This then takes you to the LinkedIn page of a Gartner recruiter, Peter Fay.

To those that say this social software stuff isn’t having a fundamental impact on HR processes, I say see above. If your organization isn’t using or seriously thinking about using these channels for passive candidate search, then perhaps it is time to start doing so. If you build recruiting software and you don’t have a plan on how to integrate all this social software business into your offering, I’d suggest you have some work to do.

Oh, and if you are interested in the job, please do get in touch with Peter.

There is also a cool job looking at privacy too. I’m almost tempted to apply for that one !-)

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.

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.

I receive lots of vendor briefing requests, some relevant to my work, and others not.  This one links to my research on privacy and HR technology, so I’m listening to it this evening. But what made me blog this today was IBM’s use of Twitter and the hashtag. Twitter is in the enterprise. How are you using it?

This post is also a subtle apology to Jeff Mann.  I  forgot to peer review his note on  Four Ways in Which Enterprises are Using Twitter,

The popularity of the Twitter micro-blogging platform has soared during the past several months. While Twitter is primarily a consumer phenomenon, Gartner has identified four primary ways that enterprises are using Twitter, but one of them is not recommended.  

Sorry Jeff.

John Prescott, former UK deputy Prime Minister,  took on the Bank bonus issue in the UK.

Anne took on the Facebook Terms of Service. She blogged about her reasons for starting the group.

I hadn’t read anything about any changes to the TOS up until then and was surprised to see they were changed weeks ago and without anyone noticing.
I have had an ambivalent relationship with Facebook since I signed up (it’s complicated), and in the years I have been there they haven’t done much to make me trust their service or their judgments, so I felt I had to speak up this time.
After some initial research (reading the old and new TOS for instance) I set up the group on Facebook about an hour later.

Personally it wasn’t so much about getting Facebook to change their TOS (at least initially). If you read the old TOS you would have known that they always sucked and probably always will. Ideally they would add the two lines they removed again, edit the wording in some places, explain why they felt they needed to change the Terms of Service and how these changes would affect their users.

The group has well over 100,000 members now, and Facebook has reinstated the old TOS.

Here is Anne on Norwegian TV.

Unlike John Prescott, Anne isn’t a politician. She is actually an enterprise  software implementation expert. She focuses on ERP/Abobe integration and form design.  I recently spoke with Anne about Adobe Forms and ERP Integration as part of some upcoming research I’m doing.

Well done Anne. This is a fabulous illustration of the power of social software. It also yet another example of Facebook making a blunder on basic legal concepts. (they should be taking my survey)

from rpongsaj’s flickr cc license (thanks)

Today is International Privacy Day, and it is all over the blogosphere. This is a good thing. Generating awareness about privacy is goodness indeed.

But I find Eric’s position on Techcrunch  that losing your privacy is the price to pay for on-line participation and collaboration rather depressing.

The more of our lives that we put online, the less privacy we have. It is as simple as that. And this is a problem that will just get worse over time. You cannot be fully engaged on social networks, blogs, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, FriendFeed, and all the rest without opening yourself up to phishers, scammers, and identity thieves.

It is a false assumption, and a easy way out for software vendors and companies that process our data. Merely shifting the responsibility to private citizens is a cop-out. It is technological determinism of the most invidious kind.

Privacy is a fundamental human right, at least where I live. It is time that software makers, data processors of all kinds realise that, and build that into their product designs and business processes. It is also time that governments get more serious about enforcing the laws.

It took a few decades for the automotive industry to take responsibility for car safety, and it took a lot of government pressure and effort to bring down the accident deaths. There are of course still too many, but car safety has become a shared responsibility between manufacturers, government and drivers.

Data breaches in the US  since January 2005 now total 252,276,206 records according to privacyrights.org.  Just like pollution is a externality in manufacturing, privacy failure is an externality in a software. Users can’t fix it alone.

So yes, change your passwords, check your privacy settings, watch what you share. But it is now time that software makers and governments take privacy far more seriously. It is not a zero sum game, we can have a rewarding on-line experience without sacrificing privacy, but it will take a concerted effort from all the parties.

For vendors in the HR technology space, I’d be really interested to hear what you are doing to protect and enhance the privacy of the personal data that you process or enable the processing for. This is part of my research agenda this year.

(photo via flickrstream of addedentry)

So much of our enterprise systems reporting is still locked into the rows and columns model of reporting. Yes, some vendors have oil gauge type dashboards and yapc (yet another pie chart) but I’ve only seen one or two vendors who really think hard about how to change the way data is displayed.

