[Postscript – 22 June 2007. Another nod to life in the cloud. Thanks to Google’s cached views of this blog I was able to restore the last few posts I made.]

When I left my last employer I made a strategic decision to continue my work with online applications. At the former workplace we used roaming profiles and server storage that was accessible remotely so the notion of my ‘stuff’ being portable isn’t new. I’d already dabbled with Google apps and Zoho as well as Open Office as replacements for MS Office apps. Primarily because of the integration points I decided to focus on Google apps with Open Office as a backup if I needed more advanced features. It’s a purely personal choice – your mileage may vary and this is not an endorsement of any one product over the other.

I don’t do heavy text formatting nor am I an Excel jockey; given that I have to say that the online apps more than sufficed. For text I used Docs or Notebook depending on my intent – Notebook served for quick thoughts, logging running tasks and lists. Docs was for longer or more formatted items, Spreadsheets handled my basic tabular needs. I didn’t have to revert to Open Office at all. I am eager to see Google’s presentations solution – I flex PowerPoint heavily and the feature set is important to me.

When I traveled in Italy I everything I needed was at hand (unless I couldn’t get connectivity, which was rare). I recently got a new PC that I put in another location and as I was setting it up I thought how nice it would be if all my ‘legacy stuff’ was online rather than being sitting on a drive somewhere else. That made me realize that I’m shifting my focal point. My best photos, most immediate docs, reminders and notes are all in the cloud and now I wish it was all there for me.

Of course this approach isn’t a universal fit. There are challenges around document compatibility, sensitive data, compliance and regulatory concerns for enterprises. But no doubt that these will be resolved and the fact is we’re well on the way to a model of data retreivability and worker agility that eclipses the one we’ve been using for the last 30 years.

TechCrunch reports on Useless Account, an amusing little bauble that gently spoofs the dubious value of account creation. It brings to mind a similar reality, that in our mixed environment we drive our users to create profiles out the wazoo. I take the unpopular opinion that we don’t have a real golden source for individual’s profile info. Of course, the HRMS is the main entry point for employee data, which then feeds the data warehouse which turns around and feed anything else that is interested. But who am I today?

• If I’m a candidate, I’ll create a profile in recruiting system
• If I land a position I’m asked to create an application
• If I’m an officer I’ll create a Talent profile
• If I want internal mobility I go to recruiting and create a profile
• I’m regularly asked if my directory info is correct and sent to update it as necessary
• If I use the LMS I have a learning profile

It goes on and on…is there a set of shared, core data? Of course. Could they be merged? As of now, it could get ugly. Each “view” has nuances that merging them would potentially destroy. Yet it’s reasonable to expect that I shouldn’t have to do that same data entry bit over and over again.

We’re thinking about creating a new environment – for current workers it pulls in the proper bits from the various systems and lets me use them like Lego to build new composite profiles. For new hires it’s the starting point, a core set of ‘About Me’ data in an interface full of webby ease of use that hides the complexity and provides a way to peel off a copy of my basic info and model it for the intended purpose. I could keep those versions so I can reuse them as needed. This would live in the intranet context and not project a message that says “I’m an HR application, run away!”. Right now it’s a whiteboard exercise, to be followed up with a few mockups and ROI exercises to see if it floats.

We’re going to propose scrapping and rebuilding our careers site for external candidates. A few salient points:

• Taleo is on the back end
• Presence in almost 100 countries
• Diverse business lines, languages and competencies

Some things are obvious – easy navigation to listings through multiple conceputal paths, minimal marketing text while maximizing the expression of our core values and unique opportunities, accessibility considerations…but what are the deeper insights that will make for a compelling site? I don’t have a lot of depth in recruiting but my fellow HR bloggers or readers do, so please let me know what are the must-haves and what traps we should avoid. Add a comment or email me at systematicviewpoints*at*gmail*dot*com

Thank you!

In my last post I made reference to Thomas’ reference to enterprise systems as akin to broccoli – not as much fun as ice cream, but way more nutritious. I want to comment a bit more about his post and the Redmonk Radio podcast he was on. Go read and listen, it’s good stuff.

Thomas, I enjoyed your posts and the podcast, even though it took me 3 days to get through it all! In the work you’re doing with the Design Services team you’ve experienced firsthand how empowering it is to take a user-centric perspective to solving business and application challenges. Folks new to the process usually come out revved up and excited. And you’ve discovered what fun we can have if we take that approach into as many situations as possible.

Thomas comments in the podcast how he imagines UI to be like fashion, and he’s on the right track. UI, like all graphic design, is subject to the tastes of time and place. I know many designers who have excellent usability sensibility but even with that in place it’s a single yet key component of the total experience. In the same way, it’s not about Web 2.o widgets or shiny logos. It’s about getting rid of some of the messy and annoying administrivia with elegant, unobtrusive interfaces that don’t call attention to themselves but blend into the process.

At our company we’re deep in the goal-setting process. As an aside – it’s interesting to be responsible for delivering the service as well as taking part in it. I have an exciting set of goals for this year. We’re to be change agents, sharing the secrets of user-centered design with our business relationship managers and the development teams’ business analysts. We’re to continue our work in enhancing the user experience past the user interface layer out to the training, learning and support materials, down into the service centers and voice response systems. We’re embedding our practice in the development lifecycle to ensure that it becomes part of the fabric. I didn’t expect it but this year it seems I’ll be a teacher.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.