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.