systematic viewpoints

Microsoft Silverlight, Adobe Air and Mozilla Prism, that is. I wish I were clever enough to fit Yahoo Widgets into that title, but my brain just didn’t go there. In any case interesting things may be going on with interfaces. There’s a sudden confluence of ’solutions’ aimed at pulling experiences out of the browser. This has some positive aspects, the browser remains a page-oriented environment and it demands a degree of bending to it’s will. In the enterprise space, there is great appeal to detaching meaningful experiences from the monolithic approach that ERP delivers.

Is there a downside? I can imagine desktops becoming cluttered with multiple disparate interfaces (“You are in a maze of twisty little GUIs, all unalike.”) with a lack of context providing the conceptual or actual relationships between them. Do people even want to have all these little bits floating about? The proportion of folks who are able to manipulate their computing environments remains low, and I for one don’t believe that Millenials are somehow naturally equipped or even inclined to be more than consumers of services. In some quarters there seems to be an almost mystical attachement to the idea that young-uns are deeply skilled laptop Jedis. I’d like to see some real-world testing, my gut says that they can easily learn to use new apps and devices but they’re just as inclined to ignore customization as us dinosaurs. I grew up on TV, that doesn’t make me an expert on signal propagation or any other technical aspect of the medium. Just a consumer, sorry.

That said, I’m thrilled to see interest in alternative interfaces at places like SAP. I believe the real benefits will come when the UX and design people get to apply their disciplines. It feels like we’re at the start of some innovative thinking around enterprise application interfaces, and it’s about freakin’ time.

Via Google Operating System: Wal-Mart is selling a sub-$200USD PC running an Ubuntu variant with a with a “conceptual Google OS” and Google’s permission to use its trademarks. The OS is available at http://www.thinkgos.com. Man, I love this country!

I had planned on a different subject today but Steve Mann’s bit on innovation in Able Brains touched something off. Read it, and then spend some time with his other writings, it’s been too long since I shilled his blog which is one of my regular reads.

There is a considerable gap between many company’s stated dedication to innovation as a competitive and growth lever and the eventual execution and product offerings. What passes for innovation in many places is too diluted to recognize. Steve offers some yellow flags:

“…if you work at an organization that doesn’t have a culture that (1) values innovation and (2) places governance, budget and resources around innovation - not that it never will but it may be a cold day in hell before Innovation becomes mainstream. Further, many top managers agree that corporate policy actually tends to offer limited incentives to innovation or limits it by placing an innovation team in a risk averse organization or business unit or having no plan to deal with failure other than to junk the team and start over. Some say this is a talent issue, other execs say its a cultural issue. The answer is “yes.”"

Couldn’t agree more. I worked in e-business organizations which were walled gardens. We were kept at arms length so as not to infect the general population and once a product was deemed to be sufficiently cootie-free it was sliced out and transplanted into the business. Today, increasingly regulated and scrutinized operating environments makes innovation look more like a risk to be managed. I’ve seen the talent issues run both ways. We may have leaders and managers who have been conditioned to drive risk out, but at the same time we experience few skillful innovators and far too many who claim to be visionary but end up being undisciplined or ineffectual at matching innovation to business benefits.

The aversion to innovate affects more than competitive advantage and growth. I often work with clients whose IT has sufficient control over how apps are deployed to push them into vanilla deployments because they’re managing risk in terms of not wanting to manage code bases or introduce customizations that add complexity to upgrades. The result is business heads who don’t get what they need out of systems, with functional professionals who are relegated to awkwardly aligned processes, managers and employees who need to perform basic tasks and are presented with systems that require hours of training to use. The aversion to innovate at even this simple level - let’s make our systems easier to use by our own - is a direct cause of this pain. Risk needs to have a 360 review process so a fuller measure of is made before a decision that leans towards benefiting a single area is taken.

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.

It’s all Thomas’ fault.

Clearly not having enough with blogging about enterprise matters, he has shown us his sartorial leaning by introducing Dedicated Followers Of Fashion, or DFOF. Here he passes comments about the state of fashion in the tech community - apparently menswear in particular. Fun and occasionally snarky in a good-spirited way, I’m getting a big kick out of it and if I ever do run into him, I’ll pick my habadashery carefully.

Recently, Thomas and Cote posted some photos/videos featuring fetishistic messenger bags, and that’s where my troubles began.

I’ve had a long history of seeking the ‘perfect’ bag, a pursuit that shows all signs of being a lifelong habit. Either circumstances or dissatisfaction with some darned thing leads me to look for improvement, and just a week prior I was nosing around a luggage shop, apparently buying my daughter a better bag for her High School belongings. While the kids were distracted I snuck looks at the Manhattan Portage, Victorinox and lesser brand offerings.

