systematic viewpoints

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.

I’ll be participating in a panel discussion at the NYC World Usability Day event on November 12, the subject is User Experience Best Practices for Corporations moderated by Kerry Bodine of Forrester Research. If you can guess which panelist is me I’ll buy you a drink.

We got so busy so fast that it feels quaint to look at what I wrote in May. I was brought into an initiative from an executive HR committee that was formed to align certain global policies and make them more visible to employees. We were presented with a multi-page wish list that was mostly new content and information but it included a new front end to one of our vendor apps. It needed to be available in multiple languages and had a complex rollout schedule based on country-by-country regulations and reviews. It had to be live in a bit less than 60 days, including global usability focus groups. My team and I found ourselves in the UK, Germany, Hungary, Singapore, Mexico, Brazil and a few US locations, but we hit our marks. That effort took up most of May, all of June and some of July.

Task two was to work up a new set of interface standards for all our HR applications - including vendor apps wherever possible. We started from the premise that the employee experience starts at the intranet home page. As it happens I spent many years running our corporate intranet and have remained actively involved as it’s being migrated to it’s next iteration. Since I had already provided the information architecture and graphical approach for that project, we started with those. After many iterations we came out with a framework that we’ve tested against dozens of different apps and intranet sites. I socialized the heck out of it and now it’s been adopted as the company’s new intranet standard. Based on our design work we’ve also gotten our internal branding standards modified to our designs. This past week we began meetings with the development and analyst teams to begin gettting the migrations from the old to new UIs into their project plans. It’ll take all of 2007, if not longer to get everything done.

My boss and I have been doing a lot of brainstorming around manager self-service environments. I’m advocating a new interface layer leveraging an undefined business workflow toolset and SOA. Mashups, essentially. Double Dubs has been talking about SOA again and as usual I agree with him. However, there are big gaps and lots of disparity when you look at whether application X allow you to pick up discrete funtionality to use in a mashup. Worse, I’m still not certain that I have the proper platform to build this new layer on. SOA is still in it’s infancy with most of the vendors we use and they only change slowly and carefully.

Even more challenging is internal resistance. Many of the teams who we’d be consuming services from argue that they already have a fully capable environment, which brings me to another item that’s been discussed a lot lately - that we need to apply a set of metrics that let us more objectively measure our sucesses and failures in delivering and promoting self-service across all our service delivery channels. We know what they are but any time you ‘impose’ new metrics on a team there’s a lot of convincing required.

But wait, it gets better. At the same time I’m beginning to plan an application upgrade to the Peoplesoft Portal. I’ll save that for later. Is this a fun life or what?

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

Boy, I’ve been slowly recovering from my vacation and in the meantime Double Dubs has been a very busy guy! He’s been filling his blog with all good things. Read all three parts of It’s all about the user and join the conversation.

I’m looking for additional sources to work on custom translations across multiple systems. Does anyone have any vendors to recommend that can handle HR and technology jargon? Thanks!

While I was in Texas I stopped to visit the folks who staff our North America service center. They seemed pleasantly surprised to have me visit, and they were more than open to sharing some of their experiences related to employee self-service. All the while, I’m wondering, why on earth we haven’t managed to connect before now? We’ve agreed to have a monthly review of user issues, some of which we probably wont be able to manage away but with others we can surely improve the experience so these folks don’t have to call in their problems.

Another discusstion we had was about the segregation of the knowledge tools they use from the learning materials provided by the application teams and the content that goes on-screen at the interface level. These are three distinct stovepipes and I need to make them come together. Authoria has been orbiting around us on this subject for some time, but I need more languages than they provide and I’m not convinced that there’s a next choice.

Anyway, I have to rank the service center teams with the same status I assigned to the data warehouse folks in my rant below - we’d be dead without them, and they don’t get the respect they deserve.

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.

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 tiime to sightsee on Saturday and get a bit of the flavor of the city. On Friday we ran two intranet 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 meething 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 sucessfully 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 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!