I’ve made it back to New York. Tokyo is a fascinating city, I enjoyed it very much. We stayed until Sunday morning, which gave us some time to sight see on Saturday and get a bit of the flavor of the city. On Friday we ran two intranet usability sessions which were very much on a par with all the others to date. I must say that I’ve experienced far less regional variation in the response to our prototype and types of issues raised than I anticipated. The anecdotal evidence points to people (at least those within my company) being more similar than different. While I treasure differences around the world it’s assuring to see that in some way the web has enabled us to provide people tools that can be used with a degree of consistency globally.

I was able to chat up one of our senior HR people and some of his team, although it was not a full a session as I’d hoped. But just being there and meeting them ensures that future telephone exchanges will be more productive. In mid December we’ll cover some sites in Latin America which will wrap up our ‘four corners’ tour. For my part I see that our HR self-service deployment has greater complexity than I’d realized. At one level we have enough flexibility in our systems to allow for local variation but there will be many challenges as we go along regardless. I wonder if it’s ever possible for an organization our size to move to truly global standards? I believe it would have to be more of a command-and-control environment, and I’m not aware of many multinationals that successfully operate in that manner. In any case there’s much to do and now I have a few more personal connections with which to do business.

I’m now in Tokyo, following a 24-hour stay in Singapore. We held 2 usability sessions for the intranet and I spent the time in between the sessions with HR. We have a greater self-service deployment in Asia than EMEA, and the folks I met with are keenly interested in doing more. The discussions centered around how to promote self-service when it’s not mandated, which translated means pulling the plug on other channels. They were interested to know what supporting communications plans we were using in North America to promote self-service. I contrasted Asia with North America in that Asia has typically provided a higher level of service through their generalists and service centers compared to NA. So the challenge is more correctly how to promote self service when it’s clearly a step down from the existing channels? I maintain that the existing ‘solutions’ including the one I manage, are missing the mark. I see more and more clearly the need to create a custom, process-driven interface to the multiple systems we use. This runs counter to our common wisdom of ‘buy, not build’ but I don’t see anything that can present these services in a coherent manner.

After a fantastic seafood dinner at an open-air restaurant on the South China Sea, we boraded our flights to Tokyo, our last stop on this outing. I’ve napped and hopefully will be awake for dinner tonight. It’s November 24th in Tokyo, Thanksgiving day for the US. Our Japanese offices host a Thanksgiving dinner for American expats and visitors, which I find charming – and I’m greatly amused that my first proper meal in Japan will be a traditional Thanksgiving turkey dinner!

As I noted below we went through with a Tools upgrade to our PeopleSoft Portal a week back. As soon as our North American users got to work on Monday morning performance took a severe hit, logins took in excess of 2-4 minutes if you could get in at all. We’ve been running at capacity for a while while additions to the operating environment are put into place. Load testing in advance of the upgrade showed that we would lose about 10% of our capacity thanks to the larger code base of the newer version of the Tools. I don’t yet have a post-mortem analysis of what went wrong, I’ve heard a few things from my technology team but it’s not a final verdict yet.

With that in play, I’ve started my usability tour. On Wednesday I was in the London where I spent time with HRs for the UK and the technology team that runs our EMEA systems. These went well, and the HRs are quite hungry for self-service although not as delivered by PeopleSoft. To hear their management speak of it there are still data quality challenges and integration issues that keep them from giving a go-ahead. I see where Michael has posed a question about data quality on the discussion forum, certainly for us it’s a topic that arouses passions, although I’m not yet close enough to it to speak in an informed manner.

Dinner and a few pints followed with my tech colleagues, and I had a few hours on Thursday morning to run around and visit some of the classics in London: Big Ben, Covent Garden, Parliament, Picadilly.

That evening I met my colleagues from New York in Dusseldorf. Friday was back-to-back meetings. In the morning through lunch I worked a focus group of German employees on a new Intranet prototype. After a hearty lunch I spent time with one of the senior HR people for Germany and one of his staff. Unlike the UK, they see self-service as a farther goal. The main challenges for them are the number of manual processes they still support and the need to complete a project to iumprove data feeds to and from their payroll vendor. They’re looking to rework their country HR Intranet site, and I hope to work with them to get the content under a management system so we can work towards personalized delivery.

My colleagues and I have stayed the weekend, sightseeing and eating. The food is wonderful but shall we say robust. The weather has been cold and misty, but we’re managing fine.

Tomorrow one of us goes home to NY, and I go to Singapore with the other. I’ll update after that.

I’ve been in London and Dusseldorf this week, and having some problems logging in. With Michael’s help that seems to be right again, so I’ll gather my thoughts later in a followup post.

My technology team is a week away from moving a Tools upgrade for the PeopleSoft Portal to production. With 300,000 users and 18 integrated applications, it’s been quite a dance. The toughest part is getting a green zone when we can absolutely take the Portal (and most of the integrated apps) down and make the changes, then rouse tech and business people in the middle of the night on a weekend to test and approve. Since we’re global there’s only an hour and a half during per week that is outside of someone’s normal working hours, which of course isn’t enough for this task. But this is Comp season, so lots of people are working weekends. Overall, it’s not pretty.

Next we want to upgrade the application itself from 8.4 to 8.8 or 8.9. I wonder what happens after that – Fusion, I guess – so that could be our last major PeopleSoft upgrade.