I’ve been asked to be the lead for my company’s thinking on portal strategy and vision. I’m pleased to do so and excited about the direction. If you want to know more, drop me a line at systematicviewpoints(at)gmail(dot)com.

I’ve been involved with employee portals in at least 4 Fortune 25 firms in the past decade. I can say with some assurance that when it comes to their portals, what passes for long-term strategy in many large enterprises comes up decidedly short.

Strategy seems to be a bad word with a lot of enterprise middle management. There’s an artificially high value on short-term deliverables, getting easy wins and picking low hanging fruit. They believe they’re being agile and quick on their feet. They think it’s wasteful to be overly analytic. Quarterly goals are set at the expense of long-term vision, and the sad truth is that these managers are often in a revolving door; an ambitious manager achieves some carefully managed-down objectives, gets his or her gold star and is promoted in 24 months or so leaving a successor to clean up.

IMHO the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater.

I’ve known developers who have literally built, dismantled, and rebuilt the same system 3 times in a decade as the cycle of  ‘new thinking’  turns endlessly. People with experience and long vision are often pigeonholed as being old-school, unable to think out of the box and have doubt cast on their often pragmatic stances. I was one of them. The outside experts were trusted to know more. I became one of those. Suddenly I knew more and am respected. Magical!

If I could advise these companies on anything, it would be train managers to be patient, to demonstrate why it really does take time to achieve world-class results and to let the first quarter of a project be spent developing a thoughtful and robust strategy that provides real vision and line of sight. They might finally stop churning and achieve the results that their mission statements so optimistically project.

When I sit down with a CIO or CFO I’m direct about the need for and value of a business-aligned strategy and honest about the time and effort it takes to achieve the goals they envision. Typically I get back honest appreciation and sometimes, relief. It’s not a cakewalk – these are sharp, brilliant people who cut to the chase with brutal efficiency. You will be mightily challenged, you must know your facts and truths and be prepared to turn on a dime from your prepared delivery. But one thing they universally recognize and appreciate is honesty. Don’t sugar-coat, misrepresent or adulterate the facts for your most senior management. They will respect you for it. You’ll suddenly be smarter, too.

It’s always a pleasure when Dubs is in town and we get together over dinner. Last week was one of those times, we met at one of the great barbecue places in Manhattan, R.U.B. – the acronym stands for Righteous Urban Barbecue. The place is owned by Paul Kirk, a bona fide Kansas City BBQ master – he’s won many awards in the competitive barbecue circuit, but the food speaks for itself. Go there.

While we attacked a preposterous amount of food I talked about some challenges I’ve been having with a client whose HR organization and programs are in a state of disarray and neglect. I said it had occurred to me that because of that exposure I must be sounding pretty cranky in my recent posts and comments lately, and he went big-eyed and said something like, “I was wondering what was going on!”

Art can reflect life, and my life has clearly been rubbing off on my art. I’m an extremely pragmatic person – I recall a psychological assessment I took as part of a leadership program that landed me dead center between strategic and tactical. I love being a futurist but I also need to get things built and out the door, in today’s terms. I get great satisfaction in connecting those points.

My client needs us to help them stop the bleeding and get the fundamentals straightened out. We’re all over that, but we’re also providing tools to help get them past the pain and make their platform something that will let them act strategically moving forward. That’s where the success will be, not in the tactical part.

Michael talks about why Web 2.0 sucks, and Dubs wonders how to apply Web 2.0 to HR. Maybe I’m jaded but most enterprises haven’t yet figured out how to apply Web 1.0 to HR.

Please tell me I’m wrong.

Thomas has asked us to give our perspective on a Deloitte/Economist survey indicating that a majority of business executives do not see HR as playing a role in business strategy.

No big surprise in my experience. I see a lack of understanding between the HR and business management worlds as articulated by Jason, Evil HR Lady and others. I agree that HR needs to think and speak in business terms. If there’s any comfort in shared pain, it’s not just HR that has this challenge, IT is often feeling disconnected while business management feels that IT just don’t understand what they need. Both functions end up being treated as commodities as a result, boxed in by management’s experience as to where they can extract some value from the functions.

How did this happen? It depends on the culture of an organization. Sometimes it was never there, sometimes it was skewered by solutions that were more painful than the prior methods, where transformation meant laying off generalists and claiming benefits realization on paper, while managers became less effective because they had to get out in the rain and pump their own gas under the banner of self-service.

I find business heads desperately want to understand what motivates their workforces and they tell me they need to be more agile and reactive to changing market and global conditions, only to find that policies are too slow to be changed, data is of poor quality and hard to manipulate, and HRs are simply being reactive. I see examples where workforce planning is at best an annual mechanical exercise, lacking in meaningful business dialogue that could result in partnership.

What’s an HR to do? Get out of your office and understand your business. Know the financials inside out, know what each leader is expected to add to the bottom line. Shadow managers, have long discussions with the business and sector heads. Get in their heads and under their skin. Then decide from there whether you can help them. Demonstrate your value in the P&L language they speak. They’re the bosses, and they won’t give you a seat at the table, it must be earned.

My cycling trip through Puglia was nothing short of wonderful on all counts. The landscape, company, guides and people were completely enjoyable.

The US holiday weekend is approaching, and on Tuesday I start my new consulting job. I’ve enjoyed my respite and I’m looking forward to getting engaged again. I don’t know if my new comapny has a blogging policy; considering that they take a positive stand on the role of social computing and the potential of Enterprise 2.0 I’m hopful that I’ll be able to continue in a more direct manner.

The Taleo blog reports on a report from Money Magazine on the best jobs in America for people looking for change in their careers. They present 4 meta categories that resemble daytime television programming: Young & Restless, Returning Parent (they really mean “Mom” but that wouldn’t be very PC), From the Military to the private sector, and my favorite – Over 50. I have thoughts about the selections, especially (ahem) the Over 50 category but the real issue for me is the coarse-grained categorization. Given the tensions of the journalistic format I can understand the desire to make this snappy.

What really surprises me is that this same broad brush is picked up by Taleo:

“For recruiters, this is a nice piece of research to help target a specific candidate pool. Looking for Sales Reps? Find moms looking to return to the workplace. Need a Field Service Engineer? Identify someone retiring from the military, and so on.”

“Proactive, targeted candidate sourcing and the use of automated solutions can go a long way towards filling open positions with talented employees who will stay with your organization.” Link.

That’s targeting? This is the opposite of what Enterprise 2.0 promises. We shouldn’t use our tools for incredibly broad generalizations that slot candidates based on generalized demographics. These are important categorizations but by themselves they have no more depth than a sound bite. Being in the over 50 category and coming off my fresh experience in the market I’m offended when I’m contacted for positions that have no bearing on my experience or career trajectory but are the result of some sloppy match based on a single data point about me. At least no one suggested (yet) that I should consider teaching, pension administration or medical records coding – all great choices for an Old Guy, apparently.

Thomas should send Taleo his copy of the Cluetrain Manifesto.

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.

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!

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!