systematic viewpoints

Tomorrow I’m reviewing an upgrade approach with my technology team (the one I used to manage) for moving the PeopleSoft Enterprise Portal from 8.46 to 8.9. I need to dynamically mix transactions and content with awareness of context, person, function and process. Having measured the delivered functionality against my needs for almost a year I’m pretty sure that I’ll decide to pass.

I’ve been in a love/hate relationship with this product since I deployed 8.3 three years ago. From the very start we needed to modify it to do things that it can’t easily do. I run one of the largest implementations on the planet and have pressured Oracle to be more forthcoming with me about the road map for the Portal line and Fusion, but I don’t get a lot to go on.

Right now I have a very expensive, slightly intelligent link farm. Bottom line is I’m not inclined to take the time and budget for an incremental upgrade that isn’t going to bring me a whole lot of business value. The most likely scenario for 2007 is I’ll tweak the UI and look to replace it entirely in 2008-9.

We spent the morning of our second day identifying what, by application, we percieved as the major business benefits from what’s delivered in the PeopleSoft upgrades. This was particularly compelling for our regional HRMS folks as they were able to compare and contrast approaches. There was a really positive flow of ideas, and you could practrically feel the group come together into a working team. This was possibly the best take-away from the event. I’ve seen time and again that the power of a motivated, smart group is incredibly more effective than individual efforts, no matter how informed.

If we expected to hear anything more specific from Oracle about Fusion, it wasn’t forthcoming. They’ve rebranded exisiting middleware as Fusion, but nothing that gave the HR product landscape any more substance was brought out. In terms of timing, they told us that the first Fusion applications are slated to begin appearing in 2007, the first Fusion ‘application suite’ for HR is targeted for 2008 and to expect it to be well beyond then before it’s sufficiently stabilized for enterprise-scale environments.

Our last day was a wrap-up, and we caught our planes back to our respective continents and cities. It was a US holiday Monday, but already emails are flying aorund following up on specifics that were raised. This morning our team met and we’re working on our summaries, follow-ups and thinking hard about how to maintain the energy from this event.

This event should mark the last of my travels for this season…I hope. I’ve been away from home a lot and it gets very tiring to be slogging aroung like that.

Long day but it was actually a good expreience. We’re having a strategy meeting about upgrading our full PS environment - 4 HRMS instances, sPro, EPM and Enterprise Portal - to 8.9. We started with sharing a definition of our target state. These are the carve-em-in-stone principles we want to deliver and/or achieve, regardless of requirements or technology. They’re simple and high level:

• a quality user expreience,
• timely and accurate data sourcing and feeds management,
• powerful and practical reporting and
• maximal system and service consolidation.

These four objectives contain many characteristics or best practices, each of which in turn will expand out to identified gaps between the as-is and terget state. The first order of business was to get agreement on the objectives and characteristics. Having that, we then went around the room with each functional owner speaking to the top of mind gaps in their areas, which we managed to filter into a single list of key gaps from a global perspective. Some of these will take years to address, others hang low but now we all agree on what they are. Everybody has to go hame and produce an exhaustive catalog.

The next stage was to identify what we wanted to achieve with 8.9 from a purely business side. How are we improving processes, enhancing services, shortening cycles, etc. The plus is that we now have a common ste of standards by which to measure any aspect of this effort - if it doesn’t deliver on one of the target state characteristics, we can fairly ask why we’re doing it. Further, with each of the 4 regional HRMS managers present in the room, talking to their goals, there was ample opportunity for sharing and comparing that was exercised in a really positive way.

By 6:30 PM we broke to go to dinner after an spontaneous whiteboard session between EMEA and Asia-Pacific on tree standardization, inspired by the warehouse and North America discussions on their respective approaches. Much lubrication followed and people were voicing their wonderment that we hadn’t started like this 3 years ago when we took this effort on on a global scale. Honestly, we didn’t have the luxury of strategy back then. We were racing a clock and a leaky budget, and we had to get the ‘plumbing’ in place. We made a lot of compromises and there’s no question that what we’re doing now is unraveling some of that.

I believe that with a vision, communications and a strong group working together we’re going to realize some cool achievements. With some blood and guts spilled, no doubt.

Orace is telling us about 8.9 and Fusion tomorrow. I’ll have to see what I can share, we’re under non-disclosure.

Back for the new year! Hope you all had some good times over the holidays. We’re gearing up for a gathering next week of the functional heads to discuss our target state and how we get there. We need to have this discussion as a level setting prior to beginning to upgrade seven PeopleSoft systems to 8.9. We plan on beginning with fairly high-level, truth-and-beauty type of stuff positioned as the guiding principles and working our way to identifying the business drivers for the upgrades, identifying the deltas between the target state and our current state(s), and how to leverage the upgrade opportunity to close gaps, eliminate customizations and standardize.

