best Practices for Corporations moderated by Kerry Bodine of Forrester Research. If you can guess which panelist is me I’ll buy you a drink.

Soup or Salad? How about an appetizer instead?

I started to reply to DoubleDubs’ post: Melting Pot or Salad Bowl part 2 but I got so verbose I figured I better put it down here. Go read his originals, then come back.

I have a dozen or more vendor products in the mix, each with their unique UIs and generally poor ability to integrate via any method, not the least being a services architecture. I love the food analogy, but I tend to characterize what I want as being like Amazon. It’s a sure bet that they use content management, media distribution, shopping cards, credit clearance, inventory, their famous recommendation engines, user profiles…you get the idea. Yet at the UI layer it’s a single, seamless product. It had better be, because if they can’t get me to that last click they don’t get revenue. We don’t share that imperative, but we should. Then I wouldn’t need to take 2 hours of training before I can use the darn thing. Granted, we are more familiar with the shopping domain than with the employee transfer domain.

So do we need specialized interfaces? They are a Good Thing in may cases. You wouldn’t want to use Photoshop or a Playstation with a mouse or keyboard. I support specialization and at the same time reject the idea that a specialized interface has to look unique.

We have almost 40 internally developed point solutions. A few of them are big-ticket global apps and many others are specialty items for a particular line of business’ unique needs. We just finished developing a set of interface and design standards for all of them. We developed a framework and then the UX team went through a ‘skinning’ exercise to ensure that we could apply the standards regardless of the interface we were dealing with.

This is not a melting pot. It’s more of a family resemblance. And it’s an important step towards aligning ourselves to the state when we stop being application-centric. Right now I have business managers, analysts and developers who live in their own silos. They know the rest of us are out there but it’s not their problem, they know their function and that’s what matters to them. By introducing the notion that they don’t get to design their UI independently, we begin to get them to look around and notice that we look alike. It’s an appetizer, meant to pique their hunger for the next course while delivering some real value for the consumer.

I want to get us completely away from application-centric thinking, but honestly nothing can support what I want to build yet. The vendors have to catch up to SOA and so do we with our internal apps. I know this is true because we are using services and SOAP for some of our integration functions. It’s still immature, and I fear that that our vendors worries disintermediation results in partial solutions for a while to come and a lot of custom work on our part. In the meantime, I hope we’re making it easier by going to standard interfaces where we can.

Begin at the beginning

We got so busy so fast that it feels quaint to look at what I wrote in May. I was brought into an initiative from an executive HR committee that was formed to align certain global policies and make them more visible to employees. We were presented with a multi-page wish list that was mostly new content and information but it included a new front end to one of our vendor apps. It needed to be available in multiple languages and had a complex rollout schedule based on country-by-country regulations and reviews. It had to be live in a bit less than 60 days, including global usability focus groups. My team and I found ourselves in the UK, Germany, Hungary, Singapore, Mexico, Brazil and a few US locations, but we hit our marks. That effort took up most of May, all of June and some of July.

Task two was to work up a new set of interface standards for all our HR applications – including vendor apps wherever possible. We started from the premise that the employee experience starts at the intranet home page. As it happens I spent many years running our corporate intranet and have remained actively involved as it’s being migrated to it’s next iteration. Since I had already provided the information architecture and graphical approach for that project, we started with those. After many iterations we came out with a framework that we’ve tested against dozens of different apps and intranet sites. I socialized the heck out of it and now it’s been adopted as the company’s new intranet standard. Based on our design work we’ve also gotten our internal branding standards modified to our designs. This past week we began meetings with the development and analyst teams to begin gettting the migrations from the old to new UIs into their project plans. It’ll take all of 2007, if not longer to get everything done.

My boss and I have been doing a lot of brainstorming around manager self-service environments. I’m advocating a new interface layer leveraging an undefined business workflow toolset and SOA. Mashups, essentially. Double Dubs has been talking about SOA again and as usual I agree with him. However, there are big gaps and lots of disparity when you look at whether application X allow you to pick up discrete funtionality to use in a mashup. Worse, I’m still not certain that I have the proper platform to build this new layer on. SOA is still in it’s infancy with most of the vendors we use and they only change slowly and carefully.

Even more challenging is internal resistance. Many of the teams who we’d be consuming services from argue that they already have a fully capable environment, which brings me to another item that’s been discussed a lot lately – that we need to apply a set of metrics that let us more objectively measure our sucesses and failures in delivering and promoting self-service across all our service delivery channels. We know what they are but any time you ‘impose’ new metrics on a team there’s a lot of convincing required.

