The Collocator

smart clients ahoy

interesting development at SaaS CRM vendor Entellium - they're discontinuing their browser-based product in favor of a smart client. an analysis of the rate at which their clients closed business with their application demonstrated better effectiveness with the smart client - a finding subscribed in part to better UI capabilities in the client than would be possible with a browser-based app.

i happen to agree with this direction. and one wonders what happened with SAP's Project Muse, an initiative that recognized the shortcomings of the browser UI-wise, and at the same time recognized the incontrovertible advantages of connectivity such as collaboration and portability.

in a post about this move, Phil Wainewright also speaks of a focus on results as a differentiating feature of Entellium's product:

"The entire user experience is built around the core premise of 'How should I spend my time most profitably?' For example, a new analytics module lets users compare key metrics to industry benchmarks to help decide where they most need to focus attention."

this can just as easily apply to an HCM product, like SAP's. E.g. if a learning administrator faces an overload, where will her time be spent to greater effect in the context of her organization's learning strategy: in scheduling the next month's courses, in managing course enrollments for employees with upcoming course expiration dates or in taking care of the frustrated employees waitlisted for more than a month on a populare new course. adding industry benchmark data would be even better.

better UIs allow for better implementation of business processes, which should incorporate metrics where relevant to improve them further. i'd rather try that in a smart client, distribution and maintenance disadvantages or not.

i'm now interested in Entellium - this just seems smart.

rss aggregators and social bookmarking

Haven't posted in a while, picking up the pace again in a festina lente way.

i use netnewswire as my rss reader on the mac at the home, after having used feeddemon for a year or so before that on my ibm tablet. From time to time i philander - albeit halfhartedly - to see what else is out there. But netnewswire is pretty much it for me - there are a great many features i love about it.

This post, however, is about something i wish it was better at, and that's the social bookmarking aspect of it. netnewswire makes it super easy to post an item to delicious, but i find that i simply don't want to go through the hassle of clicking on the save button in the delicious pop-up. i just want to flag the item in nnw and get it over with. the problem with that is those flags are only stored on my mac. i live in constant trepidation that all those thousands of xkcd cartoons, sartorialist pictures, flickr pictures of namakwaland, richtersveld, anini beach (via the smart tag subscriptions) are going to be lost through some unforeseen disaster. i've slowly started tagging flagging blog posts i want to get back to, but i know i'm going to have to go back and delicious them or something.

or something.that something in nnw seems to copy them to a clippings folder and then syncing up with newsgator's online reader. now i love what newsgator's doing with enterprise rss and social sites and i'm a fan of jeff nolan, but frankly this part of it _ _ _ _ _  _ _ _ _ _. i've spent a few hours in 3 different occasions to get clippings to sync up properly, which it could never do. but even if it did, i'd still hate having to copy flagged items, even from the flagged folder to the clippings folder. there's probably a way to do this with a script, but then i'd still have to rely on the newsgator online reader which is just so far removed from the features i have in nnw that i can't see myself using it. for one thing, in nnw there's a feature that i always wanted in feeddemon and that was that i could sort mysubscriptions and folders any way i wanted - so the important stuff - what i find most interesting and read the most often - is at the top. i lose that on newsgator and it may seem silly but it's also turns out to be pretty important to me.

this is certainly festina lente.

i want to be able to flag and tag any subscription item in nnw on my local reader on the mac, and have it backed up and synced up on something decent on newsgator. forget clippings. we call this social bookmarking now - delicious has it right: the url, the description/subject line, an optional clipping, tagging and sharing. that's it. that's what i want. 

i want the exact same features for that on nnw and newsgator online. i might even live with alpha sorting for a while. if i had this, i will never bother with saving my favorite photos on flickr, my favorite links to anything on delicious and my favorite blog posts on nnws. right now this i'm only doing delicious and nnw flagging, but boy am i going to move to something else fast if i find what i want. my truckdriver repartee will be in full force if i ever lose those flickr flags.

