Thomas Otter

I’m convinced that too many user interfaces are trapped by tyrannies of table and text. I while ago about blogged about many enterprise software UIs being like Donuts. Via Steve Clayton this arrived in my feedreader this morning. It is goodness. Someone give this fellow some HR system UIs to work on.

St Petersburg has had several name changes in its 300 years or so of existence, being known as St Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad and then back to St Petersburg. Czars, revolutionaries, dictators and democrats have all left their mark on maps, signs, history books and now navigation systems throughout Russia and the former Soviet Union. In South Africa several cities, roads, school, airports and national teams have had name changes, and rightly so.  However renaming a city or a road is not to be undertaken lightly. It causes confusion, creates costs and stirs up emotions. Names are important.

Take the case of  the newly named Archer’s Road. (via the Guardian)

A street in Sheffield that has been the butt of jokes for many years has finally won a battle to change its name to something less … behind the times.

Residents of Butt Hole Road long ago stopped seeing the funny side of the legions of titterers taking pictures of themselves with their pants down next to the road’s sign. After clubbing together to raise the £300 necessary to pay for a new sign, the local council has agreed to name the road Archers Way, in honour of its half-mile proximity to Conisbrough Castle.

There are many cases when a change in name makes good sense.

But why is it that some software companies keep changing their product names every few years? Do they understand and care about the pain, irritation and cost it inflicts on their customers?  Who exactly do they think they are helping other than the brochure department? Do they realise the vast forests of systems documentation that are made obsolete? The hours wasted doing find and replace in Powerpoints, and worse in the application code itself? The helpdesk and partner confusion?  The environmental impact alone of a large vendor changing product names is material. I wonder if I could plug that into a carbon footprint calculator? I bet it would be equivalent to a few jumbo jets or negate the impact of a newly minted LEED compliant building.

I’m beginning to think that we need to start referring to such applications as the application formerly known as…and…and before that….and before that….and originally. When road names change and country names change for the public good, it is normally because the people living there demand a change. I don’t know about you, but I’m not seeing lots of enterprise software customers clamouring for the renaming of the systems. Most of them still call them by the original names anyway.  

Jim and I published a first take on the SuccessFactors deal with Siemens. Gartner clients see Siemens to Provide Important SaaS Talent Management Test Case (G00168920), 15-JUN-2009.

Last week I suddenly felt like one of those people you meet in IT who keep telling you that computing hasn’t really changed since punchcards or Fortran, and that everything just repeats itself. Either that, or I had stumbled upon the flux capacitor. I shuddered briefly.

Let me explain myself.

Just after I joined SAP in the mid-nineties, PeopleSoft won a significant deal at Siemens. This really shook SAP up, and led to significant investment in the HR part of R/3, especially for the global market.

Then PeopleSoft stumbled, sucked into the joyous complexity of German payroll.

A few years later, SAP won back large parts of the account. I didn’t really realise it at the time, but SAP was pretty agile in its response to the loss. It had long term positive benefits for SAP’s HR product.

At first sight this month’s win for SuccessFactors seems remarkably similar.

But history doesn’t always come around the same way. For history to repeat itself here, three things need to happen:

1. SuccessFactors stumbles.

2. SAP delivers a comparable offering via SaaS

3. SAP convinces Siemens to change back.

SuccessFactors today is more globally aware than PeopleSoft was in the mid-nineties, and it has the chance to learn from history. It has a broad European customer base, and well established operations here. It is also steering clear of German payroll.

In the mid-nineties, R/3 was already on the way to dominating the client/server ERP market. Today SAP is dabbling with SaaS in various forms, but I do wonder if it will react to this with the same agility and focus that it did back then. Also, the Siemens of today is different from the Siemens then.

Earlier this year I wrote a note about the SAP German HR congress ( Gartner clients see) Observations From SAP’s German HR Congress (G00165965), 06-MAR-2009 One of the things I said was.