But wait, it gets better. At the same time I’m beginning to plan an application upgrade to the Peoplesoft Portal. I’ll save that for later. Is this a fun life or what?

Systematic who?

Where’ve I been? Around the time of my last post we experienced a reorganization that has been distracting but overall is beneficial to me. In short, the function my little group was performing – strategic business architecture of a global best-of-breed approach – was eliminated, along with our team’s leader. That was the disruptive part. My specific function is now focused more precisely on the interfaces between users and systems. I’m carefully avoiding saying “User Interface” because design is only a single part of it. In this capacity I still manage the Portal (my new Portal Ops Manager starts on Monday!). Our role is to burnish the rough edges off our touchpoints, from GUIs to (ultimately) service centers. This in my estimate is a Good Thing.

I’ve now got a small team of designers and usability specialists under me so I’ll have resources with which to execute. In a few weeks we’re heading out on a series of focus groups on our internal mobility initiative in every region which will ultimately inform our external facing recruitment efforts. I really look forward to these exercises, they’re grueling but the chance to do fieldwork prior to delivery is rare and I like to get out in front of people in other countries and hear what they have to say.

Hopefully as the dust settles I’ll get more habitual about my posts. If any of you still visit here I’d love to hear what you think the viability of this effort is, and if you had the opportunity to do something like this, what would be your highest priorities?

More on Enterprise RSS, Web 2.0 and HR

It seems that everyone’s joining the conversation started on Enterprise RSS, Web 2.0 and HR by Thomas Otter. Michael and Double Dubs have weighed in, and it”s high time I woke up and added my two cents. Dubs has most recently said:

“…I’ll be completely honest with saying that I’m not sold on RSS and OPML as enterprise business technologies. Perhaps I don’t get it, or I don’t have the same level of vision, but I do see potential. .….. My big hope for the future of HR technology actually lies with Oracle Fusion and SAP Netweaver. .….. The value that these SOA (service oriented architecture) platforms provide is an integration of process that goes outside of the core application suite.”

I agree. Global enterprises are generally allergic to emerging technologies and standards. We don’t ignore them, we lock them up in a lab for a while and make sure they don’t grow into anything ugly or dangerous. Services represent a huge advantage to those of us who see HR technology mashups in the future, but most large organizations are still busy laying the secure, high-availability plumbing to enable us to manage services at a global level. There can be stepping stones, for instance we pass workflow messages to the Portal in SOAP and have a core ”employee info” service available for non-HR apps to consume. When Oracle and others get to robust built-in support for SOA, we”ll be ready to exploit that flexibility.

I”m working on re-architecting our integrated worklist on the Portal and more than once I’ve wondered about leveraging RSS. But there are more questions than answers. I love my RSS feeds and I’d love to have that level of interaction on certain products I deliver but:  how does it become aware of whether I’ve inherited a new task in Taleo, or the HRMS, or Oracle EBS, or 14 other integrated systems only seconds after I finished a prior one? How do I remove the alert for a completed task off the Enterprise Portal without the user having to refresh a screen for someone who gets dozens of approval messages daily? How does RSS scale to a source system that sends out upwards of 40,000 messages a day? How come I have to explain what RSS is to my technology partners, those who would have to maintain this when it stops working, somewhere in the world that is inevitably dinner or sleep time somewhere else?

It”s frustrating to see potential and have limited resources. The conversation is wonderful and I hope it’s moving the experience forward but I see it as years off, at least in the type of environment I’m dealing with. I’d love to hear from anyone who’s doing something with RSS beyond pushing headlines out.

Lining up Ducks

This past weekend the tech team completed a hardware upgrade, doubling the Portal’s capacity. We’re now able to support over 10,000 concurrent users. We can probably handle more, but we ran out of ‘virtual users’ for our load tests.

Hopefully I can get back to business as usual. I’m looking to recruit someone to manage the Portal full-time so I can pay more attention to the other areas I’m responsible for:  I’m working to develop and release a communications plan to market our self-service capabilities, an update to our language strategy, a project to align the interface layers of our internally-developed products (which will no doubt have impact on our vendor products), replacing the Portal’s native app messaging tools with a web services model for displaying actionable workflow messages from the integrated applications on the Portal as well as sending an alert flag to the corporate intranet home page, and a few other bits and pieces that have been suffering from benign neglect.

Time for more coffee.