HR & Payroll transactional teams are the future

In the US it is most common from my experience that payroll reports to Finance and HR is a separate department.

Now, for the most part an HR process is going to have an impact on payroll. So when we design HR processes even for an HR shared services environment, we know that there's going to be a hand-over to payroll somewhere in these processes. This often results in problems with data not being complete by the time payroll is executed. This in turn leads to a strained relationship between payroll and HR. Payroll feels HR doesn't doesn't understand that they need to get the data in soon enough for the payroll run; HR feels payroll doesn't understand how much data they're dealing with. systematicHR also wrote about this recently.

I'm noticing that this is now being recognized as an issue that can be resolved by consolidating payroll and HR resources into teams. It seems that organizations are beginning to follow this approach. These organizations are using teams consisting of both HR and payroll resources to maintain the data for a particular employee from start to finish. A different payroll resource will still execute payroll to properly segregate duties. But the number of process handovers are reduced and employees feel they get better service.

It's not simple to get to this point, though. One has to be careful in advising this approach - one danger is that it could result in a turf war between HR and Payroll.

In addition, this raises an interesting question: does an organization take it one step further and try and assign specific employees to the various HR & Payroll teams ? I would imagine that this could resolve a lot of employee frustration, especially if one adds benefits resources to the teams also. However, it does require a method for assigning employees to specific teams, a process for notifying employees of team changes, a process for users to identify which team has been assigned to a specific employee and so on. Fortunately these processes can readily be accommodated, at least in SAP HCM.

So this is to say that in the area of transactional processes there is still room for improvement, even though the focus today is on the value-adding processes of talent management. I hope we'll see stronger willingness to take a process-and-team approach in the HCM space in the future.

another wish list item for sharepoint wikis

or any wiki for that matter, but since i'm using the sharepoint wiki at this point ...

my sense is that in a business environment folks are reluctant to develop an idea or an argument or the beginnings of a whitepaper etc etc on a wiki page. this process involves one person putting the base writing down and then the team evolves this idea by editing this text, adding to it, taking away from it. i think the problem with this is that it's not clear who contributed what. maybe the wikipedia experience counters this argument but good bad or indifferent that's what i suspect sometimes work against the successful adoption of a wiki in certain environments.

what would improve it to my mind would be the addition of a mechanism that ensures recognition for individual contributors and allows major contributors to better track what is happening to their handiwork.

this mechanism might take the form of first of all listing all the contributors somewhere on the page containing the wiki page. by clicking on any of the author ids it should be possible to easily see the contributions made by that user to what is currently on the wiki page. it could literally take the shape of uniquely identifying each word and punctuation mark that author contributed.

with the mechanism it must also be possible to see what i'd refer to as inline history. instead of having to compare the current page with a previous page, allow any contributor to basically click on 'play' and to see how the document evolved over time, with their own contributions marked in an easily identifiable way.

the beauty of blogs is that they are a way for authors to receive recognition for their contributions. the disadvantage in a knowledge accumulation and evolvement environment is that there are other mechanisms that are more suited to this purpose - like wikis. by adding mechanisms to wikis that allow one to easily see the contributions made by individual authors, the problem of invisible recognition can be solved and therewith - in my view - at least one of the problems with wiki adoption.

disclaimer: this is not a reflection of what is happening with my own organization's adoption of a wiki platform. the idea arose from a desire i myself have to be able to see how a wiki page evolved over time by being able to simulate how the document changed - effectively by clicking on a play button video style, with me being able to alter the speed at which the various versions of the page are shown.

more on HR's strategic alignment ...

Thomas Otter of Vendorprisey has been writing challenging posts here and here about HR's strategic role. Related posts and responses have been posted by Jim Holincheck here, by SystematicHR here and here.

These are not posts to comment on lightly, since this is really where the rubber hits the road with HR and this is also where HR has struggled historically. Solving the problem of how to optimize HR's strategic involvement is a little like solving world hunger.

But let me venture to say that the next decade will present a golden opportunity to HR to transform itself and become a much more integral part of how an organization is put together to pursue its goals.

