Duet, information death and email overload

This post had been written about a year ago, but I only started publishing to my blog a few days ago and it still seemed relevant. I wanted to get it off my chest. It’s about Duet and email. I altered it only a little here.

I expressed my skepticism about Duet using Outlook as a workflow communication channel. I was worried about how Duet might misuse an email mechanism for purposes that should best be handled with other mechanisms - such as applications for pulling up reports and workflow processing.

It’d be interesting to know what folks think of where Duet stands now, a year or so later.

So,: Bill French said 'email is where knowledge goes to die'. I largely concur with this.

But along come SAP and Microsoft with Duet, which threatens to dump workflow processes and even reports in my inbox. I am against that.

I am in the camp who thinks that Outlook is the wrong vehicle for bringing better usability to the broader user community. In fact, I believe the time has come for a new SAP HCM user interface and improved processes running on a thick-client, a smart-client with desktop and web components, mind you. Maybe more on that later.

The thing with workflow notifications is this: I want to be able to track, view and process workflow notifications in an application or applet that has been developed specifically for this purpose; something better than the OWA available on the SAP portal. If I could choose I'd want a graphical representation of the state of workflows that I'm involved with. I want reminders of urgent workflows in a place where I'd actually react to them, not where they're going to be mixed up with my email. I want to integrate workflow with email only when it's necessary. I don't want to be distracted by constant workflow messages, I want to be able to go TO it. Just put a workflow processing application somewhere in my main workspace and I'll take care of it.

Reports in Outlook are even worse. Just as I want to be able to go to Sharepoint or some wiki whenever I'm interested in some discussion about something (instead of being cc'ed on an email trail 50 threads deep), I want to be able to go TO the place where I can get my reports. I don't want to keep getting updates of a report every time it is re-executed or new information becomes available - it's not as if the email with a fresher version of the report automatically finds older versions and deletes them. Am I really going to want to remember that I should always look to see if there's a newer email with a fresher report than the one I'm looking at? I may be wrong, but it seems that this is what was going to happen.

Do I want my vacation time in SAP to be integrated in my Outlook calendar? Sure. But I also want my Outlook calendar at work to be synced up with my personal calendar on MSN or where ever; my personal items should of course be flagged automatically as private. Or vice versa.

I hope Thomas Otter won’t take exception to the fact that I’m referring to one of his recent posts (The future of HR systems and thinking?) twice in a row, but I think there’s really quite a lot to be explored in the following statement by him (a paraphrase of something Dennis Moore of SAP said):

HR systems today are all about capturing what the company wants to store about me. (grade, performance, salary and so on) HR systems in the future will capture what I want to tell the company about myself.

So to continue my rant: do I want to see my personal and address information in Outlook? Maybe. But what I definitely want to be able to do is to build a mashup where I can easily display and edit my addresses at all the different organizations and persons that have it - I want to be able to say, yes this is the address my employer has for me, now change my address at Social Security and at my bank to the same address.

Duet is a step in the direction of leveraging services to provide a better user interface and a more integrated 'data and process experience'. But I disagree that it's entirely a step in the right direction. We misuse email today, and among the things that will rescue us are better colloboration platforms. Platforms where we can easily publish information or subscribe to information. Platforms where we can easily build our own mashups of information we want to combine and coordinate with each other. Web 2.0 in the workplace.

I was not the only looking at Duet with a slightly skeptical eye - Zoli Erdos and Vinnie Mirchandani were also. Has to be said they were skeptical for different reasons than I; it's worth checking out their posts.

Vinnie quoted Charlie Wood (link seems to have rotten in the meantime) as saying

Ultimately I think Duet is a fantastic prototype of what's to come: solutions for exposing enterprise applications within familiar desktop tools. But where Duet is a proprietary, one-off integration, we will soon see generalized integration capabilities built on the lightweight, open standards of RSS and Microsoft's own RSS extensions, which add support for structured data and synchronization.

I’d like to see ‘generalized integeration capabilities’ for handling ‘structured data’ relevant to even the core elements of an HR and Payroll system, such as changing my address or bank account information.

Comments

[Jerome Gouvernel]

I completely agree with you here.

It’s a case of “when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.

Outlook is a platform that already struggles to reliably and coherently deliver basic services so adding more tactical processes on top of that is unlikely to improve user experience.

The complexity of the Duet architecture is testimony to an "after-thought" design.

A universal process delivery platform (which I think is what you refer to as a “thick client”) is surely what is missing. The web browser may seem like an obvious candidate, but I am not sure it is the best technical platform. It is probably the correct paradigm though. RSS and Web Services can be leveraged but as a delivery mechanism, a web browser will simply not cut it…

[Leendert van der Bijl]

Jerome,

Not to turn this into a love fest, but I couldn't agree with you more that a browser-based delivery platform is not going to make the grade. Another of my never-posted writes in 2006 was about the announcement of Project Muse. I remember thinking this was a sign of new UIs to come and recognition that not everything new should or can happen in a portal. Of course there are numerous applications today of the web/desktop variety, e.g. MS Money which stores banking data on one's machine but accesses all sorts of data on the web for display and manipulation in the desktop client.

Here's that post of yore:

Take a look at Jeff Word's SDN blog post on Project Muse - the new SAP GUI. I want to highlight two important things about Project Muse, both of which are discussed in Jeff's post:

1. Project Muse is services based. This is why it requires ERP 2005 or 2004s as the backend. This new UI is a early manifestation of how the enterprise services approach is going to give rise to new user interfaces for SAP applications.

2. Muse combines the advantages of a desktop thick client and web browser thin client. This is in my view an important tip of the hat in the direction of the thick client. We've seen that browser-based applications - AJAX notwithstanding - cannot fully match the performance and presentation capabilities of desktop applications. Jeremy Zawodny refers to this as web/desktop bridging.

Imagine how HR desktop/web applications are going to provide a richer user experience than possible with today's applications.

Imagine when these applications start to be hooked up to online/offline collaboration platforms ...