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.