Why in the next 10 years? It would be hard to miss that there's been an explosion of sorts in the talent management area. It is significant that we've moved on - technologically - from core transactional integration to the 'soft' functions in the span of what? 6 years? We're also talking much more about optimal practices and optimal processes and we're trying to put mechanisms in place for sharing these - e.g. the BPX community in the SAP world. Structuring organizations around processes and having the technology to measure and improve those processes are becoming more and more prevalent. And we're living in a world where employee self service is mainstream, we're living in a world where folks are putting how-to videos on YouTube. There's a culmination of theory, practice and technology that might very well lead to a 'tipping point' for HR.

To explain how I see HR's in helping an organization reach it's goals, first a bit of a lead up: here's how I've come to see the kernel of a business organization and HR's role in it:

- We have an organization with strategic goals.

- This organization accomplishes these goals with processes - the processes are aligned with the goals.

- These processes are performed by machines and people.

- The people need to be sourced, recruited, hired, educated in the ways of the organization and they need to know where they're going career-path wise

- The people are organized in some sort of structure, be it functional or team-based or something in between.

- The performance of these folks on the processes is measured,  always keeping in mind what the processes are and hence what the strategic goals are.

- The performance of these processes themselves is measured so we can improve the processes where need be and change processes as the goals change.

- And finally the employees are rewarded appropriately to foster an environment in which the goals of the organization areefficiently pursued through relevant processes and through the continual improvement of those processes.

This is an x-rayed business in a nutshell. According to me.

So what is HR's role in all this? Obviously quite a bit. But what we're saying is that in order for HR to play a strategic role it has to align everything it does with the goals of the organization and it has to be able to measure how what it does translates into value-add for customers and for shareholders.

How? Well, here's my utopian view.

It's analytics for starters, and it's analytics beyond turnover and headcounts. The slightly in-ward looking performance measures of the APQC should be provided without question. Full stop. Moreover, it's not only knowing what the cost of turnover is, but it's knowing this in detail - the costs of finding replacements for a lost employee, re-scheduling shifts to make do in the meantime and bringing new recruits up to speed. It's knowing what the cost of turnover is, but it's also setting a benchmark for what healthy turnover is. Dan Short pointed out in a very good paper a few years ago, entitled 'Why analyzing turnover is not enough', that not only do we need to measure Time-to-Hire, but we also need to measure the cost of Time-to-Competency.

But ultimately it's making an attempt to tie back to financials and to other concrete ways of measuring value-add the out-ward looking measures Laurie Bassi and Daniel McMurrer write about in their HBR article in March 2007, Maximizing your return on people'. As these 2 authors state, it's knowing more than how many training courses are delivered - it's also knowing what the training expenditure is per employee. And then HR needs to also know where the natural knowledge 'centers' are in an organization and make sure the organization and processes are designed to take proper cognisance of these centers.

Just looking through Bassi and McMurrer's list of practices I'd say roughly half of these can be executed and measured on an SAP ERP system today. Many of the rest can be addressed with increased incorporation of web 2.0+ collaboration and communication technologies - which, if I'm right, bodes well for SAP who in many ways gets web 2.0. What remains may be hard to tie back to an organization's top or bottom line.

HR ought to work with the folks in Finance to come up with novel ways of tying measures such as these to figures that says something. I don't want to gloss over how hard this is but in the spirit of co-operation who knows what's possible.

So how does HR align itself with the strategic goals of the organization and ensure, thereby, that it adds value, practically automatically?

It's in making sure an organization knows how to model and manage processes. It's providing an organization with human resources who have the ability to facilate process modeling sessions. Sessions that will result in processes aligned with the goals of the organization and in optimal processes to reach those goals.

It's in HR participating in these process modeling discussions because HR is going to have to ensure the staff is there to work these processes. It's HR who's going to drive design of an organizational structure that pushes decision making down to the optimal level. An org structure that ensures that knowledge centers and acquired knowledge - which HR is servicing through learning centers - are sitting at the right level. It's HR that's going to model the organizational structure so it's more than just a reporting structure, more than just a structure that reflects the financial structure of the organization.