Seeing the photos and video of Crumpler bags got me downright twitchy. I was determined to be rational about it all, so I ran aorund in a frenzy looking at Chromes, Timbuk2s, Briggs and Rileys…to no avail. They each had a fatal flaw of some sort or the other. But I wasn’t going to just cave in and order one, because the Crumpler was flawed as well - no outside pockets. I knew I had to see the bag for real.

Living in the NYC metro area has many perks, one of which is that there is a store that stocks anything you can imagine somewhere. I know there’s a Crumpler shop in the West Village, but I don’t get down there often. Today I stopped at B&H - a place I avoid because it’s very easy to get very stupid in there. But I was on a Mission. I headed straight to the bags and found the Part and Parcel. It took about 30 seconds for my remaining resolve to disappear, and I nabbed it along with a Thirsty side bag to compensate for the lack of external pockets.

So, here’s the bag porn:

Even the wrapper bag has the little Crumpler dude. Nice touch

Thirsty Large on it’s hang tag

Front

Back

Flap open

Swallowing a wide screen Dell

Dr. Strong-Tron tag - look closely, he’s made of bags

For a small pouch, it can hold a lot. The bottom is a stretchy neoprene-type material.

Video iPod, Blackberry and earplugs case

This bag is seriously built, better than most I’ve seen and seems quite comfortable. The strap is wildly long - I’m 6′ 3″ and it can hang below my knee - from top of strap to bottom of bag measure 4 feet! Adjustments are simple and the padding is super without being overly bulky. Hopefully I’ll keep this one more than my usual 18 months!

But the important question - why black when Crumpler makes such amazing colors? I spend a lot of my consulting time doing strategy with high-level execs. Low floors on Park Avenue are not good places for orange or robins-egg blue bags. Black blazer, black bag.

I’ve been nervously watching streaming news today. I received a call this morning from a friend who was evacuated in the San Diego area, their neighborhood was aflame today.

They’re safe an a friend’s in a nearby town and it seems like they may have gotten lucky since their home isn’t listed as burned down, but many people have lost homes that recognized in the videos, homes I drove past just weeks ago when I paid my friends a visit. Odd how I heard mention of the fires for the first time when my clock radio went off this morning but it didn’t become in any way relevant to me personally until the phone rang.

Best wishes to all, I sincerely hope you’re somewhere safe .

Came across this today. Read the entire post, I’m utterly humbled.

“With hearts like theirs, you know they’re good to do business with.”

>Tracking code here, nothing to see.

Let it be!

In best practice #3 I say that without governance, social media risks failure. Now I’m going to speak out of the other side of my mouth and say that too much governance will also lead to failure.

Like raising a child, there’s a responsibility to set a foundation that supports positive and healthy growth but one must step back and not interfere - most of the time. Groups will ultimately define their own priorities and tone, and to be valuable to itself and ultimately to the enterprise they shouldn’t be meddled with.

Overly visible ‘management’ will almost certainly stifle open discourse, and that is the opposite of the exact value proposition that social media holds. With all the thought, care and consideration given to establishing an appropriate medium for collaboration and discourse it will be hard to step back and let this nascent environment develop according to it’s own needs. The fact that the intranet environment is by definition controlled by a relative (and often somewhat disconnected) few within the organization makes this even harder.

Find the balance and resist the urge to steer conversations. Let people bump into things and make mistakes, just keep an eye out so things stay civil. In time, the community will be on it’s own feet and in the best case will become self-maintaining.

Best practice #4: Don’t interfere with the community-building process.

I came back from a week at a client in San Francisco this week. The last time I was there was just about two years ago, and that was the trip that provided the spark for me to begin blogging. I’m struck by how much has changed for me in that time.

Nine months ago I was laid off from my previous job in a huge RIF. I’d been at that company for 9 years, and was with the company before that for almost 15 years. I wasn’t accustomed to involuntary termination. Being at the gate of ‘a certain age’ I was concerned about maintaining positive career momentum.

I landed after three months - in retrospect, a very short time. I left the in-house world to join a management consulting firm. Since then I’ve completed two strategy engagements and I’m about to begin a third.  I have to say that I’m as pleased as can be.

I used to run the enterprise portal environments that I now create strategy for, and I like it this way. In the corporate world there was little time for strategy - we were almost completely tactical. I wanted to get out of development and production cycles and demands. Mostly, I wanted get in front of the portals and drive the business solutions they enable. My current job is exactly that.

I now work with folks who are visionary, passionate and remarkably down to earth. My clients and my boss seem to value what I bring to them. I’m a hell of a lucky man.

Lovingly linked to at GeekAndPoke.typepad.com

Thanks to the Fast Forward Blog for bringing this to our attention.