I’ve been asked to be the lead for my company’s thinking on portal strategy and vision. I’m pleased to do so and excited about the direction. If you want to know more, drop me a line at systematicviewpoints(at)gmail(dot)com.
I’ve been involved with employee portals in at least 4 Fortune 25 firms in the past decade. I can say with some assurance that when it comes to their portals, what passes for long-term strategy in many large enterprises comes up decidedly short.
Strategy seems to be a bad word with a lot of enterprise middle management. There’s an artificially high value on short-term deliverables, getting easy wins and picking low hanging fruit. They believe they’re being agile and quick on their feet. They think it’s wasteful to be overly analytic. Quarterly goals are set at the expense of long-term vision, and the sad truth is that these managers are often in a revolving door; an ambitious manager achieves some carefully managed-down objectives, gets his or her gold star and is promoted in 24 months or so leaving a successor to clean up. IMHO the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater.
I’ve known developers who have literally built, dismantled, and rebuilt the same system 3 times in a decade as the cycle of ‘new thinking’ turns endlessly. People with experience and long vision are often pigeonholed as being old-school, unable to think out of the box and have doubt cast on their often pragmatic stances. I was one of them. The outside experts were trusted to know more. I became one of those. Suddenly I knew more and am respected. Magical!
If I could advise these companies on anything, it would be train managers to be patient, to demonstrate why it really does take time to achieve world-class results and to let the first quarter of a project be spent developing a thoughtful and robust strategy that provides real vision and line of sight. They might finally stop churning and achieve the results that their mission statements so optimistically project.
When I sit down with a CIO or CFO I’m direct about the need for and value of a business-aligned strategy and honest about the time and effort it takes to achieve the goals they envision. Typically I get back honest appreciation and sometimes, relief. It’s not a cakewalk - these are sharp, brilliant people who cut to the chase with brutal efficiency. You will be mightily challenged, you must know your facts and truths and be prepared to turn on a dime from your prepared delivery. But one thing they universally recognize and appreciate is honesty. Don’t sugar-coat, misrepresent or adulterate the facts for your most senior management. They will respect you for it. You’ll suddenly be smarter, too.
I’ve spent over half of the last 10 years helping enterprises get greater use of their ERP systems. Having been by turns a graphic designer, IT and development manager, user experience advocate and close ally of business, marketing and communications professionals and strategist mine is a particularly multidisciplinary approach.
I sense the beginnings of a change coming about, although I think it will be some time before it’s fully manifested in products and ultimately in the workplace. I’m still trying to hash this nascent trend out, so bear with me and please do call me out or remix these thoughts.
How did we end up here?
If I had to describe a typical ERP deployment (necessarily a fiction, there’s no such thing) , it would have the characteristics of an installation - scaled to the usage estimates, tuned to perform acceptably but not optimally under real-world conditions, configuration changes only, no customizations allowed by IT.
It took longer and cost more than projections. Business requirements were gathered but often ended up being deferred so the critical path could be cleared of dependencies that would incur further costs and/or delays, worsening the tension that already existed between the business audience and IT. A launch is achieved with one or two key business functions being supported. ‘Features’ are rolled out over multiple releases until all the intended functional solutions are live.
Now What?
What happens next is highly variable. Frequently budgets have been strained to the point where planned change management activities are scaled back or even eliminated in favor of some form of training. This is often remote and offered for a limited time after a launch event. Recorded training is available for new employees - if they can find it.
Professional users in the functional areas begin to struggle with the gaps between local procedures and the methodology of the system as delivered. Specific pain points arise: inconsistent data sources, multiple screens to perform single tasks, you name it. Workarounds abound - job aids and cheat sheets are circulated, and a body of underground tacit knowledge required to successfully perform job functions begins to arise. Eventually metrics begin to suggest that the ROI is not being met, and the blaming begins.
What’s to be done?
How it plays out depends on how the people responsible for the systems are rewarded. I’ve just re-read an interview with Donald Norman from 2000 where he took the usability profession to task for not understanding how business people typically get promoted, and emphasizing long-term benefits to the wrong audience. His point was if a manager gets a very narrowly defined task completed without making a mess of their P&L sheet for the year, they get promoted. Usability? Service quality? Benefit realization? Not my job - that’s for the next person to achieve.
Companies are frequently motivated to address problems arising from ERP deployments because senior management relies on them for critical processes and key data and they are not achieving the desired results. They assign that ‘next person’ to improve the system. Sometimes they call in folks like me.