It's HR who's going to need to ensure that process teams are appropriately skilled and scheduled. HR will do this e.g. by providing the proper learning services, and it's HR who has an opportunity to bring web 2.0 technology into the workplace to make learning fun and addicting through viral distribution of learning content. It's HR who's going to try and do something about the sometimes formalization-resistant definition of jobs and qualification catalogs and try and use folksonomies to improve on traditional methods.

It's HR who's going to help managers formulate KPIs against the processes they're helping staff and which HR's process modeling facilitators will have helped design and are helping measure. It's HR who has to come up with a way for managers to get more value out of performance reviews and start seeing more real value come out of it. Ongoing job reviews and KPI adjustments rather than bi-annual job reviews anyone ?

It's HR who's going to put compensation plans in place that exhorts the process-focused business to come up with better and different ways of staying ahead.

Taking this view, HR is almost subsumed by the business. Instead of a completely separate functional silo, it becomes inextricably enmeshed in the business. It is no longer possible to design, measure and reward a process-driven organization without HR, and so HR's role in contributing to the strategic goals of the business becomes unquestionable.

HR can also lead the way by other means.

It's HR who can practice the gospel of process and services centricity and reduce process handover by performing HR, benefits and payroll processes with teams instead of with individuals from each functional department. There are segregation of duties guidelines to keep by but even so improvement is possible. It's HR whose teams should be the first to be measured by customer satisfaction - i.e. EMPLOYEE satisfaction, in HR's case.

It's HR who can stay ahead of the curve technologically and provide employees with tools to change their home address without having to log on to ESS even - a tool that will allow them to update their address at their employer, their bank, social security, the post office, all in one go. Why wait for someone else to do this ? Talk about employee satisfaction!

It's HR who can provide more meaningful presentations of analytical data than your typical bar charts and 'oil gauges'. Take for example the Markov analysis (below) of workforce movement depicted by Peter Howes and Anke Doerzapf in an SAP insider article (April-June 2005), entitled 'What your workforce can tell you about your bottom line'. Who wouldn't want to have this kind of single-page, graphical expose of what's going on in terms of employee movement?

For HR much else remains to be done of course that may need to be done in a functionally more distinct compartment - industrial relations, workers compensation, setting HR policy, handling exceptions in transaction processing etc. But by more clearly separating this work and exceptions from the rest the absolutely necessary overhead of HR to the organization becomes clearer.

offline wikiing

i've written about wikis before and this is a continuation on the theme.

wiki's are just simply appealing because of how they allow one to put content on the web instantly.

over the years i'd primarily used wikis as an online notebook, accessible from anywhere as long as i had an internet connection.

but i remember years ago when groove came out that i read something about the research that groove was based on. (my brain may be misremembering this and i can't find the link anymore that supports this memory fragment.) it figured that not all users like to work online (what?). so groove was built - among other reasons - as a peer-to-peer content sharing and collaboration platform that allowed users to work offline on content before uploading it and to download content to their local systems.

now, groove is one way of taking sharepoint content offline; see for example an assessment here. colligo is another.

why am i suddenly on the topic of sharepoint? - well, i've used sharepoint on SAP HCM implementation projects and use it internally in my own organization - EPIUSE - and offlining is something that's pretty important if you're going to be on the road or somewhere without a connection - like BART.

we use the WSS 3.0 wiki capabilities and, just like i used to do with some of my wiki-'notebooks' way back when, i'd like to take our sharepoint wiki content offline as well. i was able to replicate my old wiki's - like fpwiki - on my local system simply by downloading the access database it ran on to my local IIS server. can't do that of course with sharepoint. fact is that groove and colligo is only capable of taking offline document libraries and such. which may make perfect sense to some, given that wiki's are meant to be online.

right? not right in my opinion.

the thing is that i would very much like to read offline - even if not quite be able to edit - the wiki content on our sharepoint server.

