Kick me

While I was in Texas I stopped to visit the folks who staff our North America service center. They seemed pleasantly surprised to have me visit, and they were more than open to sharing some of their experiences related to employee self-service. All the while, I’m wondering, why on earth we haven’t managed to connect before now? We’ve agreed to have a monthly review of user issues, some of which we probably wont be able to manage away but with others we can surely improve the experience so these folks don’t have to call in their problems.

Another discusstion we had was about the segregation of the knowledge tools they use from the learning materials provided by the application teams and the content that goes on-screen at the interface level. These are three distinct stovepipes and I need to make them come together. Authoria has been orbiting around us on this subject for some time, but I need more languages than they provide and I’m not convinced that there’s a next choice.

Anyway, I have to rank the service center teams with the same status I assigned to the data warehouse folks in my rant below – we’d be dead without them, and they don’t get the respect they deserve.

Back to basics

There are a lot of year-end lists being posted and one thing that’s been on many of them is Web 2.0. This is an interesting meme that has now reached the mainstream. I’ve been drawn to many sites and services that fall into the broad category, and after almost a year of Web 2.0, AJAX and all the others I’m frankly a little tired of the ongoing Deep Thoughts on the subject. Maybe I’m being obtuse but I think that the signal to noise ratio is off on this; one of these days I’ll have to get a look at the Gartner Hype Cycle on it just to satisfy my curiosity. Here’s my simple manifesto: Web 2.0 is a very useful set of tools representing an intriguing approach to interaction design, so let’s get on with it.

The intranet prototype I’ve been doing these focus groups on uses Web 2.0 constructs and approaches at the transaction and interface layers. What I’ve observed in every country I’ve been to is that Just Plain Folks are completely comfortable with using Web 2.0 constructs and interfaces.I have 2 cities to go, and I don’t expect to find anything unusually different by the time I’m done. The revolution is over and we’re the better for it.

Speaking of the prototype, it struck me this morning that degrees of hype and the distractions of shiny new things can make us lose sight of fundamentals. Case in point, I drew the original design concepts for our Employee Portal in the summer of 1998.

Back then we were in the heat of Web 1.0 and the future was going to be amazing! But…couldn’t do it. Why? We were missing a most humble enabler

Vote For The Recruiting.com 2005 Best Blog Awards

The voting has opened at recruiting.com’s 2005 Best Blog awards. Vote here – hopefully for Systematic Viewpoints, or any of the great bloggers that have been nominated, and thanks for supporting the community.

About Systematic Viewpoints

I worked with HR systems at one of the world’s largest corporations. These thoughts are my own, however. Now I’m looking to focus on Usability and interactions. Here’s the fine print:

This blog site is published by and reflects the personal views of it’s author, in his individual capacity. It does not necessarily represent the views of his employer or internal clients, and is not sponsored or endorsed by them. The purpose of this blog site is to assist in dissemination of information about enterprise HR system deployment, but no representation is made about the accuracy of the information. The information contained in this blog site is provided only as general information for education purposes, and blog topics may or may not be updated subsequent to their initial posting.

By using this blog site you understand that this information is not provided in the course of a professional relationship and is not intended to constitute professional advice. This blog site is not intended to be advertising.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

Copyright 2005-2006: All content on this and other pages within http://systematic.hrblogs.org are the specific intellectual property of the “owner” of the site. Content may not be reused or reproduced without the specific permission of the owner or a reference to the source. Opinions may be generated from content obtained from other sources and such content is referenced as appropriate.

Muchas Gracias

This morning I arrived home on an overnight flight from Bogota. It’s been a busy day catching up, capped by the very pleasant surprise that I’ve been nominated in recruiting.com‘s Best HR Blog 2005 category. Vote here!

A tip of the cap to good folks at recruiting.com and Jobster for this event and thanks to the kind person who nominated this blog. I’m truly excited and looking at the other nominees, I see that I’m in great company. The fact that we’re sharing thoughts and ideas is it’s own reward.

More about my travels after dinner!

Focus!

If I thought I’d be able to take it easy and catch up when I got back from travelling, I was sadly mistaken. There’s been a blur of activity, a lot having to do with our recrutiment workstream. They’ve been working to get Taleo out as a global standard for internal and external postings. Again, due to the size and complexity of our organization, deploying any global standard is a hige challenge. Recognizing that, the team was charged with creating something that links to not only Taleo but any de facto job board used within the company. I’m not confident that we even have a definitive list.

To the horror of the workstream lead I proposed that we proceed with a target state definition of an integrated career management environment and use that undoubtedly compelling vision as leverage to convince people around the company that the heavy lifting and pain that it will take to adopt this particular standard will be worth it in the end. I understand their pain, as an escaped technologist I know it would be in their intrests to simplify, not amplify. What I’m fighting is the emergence of a fat new silo created by lashing together a bunch of old silos. In any case I think she ultimately agreed so long as she can deliver something in March to satisfy the basic request. But now I have her attention while I create a picture of a critical part of the overall target state for self-service users.

Noted Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox post “Why Ajax Sucks (Most of the Time)” I’m in the love/hate camp with regard to Jakob. On the one hand I very nearly engaged him to speak to senior management when I was creating the business case for the latest version of the corporate intranet, on the other hand I sometimes find his positions unnecessarily orthodox/purist. In this case there are some spot-on issues – I watched focus group users struggle with some of the Ajax elements in the intranet prototype, especially around the use of the back button. This is something that needs fixing, like it or not. That said, I believe that the Ajax approach has much goodness, especially as it will apply to a thoughful self-service environment.

I’ve also been asked to put together a short paper for internal use on Fusion as a follow up to Open World. Given the current state, that should be brief.

Sunday I travel yet again, we’re taking our road show to Colombia, I come back Tuesday and then out again Thursday for Dallas and Mexico City. That’s the end of the intranet prototype tour, and I’m glad for it. I love to get out now and again but I’m just plain tired.

It’s a systematic world

Double Dubs has rebranded his excellent blog as systematicHR. We’ve agreed to confuse the world with our similar urls, because it just feels right.

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.

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.