There’s a fair amout of angst in some groups about all this. It’s hard enough to manage an upgrade like this without cluttering it with a desire to quantify and seek improvements for the greater good. We’re keeping this as a business-only session so we can keep a sharp focus on having business justification for the upgrade activities. For example, there’s a very interesting proposal floating around that shows ho we could gain advantages by moving some of our regional instances onto combined hardware platforms. There’s no denying that it would bring clear advantages but very few of them will improve the business processes that the systems support - and in fact it may make some of them more difficult.

Given that these are proprietary discussions, I’ll try to extract some meaning from them to report, but my mileage may vary.

If I thought I’d be able to take it easy and catch up when I got back from travelling, I was sadly mistaken. There’s been a blur of activity, a lot having to do with our recrutiment workstream. They’ve been working to get Taleo out as a global standard for internal and external postings. Again, due to the size and complexity of our organization, deploying any global standard is a hige challenge. Recognizing that, the team was charged with creating something that links to not only Taleo but any de facto job board used within the company. I’m not confident that we even have a definitive list.

To the horror of the workstream lead I proposed that we proceed with a target state definition of an integrated career management environment and use that undoubtedly compelling vision as leverage to convince people around the company that the heavy lifting and pain that it will take to adopt this particular standard will be worth it in the end. I understand their pain, as an escaped technologist I know it would be in their intrests to simplify, not amplify. What I’m fighting is the emergence of a fat new silo created by lashing together a bunch of old silos. In any case I think she ultimately agreed so long as she can deliver something in March to satisfy the basic request. But now I have her attention while I create a picture of a critical part of the overall target state for self-service users.

Noted Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox post “Why Ajax Sucks (Most of the Time)” I’m in the love/hate camp with regard to Jakob. On the one hand I very nearly engaged him to speak to senior management when I was creating the business case for the latest version of the corporate intranet, on the other hand I sometimes find his positions unnecessarily orthodox/purist. In this case there are some spot-on issues - I watched focus group users struggle with some of the Ajax elements in the intranet prototype, especially around the use of the back button. This is something that needs fixing, like it or not. That said, I believe that the Ajax approach has much goodness, especially as it will apply to a thoughful self-service environment.

I’ve also been asked to put together a short paper for internal use on Fusion as a follow up to Open World. Given the current state, that should be brief.

Sunday I travel yet again, we’re taking our road show to Colombia, I come back Tuesday and then out again Thursday for Dallas and Mexico City. That’s the end of the intranet prototype tour, and I’m glad for it. I love to get out now and again but I’m just plain tired.

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.

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.

Back in New York! So what are my after thoughts? First, the size of this event was challenging, the general estimate I heard was 37,000 attendees. That made initial introductions a little like speed dating - “Are you Oracle? PeopleSoft? JD Edwards? Apps? DB?” It made it hard to figure out who to network with. I was thinking about ways to make it easier for us. At the trade show, EMC (the storage and enterprise content management company) was handing out big, numbered pins that people were wearing like license plates. The hook was that somewhere out there was another attendee with the same number. Find them and win something! That made me think that Oracle should put RFI tags in the show badges that would light up when someone with a similar customer profile approached. Or maybe just color code them somehow - keep it simple.

If I didn’t say it already, I’ll say it again - the messages were remarkably consistent:

• Oracle is moving to standards-based platforms and products
• Oracle will provide flexibility and choice between their and other company’s products when architecting business solutions
• Fusion will be best-of-breed from their entire product portfolio
• We’ll support you as long as you want until Fusion, and even after that
• Oracle has a laser focus on the customer’s needs

I have little direct background with Oracle, they were always a commodity component (the standard database layer) in my applications. So I’m taking their claims at face value until proven otherwise. With my arms folded, I guess. I took away some good connections with individuals who are doing the same things, that I can share ideas with. And for all the good messages and rock-star keynotes what I ultimately I saw for the here and now were basic, incremental changes to the HRMS, EPM and Portal applications, and a lot of hesitant customers wondering how this will play out. If they do it well, we could get a lot closer to the kind of systems and usability that we hoped we would get (and usually didn’t) when we purchased PeopleSoft apps. If not, I expect a lot of folks will take them up on their ‘lifetime support’ deal.

Now it’s back to day-to-day efforts. Today it’s getting a plan and support together for rounding up some standalone intranet sites that provide mandatory training and attestations and getting them into a LMS and front-ending it through the portal.

Sorry for the delay in posting. Thursday was my last day in San Francisco, and the first day I sat through an entire session. It was “Oracle’s strategic direction for Portal technologies for Peoplesoft applications” run by Rich Manalang. He provided a decent overview of where the direction appears to be heading -

I did get a hot soak in last night and my tired legs feel much better today, and it’s a good thing because today was the day to put on our ties and act like senior managers at the full-day Leader’s Circle session at the Marriott. Breakfast and lunch provided more opportunities to meet some folks and compare notes. I’ve collected a lot of business cards on this trip.