this is one of the reasons i found tiddlywiki so appealing - it's offline wiki'ing without a problem. (tiddlywiki has been picked up recently by BT; commentary by Jeff Nolan and Dennis Howlett.)

what i find just immensely frustrating is how much software microsoft is sitting on that could imho be put to better use. here we have a sharepoint wiki. i can't view the content offline. (and offline is important - let's not forget e.g. about google gears.) i can't easily link from one web page or wiki page to another or to a file - i have to look up and paste URLs around (there are other wiki's that are better at this, but in many respects they don't provide what sharepoint does as a whole). i can't do flashy things (ha! what am i talking about) on a wiki page like outlay-like intersperse document libraries, pictures, text, blog excerpts on a single page or a wiki-page, almost ala zoho notebook. i can't easily print a wiki page. i can't download it to word or powerpoint. i can't go from word to wiki and back again. i can't go from excel to wiki table and back again.

microsoft has so much at it's disposal - can't it make a collaboration platform that really works. i'm sure they've thought of this. we know they must be aware of what's being built by the makers of tiddlywiki, zoho and pbwiki.

ok, so this is an ironic post. let's just leave it there.

the question of doing AS-IS analysis

I attended an excellent day-long session on Creating the To-Be Process at BPMI.org's Business Process Managment conference series in San Francisco this past week. The course was presented by Dan Madison who wrote a well-received book on process management, entitled Process Mapping, Process Improvement and Process Management.

In the world of SAP HCM implementations 'best process' is a well-worn phrase. The result of salespeople and project managers citing it is that as-is analysis often falls by the wayside. The thinking is that since SAP HCM offers best processes there's not much of a point in rehashing old processes. And the argument is sometimes made that reviewing the as-is will lock the client's business process experts into thinking the 'old way' and prevent them from being open to the 'new way'.

Circumstances can be found when it's probably not all that necessary to investigate the as-is processes in detail. Organizations looking for an outsourced solution will not necessarily have the luxury of being able to customize their new processes to the extent they may have liked to. However, a lot stands to be gained from investigating the as-is in detail.

(This discussion really needs to start with what 'best' processes really are in the SAP HCM context and it ought to include a review of policies, business rules and business practices. That for later. Although I'll say so long that 'optimal' instead of 'best' is my preference.)

In considering whether a substantive as-is process analysis is necessary one has to look at what both the customer and the services provider will gain from it. It seems to me that the bulk of the benefit lies here:

1. The as-is is the starting point for understanding how the process works today and what, if anything, is wrong with it. This seems obvious, but if this task is performed well, it may be an eye-opener even to the customer. One of the techniques Dan demonstrated and which the class didn't completely get at first was that process maps are to be drawn based on a very specific example of how that process has recently been executed - this simplifies the analysis in the beginning and ensures that process experts don't analyze in terms of what should be but in terms of what is.

2. By having an as-is analysis of processes available it becomes possible to measure the efficiencies of the as-is against the to-be. This is a clean-cut method to validate that efficiencies have been gained and improvements made. It also lays the groundwork for continued process improvement.

3. Change management and end-user learning are eventually served by the availability of an as-is analysis. It is easier to explain to an end-user how the new way differs from the old way if one can actually draw the comparison. Just like it's easier to remember something new if you already have a framework to attach the new concept to.

There are other important practical considerations here as well - how much time should be spent on the as-is analysis relative to the rest of the project, how should the as-is be documented, should the as-is be performed during the blueprint phase, during the preparation phase or during a pre-preparation phase? Valid questions all. For a next post.

taking web 2.0 to HCM

this is a brainstorm post, so i'm going to stretch things a little bit here and there.

let's take a few web 2.0 concepts and see how they might apply to the HR environment today. i won't concern myself with making the business case here, with debating if this is going to be distracting to employees or not etc. for the purposes of this post it's just about possible examples of how web 2.0 technologies might find application in a business and HCM environment.

systematicHR has a more considered post on this topic here; also check out an enthusiastic post by Thomas.

