Computerworld reports that “Oracle Corp. is already claiming to be ahead of plan” on delivering Fusion, saying that they are halfway along.

We spent the morning of our second day identifying what, by application, we percieved as the major business benefits from what’s delivered in the PeopleSoft upgrades. This was particularly compelling for our regional HRMS folks as they were able to compare and contrast approaches. There was a really positive flow of ideas, and you could practrically feel the group come together into a working team. This was possibly the best take-away from the event. I’ve seen time and again that the power of a motivated, smart group is incredibly more effective than individual efforts, no matter how informed.

If we expected to hear anything more specific from Oracle about Fusion, it wasn’t forthcoming. They’ve rebranded exisiting middleware as Fusion, but nothing that gave the HR product landscape any more substance was brought out. In terms of timing, they told us that the first Fusion applications are slated to begin appearing in 2007, the first Fusion ‘application suite’ for HR is targeted for 2008 and to expect it to be well beyond then before it’s sufficiently stabilized for enterprise-scale environments.

Our last day was a wrap-up, and we caught our planes back to our respective continents and cities. It was a US holiday Monday, but already emails are flying aorund following up on specifics that were raised. This morning our team met and we’re working on our summaries, follow-ups and thinking hard about how to maintain the energy from this event.

This event should mark the last of my travels for this season…I hope. I’ve been away from home a lot and it gets very tiring to be slogging aroung like that.

Long day but it was actually a good expreience. We’re having a strategy meeting about upgrading our full PS environment – 4 HRMS instances, sPro, EPM and Enterprise Portal – to 8.9. We started with sharing a definition of our target state. These are the carve-em-in-stone principles we want to deliver and/or achieve, regardless of requirements or technology. They’re simple and high level:

• a quality user expreience,
• timely and accurate data sourcing and feeds management,
• powerful and practical reporting and
• maximal system and service consolidation.

These four objectives contain many characteristics or best practices, each of which in turn will expand out to identified gaps between the as-is and terget state. The first order of business was to get agreement on the objectives and characteristics. Having that, we then went around the room with each functional owner speaking to the top of mind gaps in their areas, which we managed to filter into a single list of key gaps from a global perspective. Some of these will take years to address, others hang low but now we all agree on what they are. Everybody has to go hame and produce an exhaustive catalog.

The next stage was to identify what we wanted to achieve with 8.9 from a purely business side. How are we improving processes, enhancing services, shortening cycles, etc. The plus is that we now have a common ste of standards by which to measure any aspect of this effort – if it doesn’t deliver on one of the target state characteristics, we can fairly ask why we’re doing it. Further, with each of the 4 regional HRMS managers present in the room, talking to their goals, there was ample opportunity for sharing and comparing that was exercised in a really positive way.

By 6:30 PM we broke to go to dinner after an spontaneous whiteboard session between EMEA and Asia-Pacific on tree standardization, inspired by the warehouse and North America discussions on their respective approaches. Much lubrication followed and people were voicing their wonderment that we hadn’t started like this 3 years ago when we took this effort on on a global scale. Honestly, we didn’t have the luxury of strategy back then. We were racing a clock and a leaky budget, and we had to get the ‘plumbing’ in place. We made a lot of compromises and there’s no question that what we’re doing now is unraveling some of that.

I believe that with a vision, communications and a strong group working together we’re going to realize some cool achievements. With some blood and guts spilled, no doubt.

Orace is telling us about 8.9 and Fusion tomorrow. I’ll have to see what I can share, we’re under non-disclosure.

Back for the new year! Hope you all had some good times over the holidays. We’re gearing up for a gathering next week of the functional heads to discuss our target state and how we get there. We need to have this discussion as a level setting prior to beginning to upgrade seven PeopleSoft systems to 8.9. We plan on beginning with fairly high-level, truth-and-beauty type of stuff positioned as the guiding principles and working our way to identifying the business drivers for the upgrades, identifying the deltas between the target state and our current state(s), and how to leverage the upgrade opportunity to close gaps, eliminate customizations and standardize.

There’s a fair amout of angst in some groups about all this. It’s hard enough to manage an upgrade like this without cluttering it with a desire to quantify and seek improvements for the greater good. We’re keeping this as a business-only session so we can keep a sharp focus on having business justification for the upgrade activities. For example, there’s a very interesting proposal floating around that shows ho we could gain advantages by moving some of our regional instances onto combined hardware platforms. There’s no denying that it would bring clear advantages but very few of them will improve the business processes that the systems support – and in fact it may make some of them more difficult.

Given that these are proprietary discussions, I’ll try to extract some meaning from them to report, but my mileage may vary.

The usability focus groups are done, so what was learned? Well, Bogota wasn’t as scary as I feared. I only spent a day and a night there but the folks that I worked with were great, very positive and helpful. Mexico City was similar, and Dallas provided one of the best sessions overall in terms of engagement and interest on the part of the participants.

In terms of the prototype, the reaction to the approach and information architecture was positive and surprisingly universal. We were looking for cultural variations, but there weren’t any major things that have to be accomodated. Despite that, in each session there was at least one suggestion for a feature or an aspect of usability improvement that was unique. This was an enormously valuable exercise and provides important considerations for our self-service approach.

I now feel that I have a much freer hand to build on top of the concepts that I used for the enterprise portal, and I’m figuring on having a model in the next 90 days. I’m going to assume no constraints from a technology/vendor perspective because a) I want an ideal state and b) it will be necessary to get some people’s thinking out of the current application-centric model. I’m also less concerned about how this nascent concept will play around the world.

If things quiet down I hope to dig in between the holidays to model some of this out. But first, I’m taking a little break with my family for a few days of fun in Vermont. I’m about as mediocre as it gets but I love to ski. My daughter is a bit of a skier, and this will be her first time on a full-size mountain, we visited a junior mountain last winter. My younger son has visions of shredding the slopes on a snowboard…so he’s signed up for beginner lessons and I’m keeping my fingers crossed. My wife is the sane one, she’ll be chilling off the slopes. We’re heading off tomorrow morning, so everybody have a wonderful holiday weekend.

Today is the last day to vote for the Recruiting.com 2005 Best Blog Awards. Make sure you stop by and give your nod to the community – and thanks for your readership.

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.

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

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.

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:

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