Packing up again, this time it’s a Caribbean cruise with the family. All I can say is: I’m so ready.

But before I go, a quick request. A project came up to build a quick and dirty knowledge base for expats and every time the model is seen someone wants to bolt on another function. We’ve decided to do the expat piece as a proof of concept and build a reference architecture model for a process tool in parallel.

There are a lot of choices for process modeling tools around here, ranging from homegrown to dedicated teams that claim to be centers of excellence. Anyone with practical experience in HR process modeling, I’d love to hear from you. I’ll be back on shore on the 27th.

Try as I might, I just couldn’t get a full day off on Friday. I declared a ‘Green zone for maintenance’, a bit of humor meaning I was headed to my physician and dentist for checkups. In between those stops and a dozen other things that piled up a a lot of mail came into my Blackberry. I expected a certain volume because we’re preparing for a killer week. We’re expecting very high traffic through the systems – 2-3 times more than we can handle – and it’s been ugly when we hit our peaks. Various parts of the infrastructure just fall over and nobody is entirely sure why. Our friends from Oracle are on hand to see it for their own eyes and help us figure out what exactly is blowing up.

But what caught my eye was a message from the folks who are trying to pull our multiple LMSs into a single global instance. They’ve hit a snag in the fact that we send everyone to the ‘Employee Portal’ when in fact not everyone who is a worker is an employee. Now, this isn’t a new phenomena, and in an earlier time I had to work with HR Legal to get some carefully worded language explaining that non-employees may be using this system for very limited reasons. As I recall that was driven by certain countries’ Works Councils. Upshot – they’re recommending we rename the Portal, removing all vestiges of the word “Employee”.

Now, my wife is an attorney in Tech and Intellectual Property and between sharing stories with her and my own experiences I’m not blind to the legal perspectives on semantics and implied meanings. But this is getting a bit fussy IMHO. I hope we can resolve this with another go at the disclaimer language. I’d love to hear if anyone else has dealt with this and how you may have resolved it before I go back in on Monday and take up the Good Fight.

In the meantime we’re expecting a minor blizzard here in the northeast US, so after I’ve dug out I’ll check back in tomorrow afternoon. Thanks, all!

Mostly off topic…my life has been inundated with PowerPoint. Starting with a summary presentation of the strategy meetings I detailed last month, one by one they increased and soon I was juggling decks from all sides, including from my school-age children.

I’m reasonably adept at PowerPoint, and I believe that in the right hands it can do some very cool things. Musician David Byrne has done some interesting work using it as an artistic medium. However, in the case of most business applications, I tend to agree with Edward Tufte’s sardonic assessment of the cognitive limitations that template-driven PowerPoint imposes. One of the better examples, by Peter Norvig, is here.

The next presentation I had to deliver was at a benchmarking group. Mulling over my topic and this love/hate relationship I have with PowerPoint, I decided to try a presentation modelled after the “Lessig Method”, named for Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, whose presentation style of using slides with short phrases or even single words has gained some notice. More about that here.

Generally I don’t work from detailed speaking notes. I usually present on subjects that I’m close to and am relaxed speaking freely about. My slides are typically milestones of what I’ll cover verbally. In this case I created my deck by essentially figuring out how my rap would go by rehearsing it a few times and pulling out lots of key words and phrases per Lessig’s approach. I ended up with 50 slides for what would probably have been 10 or 12 if I’d used the typical title-bullet-transition approach.

Sad to say, it didn’t resolve my PowerPoint angst. My presentation was very well received, right up there with highly entertainment-oriented ones where I’ve pulled out all the multimedia effects. I was asked by a reviewer at my office if he could have a copy so he could steal it for his own presentations. Yet at the same time I can’t escape feeling that perhaps it was well received only because of it’s novelty, a break from the bullets. And the impression that I get from the presentation style, and others I’ve seen like it, is that of ‘MTV for meetings’ – lots of quick cuts, flashing screens and only tiny amounts to digest in one bite. Well, if that’s my worst burden, I’ll deal with it.

My daughter in middle school has been using PowerPoint for a few years, they teach it in school these days. For my son’s 10th birthday she made him a presentation instead of a card – with photos, clip art, animation, sound and timed transitions. And now my son is getting the same instructions she had a few years back and together we created a deck for his research project. And he demanded backgrounds, type effects and cool transitions too.

I used to be in graphic design. Maybe I still am.