let's take twitter first, since it's one of the most recent developments. as i said i'm going to stretch things a little here. imagine a group of employees using an internal twitter type feedback system on the job to provide running commentary on what they're doing. what would an organization get out of it? well, a business process expert may be looking at what's coming in from everyone and suddenly find herself with a treasure trove of data about how processes are actually being executed. or a communications manager may be looking at a growing database with valuable data about how employees are working and communicating with each other. instead of mashing this data with google maps, we mash it up with the org chart which helps put where employees are coming from in context.

from the perspective that applications like this help people meet each other and build interpersonal networks we may be looking at a new employee following what the veterans are doing and learn the ropes that way. we may be looking at employees picking up on someone effectively reporting a problem that they have themselves already solved and this person can now get in contact with the person experiencing the issue and help them solve the problem.

let's take tagging and folksonomies. hmmm. ok, in addition to HR annotating jobs and employee records a meticulously detailed skills and qualifications catalog employees are allowed to tag themselves with what they perceive to be their skills. let employees tag themselves - e.g. what their interests are. use these tags in a feedback loop to evolve skills and qualifications catalogs; let them tag the work and training material they come in contact with. we put a tag cloud up on the portal so it becomes clear to portal users which material is being looked at and used and which is the most important or popular.

let's take social networking and media sharing like we have in e.g. LinkedIn and YouTube. establishing a social network within an organization can be very useful to internal recruiters. but it might also be useful to business process experts and organizational design analysts in HR in tracking actual process and information flows.

with an internal YouTube - allow employees to 'tape' themselves performing some task and put it up as training material. instantly we have folks with intimate knowledge of how the job is done posting a personalized perspective on how to do a particular task at work. introduce a ranking system and let users gain prestige in the organization by posting well-made, useful training clips.

let's take wikis, which existed well before web 2.0 but i'll include it here just because it's a prominent part of the web 2.0 ecosphere. instead of letting my static job description just sit there, let me and my boss evolve it over time as my job becomes clearer and changes in rythm with how processes and goals change. notify my boss via email or rss when i made a change and let her decide whether to adopt the change.

give employees more control over the performance management process. let them adjust the goals as organizational goals and conditions shift. notify their managers when they adjust their KPIs or request an adjustment to their KPIs. let their colleagues twitter in quick observations about performance on specific tasks. this makes for a more responsive, dynamic organization.

let's take a voting system like we have in digg, a web 2.0 era phenom - instead of having a steady stream of company news on the internal portal, allow employee to contribute stories related to the organization and to digg stories or bury them. this may result in more folks reading the stories that are most important.

let's take RSS, a web 2.0 precursor. if i'm the recruitment director then push to my internal rss aggregator the persons applying for jobs with their name in the headline and other details in the body of the item. if i'm the HR director then push to my aggregator information about employee turnover - information about the employee starting or leaving, their job, the organizational division they're entering or leaving etc. if i'm the payroll supervisor, then push me information about off-cycle checks so i can see what kind of adjustments are being processed with the payroll system.

the thing with organizational structures

is that they go only so far at the moment. i'm talking about the typical vertical structures that organizes employees according to the chain of command - the reporting structure - and the organization's financial structure. these are the structures that are typically reflected in the org charts we see today. Thomas Otter's post about org charting tools is a good read to stimulate ideas around this topic.

changing how the org structure is designed and depicted presents a good opportunity to better integrate HCM implementations with the rest of an ERP system. it's also a huge opportunity for HR to become better aligned with an organization's strategic goals. let me explain what i mean.

in the world of ERP implementations today we take a process centric approach to how businesses should organize themselves and their ERP systems. this is culminating in BPM systems becoming more and more important and it is what SAP's BPX community is about. it is at the heart of what is so important about SOA and ESA.

now if we're serious about the escalating emphasis on processes then organizational structures are going to have to start reflecting that. we'll know they do when we see horizontal structures and flatter structures on org charts more often - the structures Frank Ostroff wrote about in his book about horizonal organizations.

