As I noted below we went through with a Tools upgrade to our PeopleSoft Portal a week back. As soon as our North American users got to work on Monday morning performance took a severe hit, logins took in excess of 2-4 minutes if you could get in at all. We’ve been running at capacity for a while while additions to the operating environment are put into place. Load testing in advance of the upgrade showed that we would lose about 10% of our capacity thanks to the larger code base of the newer version of the Tools. I don’t yet have a post-mortem analysis of what went wrong, I’ve heard a few things from my technology team but it’s not a final verdict yet.

With that in play, I’ve started my usability tour. On Wednesday I was in the London where I spent time with HRs for the UK and the technology team that runs our EMEA systems. These went well, and the HRs are quite hungry for self-service although not as delivered by PeopleSoft. To hear their management speak of it there are still data quality challenges and integration issues that keep them from giving a go-ahead. I see where Michael has posed a question about data quality on the discussion forum, certainly for us it’s a topic that arouses passions, although I’m not yet close enough to it to speak in an informed manner.

Dinner and a few pints followed with my tech colleagues, and I had a few hours on Thursday morning to run around and visit some of the classics in London: Big Ben, Covent Garden, Parliament, Picadilly.

That evening I met my colleagues from New York in Dusseldorf. Friday was back-to-back meetings. In the morning through lunch I worked a focus group of German employees on a new Intranet prototype. After a hearty lunch I spent time with one of the senior HR people for Germany and one of his staff. Unlike the UK, they see self-service as a farther goal. The main challenges for them are the number of manual processes they still support and the need to complete a project to iumprove data feeds to and from their payroll vendor. They’re looking to rework their country HR Intranet site, and I hope to work with them to get the content under a management system so we can work towards personalized delivery.

My colleagues and I have stayed the weekend, sightseeing and eating. The food is wonderful but shall we say robust. The weather has been cold and misty, but we’re managing fine.

Tomorrow one of us goes home to NY, and I go to Singapore with the other. I’ll update after that.

I’ve been in London and Dusseldorf this week, and having some problems logging in. With Michael’s help that seems to be right again, so I’ll gather my thoughts later in a followup post.

My technology team is a week away from moving a Tools upgrade for the PeopleSoft Portal to production. With 300,000 users and 18 integrated applications, it’s been quite a dance. The toughest part is getting a green zone when we can absolutely take the Portal (and most of the integrated apps) down and make the changes, then rouse tech and business people in the middle of the night on a weekend to test and approve. Since we’re global there’s only an hour and a half during per week that is outside of someone’s normal working hours, which of course isn’t enough for this task. But this is Comp season, so lots of people are working weekends. Overall, it’s not pretty.

Next we want to upgrade the application itself from 8.4 to 8.8 or 8.9. I wonder what happens after that – Fusion, I guess – so that could be our last major PeopleSoft upgrade.

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.

We’re deep into self service. I’m now responsible for the user experience. We use many applications – PeopleSoft HRMS, internally developed applications for compensation and talent, other vendor’s products for recruiting, time and attendance and more. There aren’t many standard processes. There are multiple service centers. Is this a headache or a green field?

It looks like I’m going to travel to a number of cities in the UK, Germany, Japan, Singapore, Australia, Latin America and the US to run focus groups and usability sessions with HRs, managers and employees. I’d like to hear what you’d like someone like me to ask. What would you like to have changed? What should we fix? What should we never, never do?

Thanks for your input!

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.

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.

Back in New York! So what are my after thoughts? First, the size of this event was challenging, the general estimate I heard was 37,000 attendees. That made initial introductions a little like speed dating – “Are you Oracle? PeopleSoft? JD Edwards? Apps? DB?” It made it hard to figure out who to network with. I was thinking about ways to make it easier for us. At the trade show, EMC (the storage and enterprise content management company) was handing out big, numbered pins that people were wearing like license plates. The hook was that somewhere out there was another attendee with the same number. Find them and win something! That made me think that Oracle should put RFI tags in the show badges that would light up when someone with a similar customer profile approached. Or maybe just color code them somehow – keep it simple.

If I didn’t say it already, I’ll say it again – the messages were remarkably consistent:

• Oracle is moving to standards-based platforms and products
• Oracle will provide flexibility and choice between their and other company’s products when architecting business solutions
• Fusion will be best-of-breed from their entire product portfolio
• We’ll support you as long as you want until Fusion, and even after that
• Oracle has a laser focus on the customer’s needs

I have little direct background with Oracle, they were always a commodity component (the standard database layer) in my applications. So I’m taking their claims at face value until proven otherwise. With my arms folded, I guess. I took away some good connections with individuals who are doing the same things, that I can share ideas with. And for all the good messages and rock-star keynotes what I ultimately I saw for the here and now were basic, incremental changes to the HRMS, EPM and Portal applications, and a lot of hesitant customers wondering how this will play out. If they do it well, we could get a lot closer to the kind of systems and usability that we hoped we would get (and usually didn’t) when we purchased PeopleSoft apps. If not, I expect a lot of folks will take them up on their ‘lifetime support’ deal.

Now it’s back to day-to-day efforts. Today it’s getting a plan and support together for rounding up some standalone intranet sites that provide mandatory training and attestations and getting them into a LMS and front-ending it through the portal.

Sorry for the delay in posting. Thursday was my last day in San Francisco, and the first day I sat through an entire session. It was “Oracle’s strategic direction for Portal technologies for Peoplesoft applications” run by Rich Manalang. He provided a decent overview of where the direction appears to be heading –

I did get a hot soak in last night and my tired legs feel much better today, and it’s a good thing because today was the day to put on our ties and act like senior managers at the full-day Leader’s Circle session at the Marriott. Breakfast and lunch provided more opportunities to meet some folks and compare notes. I’ve collected a lot of business cards on this trip.