"German organizations are in a good position. SAP perceives that it has significant competition in the talent management space and is strengthening its products, while best-of-breed vendors see an opportunity to gain an increased foothold in the market. There is nothing like a DAX 30 company selecting a best-of-breed vendor to focus the minds of SAP management and its development organization, as no organization likes to lose at home.

We will be watching with interest.

I took a brief detour to the TED website this morning.  I watched Malcolm Gladwell’s talk from February 2004. TED is a dangerous site. People have been known to disappear in it for months.

Click here if you don’t see the screen.

Watching it is 20 minutes well spent, even if you aren’t a big spaghetti sauce fan. This isn’t a food blog.  Gladwell’s message is very important for those that design and deploy software, especially those responsible for the user experience.

Most of what he says about spaghetti sauce could be applied to user experience. There is no perfect sauce, there is no perfect UI or UX. Embrace diversity. 

Readers of this blog and my Gartner research will know that I am a big fan of analytics. Not the really the tools, but the skills to take numbers and turn them into something useful. I’m not a statistician, but I know several. I’m even friends with a couple (meaning, in this instance, more than one, rather than two statisticians in a significant relationship).

Tony Hirst, who I linked to the other day about the UK politics mashup, came back and commented on my blog, so I followed a couple of his links and I ended up at the delightful Dataspora blog.

The post the three sexy skills of data geeks is excellent. Here is the concluding paragraph, but read all of it.

Put All Three Skills Together: Sexy. Thus with the Age of Data upon us, those who can model, munge, and visually communicate data — call us statisticians or data geeks — are a hot commodity.  I grew up before the age of geek chic, when the computer wizzes were social pariahs, and feature-length movies were dedicated to nerds seeking revenge.  But in the last decade, Steve Jobs became an icon, the Internet became cool, and an entire generation of tech kids grew up well adjusted.  They even built the social web to prove it.   I believe the same could happen to statistics and data geeks too.

I spent Friday night on the phone with a large company asking about how to sort out their HR analytics issues. My advice was to hire such a person, and not worry too much about whether you need to do the charts on tool a or b. I didn’t put it quite as eloquently as model and munge though.

Sometimes with web 2.0 technologies I feel as if I’m seeing demos of solutions looking for problems in a technology bubble, but this example really shows how mashups, text messaging and blogs can have a real impact on the quality of life and democracy. In this case, in Africa.

via the TED site. Ushahidi — a crisis-tracking tool with roots in TEDGlobal 2007 — has been awarded a $200,000 grant for development from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Spend a moment watching Erik in Action. link here if it doesn’t display in your reader.

Well done Erik and the gang.

Web 2.0 technologies are having an impact on UK politics too.

From the cc flickrstream of sludgegulper Thanks!

I have been watching and reading about the goings on with the UK parliamentarian expenses with a mixture of incredulousness, dismay, horror, and anger. As this isn’t the place to charge off on a political rant, I’ll leave my criticisms to a minimum, save to say this is a grave insult to the UK tax payers, and a blow to global democracy.  

Other than all the information about moat cleaners, tennis courts, duck shelters, large screen TVs, iPhones for husbands, 200 mile taxi rides, tax advisors, and mortgage payments on mortgages that no longer existed, I was struck by the absolute lack of process and systems to manage the expenses. The inefficiencies and the lack of control are astounding. 

The problems are bigger than technology, The whole process needs a complete overall, but essentially we are talking about some basic compliance procedures. Workflow approvals, automated routing of claims out of policy, electronic receipt management,and SOD (separation of duties).  Even simple expense management system would go a long way to stopping this sort of abuse happening again. Rules can be easily automated and enforced, and with a bit of configuration, even issues such as flipping and claiming for trivia could be managed.

Driven out of a good process system, the data could also be easily mashed up with consumer analytics tools such as Google maps, and a simple query tool, allowing concerned citizens the right to audit.

Indeed, there has been a wave of excellent mashups and analytic reports based on the data that has been released and collated.

Charles Arthur over at the Guardian has a closer look.  Tony Hirst’s blog gives an excellent account on the technical efforts needed to do this. Looking at what he has done with essentially free software. It is interesting to see how various technologies and techniques have been deployed. more here.  It is a fascinating study for anyone interested in analytics and data visualization. It does make the analytics offerings of many of the software vendors I cover seem rather dowdy, but that story is for another day.