if organizational structures are to accurately reflect and even influence process design there will be all sorts of far-reaching implications for how SAP HCM projects are conducted. to indulge in a little SAP tech speak: to more strongly reflect an organization's core processes in the org structure we need to use more organizational management objects than just the usual ones: position, job, org unit and cost center; the work center object becomes more important, the skills and qualifications object becomes more important. these are objects that can be used to organize people into teams according to what their skillsets are. doing this will lead to more process oriented structures, which will also means a more horizontal flavor to the structures.

the great implication for HR itself is that its alignment with an organization's goals immediately takes a step forward when the org structure - an HCM component - is tied directly to the processes that serves the goals of the business.

we can take this one step further to a practical application in business process modeling: we need to get to the point where all processes in SAP are modeled not only in terms of a role, but all the way through to an actual org structure position (which would be tied to a role). in other words, not only do we define hire-to-fire processes in terms of roles and actual org structure positions, but we do the same for e.g. order-to-cash processes. it is inevitable that HR will need to be involved on some level with non-HR teams in the design of their processes when this becomes the case.

an organization that places proper focus on its processes requires performance management and rewards and recognition processes and systems to ensure the success and continual improvement of those processes. the performance of an employee in executing a process must be evaluated. and employees must be rewarded according to their performance. both performance management and reward and recognition fall in the domain of HR & Payroll, and since the the org structure does also, it means that HCM forms an integral part of transforming and measuring a business around it's core processes.

the point of this post is really to point out how important HCM's role becomes if an organization is going to focus on improving its core processes. how there's a very natural route to HR's work becoming better aligned with the strategic goals of the organization. and how the interaction between becoming more process-focused and having the org structure reflect this focus are integral parts of this process. all this is underscored by the push towards talent management implementations today. what i'm also saying is that talent management implementations will need to take a strong look at the org structure as well to be optimally successful.

we need better tools to accomplish the goal of integrating the org structure with the processes of an organization - even if this doesn't result in horizontal or even hybrid organizations. we need better tools to design organizations that best serve the needs of customers. In the ASUG HCM benchmark study a strategic best practice is for organizations to run what-if scenarios on its org structures. but the ability to run what-ifs on org structures is not a simple process and not one that's supported today to the extent that it needs to be.

i predict that before too long we'll have tools that will allow us to design org structures in a powerful way by looking at the org structure in terms of processes and by allowing org structure elements to be tied into process design. maybe these tools will allow us to adapt organizations on the fly according to how processes change. maybe even according to how the interaction between people and teams changes thanks to the collaboration platforms and other web 2.0 concepts that's seeping into the ERP world. for certain that's going to add more value than the ability to just move some org units around without knowing if that reduces the number of process handovers or reduces the process approval complexity.

a little HCM data visualization

Mario Herger posted on the topic of data visualization the other day and emphasized how important it is to bring out the salient aspects of a data set and to not go overboard with the visualization methods available nowadays.

While I'm wary also of how meaningful data can be obscured by fancy visualization methods, I couldn't help letting my imagination go about an interactive data 'sketch' Ben Fry recently put up on his site. This data representation is fun to use and it looks great. It just confirms how mode of presentation remains an important part of inviting a user to look at data and to help the user make sense of it. Take a look.                                                         

The breakdown of Ben's particular visualization for baseball team rankings may be summed up as follows: constants on the right are tied to an element on the left where the elements on the left are sorted according to some criterium. In Ben's example the figures on the right show the payroll of baseball teams and the listing on the left shows the ranking of each team on a given date. If a team's ranking sits higher or on the same level as its relative payroll then the team's logo is tied to its payroll with a blue line; otherwise the line is red.

So here we have relative positioning and color (as well as the thickness of the connector) helping us make a judgement about whether or not a team's payroll is justified.

What makes the visualization even more compelling is the interactive aspect of it. By moving through the timeline one can very easily see how the rankings are changing relative to payroll as the season carries on.

Here are a few simple examples of how this model might be applied to present HCM related data (including a timeline at the top):