Google has changed another paradigm. A new front end to Google Docs and Spreadsheets is striking in many ways. First is a mashup of Folders and Tags – create a folder and it displays in a familiar left sidebar looking much like a Windows Explorer / Outlook folders view, click a folder and see it’s ‘contents’, etc. but they also behave like tags – select your doc and assign it to as many ‘folders’ as you’d like, search for tags, and so on.

Just yesterday I listened to Dave Weinberger on an IT Conversations podcast explaining why tags are inherently superior to folders in that they are attributes of the original item, being metadata they can be numerous without needing to be displayed, their inherent searchability, and so on. I love tags, so my first take on using this new Google mashup rattled my left brain a bit – why mess with the paradigm? I find myself explaining tags frequently when I discuss findability challenges in the enterprise. But folders are a concept that most folks grasp. Even though loads of people don’t quite get the Windows Explorer interface they are at least ok with the basic unit of the folder.

Google has solved one nascent problem – a lack of organizing tools around the document space – by giving folks something that behaves like the way they already handle documents. Looking closer, now there’s a higher level environment that has some attributes of the desktop – tools allowing me to manage and access my collection of stuff. They’ve just moved another step up the logical stack away from the application itself and provided a path to transition people from desktop to webtop. At the same time they’re allowing people to ease into the idea of tagging instead of filing by wrapping tags in a familiar look and feel.
This is a powerful little change that advances the state of their SaaS offerings and could expose tagging to a much broader audience. Whether you like the execution or not, it’s pretty damn clever. I wonder what the Blue Monster makes of it?

Thomas has asked us to give our perspective on a Deloitte/Economist survey indicating that a majority of business executives do not see HR as playing a role in business strategy.

No big surprise in my experience. I see a lack of understanding between the HR and business management worlds as articulated by Jason, Evil HR Lady and others. I agree that HR needs to think and speak in business terms. If there’s any comfort in shared pain, it’s not just HR that has this challenge, IT is often feeling disconnected while business management feels that IT just don’t understand what they need. Both functions end up being treated as commodities as a result, boxed in by management’s experience as to where they can extract some value from the functions.

How did this happen? It depends on the culture of an organization. Sometimes it was never there, sometimes it was skewered by solutions that were more painful than the prior methods, where transformation meant laying off generalists and claiming benefits realization on paper, while managers became less effective because they had to get out in the rain and pump their own gas under the banner of self-service.

I find business heads desperately want to understand what motivates their workforces and they tell me they need to be more agile and reactive to changing market and global conditions, only to find that policies are too slow to be changed, data is of poor quality and hard to manipulate, and HRs are simply being reactive. I see examples where workforce planning is at best an annual mechanical exercise, lacking in meaningful business dialogue that could result in partnership.

What’s an HR to do? Get out of your office and understand your business. Know the financials inside out, know what each leader is expected to add to the bottom line. Shadow managers, have long discussions with the business and sector heads. Get in their heads and under their skin. Then decide from there whether you can help them. Demonstrate your value in the P&L language they speak. They’re the bosses, and they won’t give you a seat at the table, it must be earned.

Google Operating System reports today that Powerpoint attachments can now be previewed as slideshows in Gmail.

[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.

Thomas kindly gives us an overview of how SAP applies user experience (UX) discipline and practice in their product cycle. I’m always happy when he (or anyone) gets excited about UX.

At my new firm we get it big time. Tomorrow morning I take an early Acela Express to Philadelphia for a kickoff of an HR Portal strategy project. With me will be one of our senior UX consultants to demonstrate how we use extensive discovery of usability factors at the very beginning of a project to help drive our strategy – user interviews, surveys, data analysis and expert heuristic evaluations. She has equal standing with our technology lead and that’s a rarity. When UX is invoked it’s all too often closer to the finish line and nobody wants to make changes.

Thomas also touched on accessibility. Personally I think this one will become a compliance issue for companies sooner than they think. I predict it will not be long before general commercial entities will be required to provide accessible enterprise services in the same manner as governmental sites are currently. It’s not hard or expensive to accomplish accessiblity unless you find yourself in a crash course to remediate. Best practices in accessibility can be integrated into design and coding standards so it is a natural part of the process. Bottom line, it’s the right thing to do.