I came across a super web-site this afternoon. (Thanks Claus) It takes a map of the world and changes the sizes of the countries based on different criteria, such as number of cellphones,or  this example below women in parliament. (the excellent mappingworlds site is here)

Look how small the US is on the map. This is a powerful way of visualizing data, partly because of the  Von Restorff effect. A phenomenon of memory in which noticeably different things are more likely to be recalled than common things. Mapping worlds changes the way the see a common image, the world map. The dissonance is what makes you think and remember.

This TED presentation from Hans Rosling has been watched millions of times. It is a lesson for us all in data visualization data and presenting it.

Imagine if you presented your succession planning data like this? Wouldn’t it have a whole lot more impact? Most of you have years and years of ERP data, why not do something noticeably different with it?

Anyway, this morning on Twitter I noticed that several of my online connections had recently spilled beverages, adult or otherwise,  on their laptops.  Closer to home, my wife’s macbook still works after a coffee incident, but only when plugged in to the wall socket, also the range of the wireless has decreased to a few metres, and one of the shift keys doesn’t shift.   To fix the laptop would cost more than replacing it, and would mean being without it for a couple of weeks. It limps on. It is the Bruce Willis Die Hard  of laptops.

Tom provides advice that only experience brings.

Don’t leave a 2 year old alone with a laptop.

What does this have to do with SOA?

Well, one of the alternatives to a laptop is a desktop.  Here the main parts of the computer are separate but connected.  If I spill coffee while working with a desktop, I just end up replacing the keyboard.  The rest of the system goes on working fine. If you are accident prone, buy a desktop.

SOA is software’s attempt to limit the damage that a cup of coffee does. Much clearer now isn’t it. hmmm.  If you are looking for something more sensible on SOA and HR technology, my colleague Jim Holincheck has written a series of notes on this.

Moving swiftly on from SOA.

ASUS and Intel are asking users to help them design a better computer. Have a look at the site WePC.com. I think a coffee proof laptop would be a winner. Not sure that anything can be made to be  2 year old proof though.

This reminds that I have been planning to do some more research in to user led design in an HR context. TIme to get out the Von Hippel.

One service that I use a lot is Last.fm. It encapsulates so much of that 2.0 goodness, Tagging, suggestions, the joy of discovering obscure bands you hadn’t heard of before, or finding bands you’d forgotten about.  You can build your own radio station, and listen to those of others. For free.  Because of Last.fm I have bought more music in the last 2 years than I did in the previous 10, so there is a business model there somewhere. 

I have a sagacious colleague who researches serious and weighty topics in the ERP world, and he is rather skeptical of some of these 2.0 sort of things. Until I pointed him to last.fm.

Turns out in the late 1970’s he was a bass player in a Punk band- The Exclusives, and they have a single. It is on last.fm.  Have a listen to the Sinking Gondola.  Warning. It is hard hitting, punchy stuff. Just like his research.

Microsoft’s recruitment blogs are an excellent example of the effective use of blogging in a recruitment context. They  provide good guidance on how best to apply to Microsoft and put a human face on what is, for most job seekers, a daunting exercise.  They make good use of video too.

I’m  working on a note at the moment on the employer brand and social software, so I decided to spend sometime in YouTube surfing around looking at recruitment related activities. Nothing like a bit of primary research.

I found this example from Google. An engineer is doing the talking rather than corporate communications or HR.  It isn’t a professional video, but it is neatly produced. It works quite well, and it does an excellent job of showcasing female engineers. There are some moments of “scripted acting”  but most of it is genuinely open and transparent discussion. It gives a good insight into Google. It is probably a tad long.

This one from Cisco. More polished, professional presentation. It positions the organisation well, without being too syrupy.  There is a strong CSR message in here too. A big factor when recruiting, especially for youngsters, but not something you can fake. There are several other Cisco employee cameos out on YouTube, most of them well done.

Xobni, a start up, (Xobni is inbox spelt backwards) uses, for want of a better term,  “developer” humour. It picks up on the company culture and gives an excellent insight into the business. It works. I really liked this one.  However, it takes a good bit of creativity to pull this off.

I suppose I’m nearly 20 years older than the target market for this clip, but I do wonder about the effectiveness of this particular effort from Cap Gemini.

At the very least, HR should have an idea of what is out there on YouTube about their company. Consider putting recruitment videos on YouTube, but I’d suggest you need to tread a fine line between over produced corporate advertising and “hip and funky” amateur attempts.  Hippness is impossible to fake.

But remember also to consider copyright issues on backing soundtracks, the last thing you want is the RIAA after you.

What techniques have you seen out there that work? Please send me links to the ones you like and the ones that make you cringe.

Gartner research subscribers may want to look at The Business Impact of Social Computing on HR Data (G00160278), 05-SEP-2008 and Alumni Community Management Isn’t Just for Universities and Consulting Firms (G00159095), 17-JUL-2008