Over time and through many engagements we’ve identified a spectrum of possibilities that improve in varying ways the business results that ERP supports, depending on a given company’s appetite for change and customizations. It’s not about user-centric design, although that’s a key component. It’s about tasks and goals and how people get through complex, lengthy processes. It’s about how the systems support the strategic goals of a company. Sorry to say, no system delivers that out of the box.
Vendors know the truth.
This challenge is very clear to ERP vendors. Their interfaces are brittle and monolithic; corporate IT experiences so much pain customizing and maintaining them that they have very compelling arguments against modifications. SaaS companies like Salesforce.com and Workday are invading their turf.
Oracle knows this, but they’re too busy rationalizing their product lines to be able to address it head-on yet.
SAP knows this and even though they provide tools for IT to tweak interfaces they are not used in may enterprises for the reasons above.
Change is coming…maybe.
One of the biggest challenges in any system is how to design for large numbers of people across many disciplines. Many of today’s applications try to accommodate just about everyone, creating extraordinary complexity. This applies as much to Microsoft Office products as it does to ERP. Word and Outlook are ‘feature-rich’ to the point of being ridiculous for must folks.
Other paradigms for improving the interface to ERP have been in play, most prevalent being the dashboard. They can be terrific for information consumers but they are often implemented with limited interactivity for decision support. A very compelling set of demonstrations was given at SAP’s Munich TechEd event showing interfaces and widgets that begin to decouple interactions and data manipulation from the ERP interface. Oracle and SAP both have dedicated groups looking at ways to exploit the best of Web 2.0 technologies and interfaces to the business solutions.
I’m not sure whether folks can cope with widgets floating around their computer desktops, monitoring data, work lists, or enabling faster/simpler transactions. But in general people prefer use-specific interfaces and devices over multipurpose ones. I commonly use the kitchen as a case in point. Your own kitchen probably has a range/oven, a microwave and some form of toaster-oven. 3 devices, all specialized interfaces for making food hot in a chamber.
Folks like Don Norman have envisioned more embedded computing and fewer general purpose systems in the future. In the last year specialized computing products have bloomed in the consumer space: digital picture frames at Target, iPhone and iPod Touch, Chumby. Perhaps the general public’s embrace of Web 2.0 interfaces (which seem to tend towards the single-purpose) is beginning to create sufficient demand that the product managers for ERP systems can contemplate adding them to feature sets. For some interesting insight into the dynamics of that process, see “Why 2.0 Didn’t Start in the Enterprise” by Paul Pedrazzi.
How does this impact the enterprise?
I see a shift away from the massive interface, the all-in-one portal and the soup-to-nuts dashboard in favor of compact, customizable and intelligent widgets, applets and services that can be called upon demand or pegged to a corner of the screen. I see a move away from the browser and the page paradigm that demands information architectures and navigation, towards a set of easily grabbed tools that I can use in combination or snap together like Lego blocks to solve my here and now business problem, and move on. The browser will still have it’s place because it’s a great interface for linear processes, but it will stop trying to be everything to everyone. I’m almost reminded of the March 1997 issue of Wired magazine, which breathlessly declared the death of the browser. I still have my copy.
When I watch the Demo Jam video I think that it’s some of the better thinking I’ve seen in this space in quite some time, but realistically speaking these innovations aren’t ready for general availability. Enterprises are often years away from major upgrades of ERP; in fact the days of the sweeping upgrade are probably past for many organizations. It’s incremental change that will be coming, so I don’t expect the landscape to change drastically in the next few years. But it’s an exciting trend and when these innovations begin to creep into the enterprise, I fully expect demand for more to rise.
Many of the portals I’ve worked on have had a complete lack of attention to the HR practitioner. The generic scenario is an enterprise intranet, often driven by an underlying portal technology, with a static and outdated HR presence oriented towards policy and benefit information and links. These organizations are motivated to improve their HR offering and there’s no lack of energy around ESS and MSS integration, and plenty of thinking around how to balance centralized vs. decentralized employee programs.
When I recommend optimizing the experience for the HR professionals I find this has been given little to no thought, and that’s reflected in the environments I have seen for HRs, typically a password-protected sub-site with some stale documents and an unused discussion forum (”Test Message” and “Hello World” seem to be the common subjects) created to share a handful of sensitive documents, with little thought to making it easier for HRs to work together.
A couple of things - first, it’s generally acknowledged that the ERP user experience is sufficiently difficult to require supplemental front end work at a portal interface layer, yet the expectation is that HR professionals ought to be able to deal with it. Why is that? Frequent/’power’ users of an application stand to gain a lot from optimization, and I frequently interview folks who demonstrate tasks that require high numbers of clicks, screen changes, data fetching from other sources, etc. Training doesn’t make awkward processes efficient.