Shining a bit of sunshine on the issue by opening up the data  is the best remedy. After all, when I last looked, parliamentarians work for the citizens.

Not only did the Australians invent the flipper, a devious cricket delivery,   but they have an innovative HR technology thinker in Michael Specht.  If you are interested in HR tech then you ought to be reading his blog.  He has a lot of experience and interesting ideas, especially around the impact of social software on HR.

More generally, there is a lot of HR technology innovation coming out of Australia and New Zealand. Expect to hear more about HR technology innovation from outside the US in my Gartner research over the next few months. Global companies looking at talent management processes would do well to cast their net wider than just the leading US and European Vendors. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see Australian and NZ vendors start to succeed globally. They seem to be growing in confidence and reach through the success with the larger Australian multi-nationals. Now the next test is to see if they can make the big leap and compete for other multi-national business.

Keeping up with the rate of innovation in HR technology is challenging, so if you have come across an innovative smaller vendor,  no matter where in the world you are, let me know what you are doing with them. If you are a small vendor innovating in the HCM space, arrange a vendor briefing with me or Jim Holincheck.  Rolf Jester and I are also interested in talking to SIs that focus on HCM technologies, would love to hear about what you are up to.

From Mel Conway’s website.

In 1967 I submitted a paper called "How Do Committees Invent?" to the Harvard Business Review. HBR rejected it on the grounds that I had not proved my thesis. I then submitted it to Datamation, the major IT magazine at that time, which published it April 1968. 
Here is one form of the paper’s thesis:
Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure

This was on my mind at Sapphire last week. To understand the road maps and legacies of software vendors, especially the big ones, you really need to understand how they are organized and have been organized.  The code reflects the organization reality.  Grasping the shifts in the organization was one of my main goal at the event, as this gives us more insight into the company strategy than press releases, keynotes and powerpoints do.

The first German Chancellor, Otto Von Bismarck once said

„Je weniger die Leute wissen,
wie Würste und Gesetze gemacht werden,
desto besser schlafen sie!“

This loosely translates as the less people know how sausage and laws are made, the better they will sleep.With large software vendors I’d suggest it is the opposite. The more you know about how your software is being made the better, as only then can you really understand the products and the strategy.

Here is the organisation chart of The Tabulating Machine Co, which eventually became IBM.

photo credit CC flickr. Thankyou Marcin Wichary for an excellent series of computer history images.

The best job in the world campaign from the Queensland government has gone brilliantly. It created masses of publicity for the barrier reef, on prime time TV, in the press, and across the full spectrum of social media.  It won best advertising campaign of the year.

According to my favourite newspaper, the Guardian.

A PR coup for Australian tourism, the whole campaign has generated around A$148m (£73m) worth of publicity for northern Queensland. In a clever piece of marketing and timing, they sent out news of the concept on a dreary Sunday afternoon in Britain, and subsequently the idea of a job reclining on a beach in Australia promptly received a prominent news slot in Monday morning’s papers

British Charity worker, Ben Southall landed the job, beating out 35.000 applicants.

There are a number of technical innovations that are worth noting for those of us involved in recruitment and recruitment software. Strong use of video based CV/Resume, Viral campaign, Voting, Community, multiple social media channels, psychometric testing…

I could pick up on those here, but I think there is a more important point here for recruiters and HR folks. Do you align your recruiting strategy with your overall branding strategy? Can you turn your recruiting strategy into a brand advantage? What does your  recruitment process say about your brand?  Do you work closely with marketing to position the employee brand in the broader branding strategy?  Do you measure the impact of your recruiting strategy on your brand?  Can you clearly articulate why someone should want to work for your organization?

If your organisation is skeptical about the power of social software and the web,  then you could do worse than remind them of this campaign.

If anyone has any details on the technology platforms used to manage the application process and the selection, I’d love to hear from you. What innovative recruitment strategies have you seen? Do let me know. please.