Second, the value proposition of leveraging collaborative technology in the HR space hasn’t been connected to the ongoing transformation programs in place at most large enterprises. I commonly hear from professionals out in the businesses and regions that don’t have a good sense of what’s going on in Corporate, and they often feel that their local dynamics are either unknown of ignored. Corporate people often expresses that they feel disconnected from the field and have little visibility into who does what, where. Often HR operations is under pressure to reduce operating costs, making it appear counter-indicative to provide practitioners additional IT effort on top of the ERP systems that are already in place.
Contrast this with sales. Here’s a function with similar needs: to rely on ERP but in this case a recognition that there is also a supporting data, historical information and a need for awareness of ongoing work efforts among their teams. Sales has always had a tacit social knowledge network supporting a set of individual practitioners performing against personal and group goals. The big difference is that sales generates revenue and HR is an expense, and as such it’s managed quite differently.
The HR Professional portal should provide a functional workspace with information and tools that can be managed by a distributed workforce, centered around the areas that align to the business and corporate HR strategies and moves the value proposition away from the administrative formula. I’ve yet to see an organization that doesn’t get an ‘ah-ha’ moment when we talk about it but I have seen those that just can’t get it either funded of adequately staffed and developed. Where we are building them, they are in their infancy but I feel they will have high value as HR emerges as a strategic business partner over the next decade.
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.
In an hour I have a briefing on my first assignment, an HR Portal strategy and blueprint for a diversified international manufacturing firm, based on their SAP Portal and existing HR intranet.
(tracking data follows, nothing to see here…)
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I use Google’s personalized home page. This week Google enabled ‘themes’, an interesting break in their graphical standards. I find myself wondering why they went forward with this - notwithstanding a few playful tricks they’re little more than window dressing. The selections are limited and lean towards the cartoonish. I’m not critiquing the designs; my point is that if Google is going to allow us to tweak the UI I’d like to see more substantial controls like allowing modules to span multiple columns for better readability or changing font sizes, backgrounds or colors on a per-module basis.
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.
Amazingly, I now have a rollup of over 30 internal apps with target dates for migration to the standardized UI. Getting there was easier than we feared, most of the development teams were fairly receptive and the pushbacks could be anticipated - resources, overloaded work slates and budget. My team is central and funded as an expense so we were able to position ourselves as additional, no-cost resources per project. The timing issue got easier when we made it clear that we were happy to work in existing release schedules and if they needed all of 2007 to get there, that was fine so long as it wasn’t open-ended.
Next stop, another 10 vendor applications. My mileage will clearly vary. I need to spend some serious time analyzing the Portal upgrade approach and coming to a go/no-go on that.
This Tuesday I participated in a World Usability Day panel on managing the usability function within the enterprise. I met a few folks from my own organization and we are trying to maintain a dialogue. This is an emerging theme, last week I was contacted by another person internally who said she’d been trying to find me (not me personally, but whoever does what I do) for that past two years. A community of four has emerged.
Findability in the enterprise typically sucks and it’s compounded by the timidity that we have about allowing people to manage information about themselves and their expertise and even further repressed by lack of rewards for sharing knowledge. Social networking is the only way to manage this right now, but I’m hopeful that we can leverage blogs and wikis to create sturctures that help lubricate the process. But creating community in an organization is hard. Anyone with thoughts about that? Please share them, I need help with this.
Where’ve I been? Around the time of my last post we experienced a reorganization that has been distracting but overall is benefical to me. In short, the function my little group was performing - strategic business architecture of a global best-of-breed approach - was eliminated, along with our team’s leader. That was the disruptive part. My specific function is now focused more precisely on the interfaces between users and systems. I’m carefully avoiding saying “User Interface” because design is only a single part of it. In this capacity I still manage the Portal (my new Portal Ops Manager starts on Monday!). Our role is to burnish the rough edges off our touchpoints, from GUIs to (ultimately) service centers. This in my estimate is a Good Thing.
I’ve now got a small team of designers and usability specialists under me so I’ll have resources with which to execute. In a few weeks we’re heading out on a series of focus groups on our internal mobility initiative in every region which will ultimately inform our external facing recruitment efforts. I really look forward to these exercises, they’re greuling but the chance to do fieldwork prior to delivery is rare and I like to get out in front of people in other countries and hear what they have to say.
Hopefully as the dust settles I’ll get more habitual about my posts. If any of you still visit here I’d love to hear what you think the viability of this effort is, and if you had the opportunity to do something like this, what would be your highest priorities?
Speak to you soon,
Systematic