Managing your identity

Found Kim Cameron’s new blog today, an very interesting read, Kim works for Microsoft and their architect for identity. Kim is the architect of Active Directory and other identity activities, while fairly technical topic they have very significant impacts for HR systems.

In one post Kim talks about the first law of identity “The Owner Decides Law of Identity” Now I am not aware of the background to all the work Kim and others have done in this area however the post struck a cord with me.

Kim also talks about implied and explicit consent over the collection and usage of personal information from employees. Very interesting, while at a basic level I think all solutions in the marketplace cover these items, however if we extrapolate Kim and others thoughts things become very interesting. How do HRIS systems help facilitate the control over an employees identity, should we?

What do I mean. Imagine a world as described by Apple in their Knowledge Navigator (video link via Jeremy Zawodny) a lot of the underlying information needed to provide these environments will come from HRIS systems.

For example, many IT folks believe that IT systems such as LDAP are the basis of this information, here I disagree. HRIS is the master source and should be used to populate LDAP etc. HR are the first people in the organisation to begin data collection and as such should be the master.

This means long term we have some serious things to consider.

Vote testing

I have just been reading Tantek’s Thoughts (via Scoble) where Tantek provides some feedback on Scoble’s Information Overload session at BloggerCon. Anyway I felt I might test out the voting that Tantek wrote about. So my choice for a vote is for Firefox.

The rest of Tantek’s item is very interesting and worth a read, and some serious thought time.

Want to buy a blogger?

Jeremy Wright from Ensight is auctioning himself on eBay as a blogger for hire. I notice that I could buy him right now for US$5K and get his services for 3 months to provide 5 -10 posts per week. So lets do the math. Over 13 weeks I would get at a minimum 65 posts at the top end around 130. Therefore each post would cost me between US$76-US$38.

Now if I was a corporate blogger this starts to become a very attractive proposition. Good luck Jeremy!

Deviance + Innovation = ?

Scott Aldred has been talking about how the timeframe between fringe dwellers and social acceptance is reducing and the associated impact within an organisation. Scott refers to an old article from FastCompany on how we should all be thinking more like a deviant as this is a source of innovation. In reading these items it gets me thinking about The Innovator’s Dilemma which profiles innovation and how organisations cope with it and how innovation from other organisations can destroy market leaders (recommended reading for anyone who works for a market leader).

If the lag between fringe dwellers and social acceptance is reducing this also means that the timeframe for organisations to accept new ideas has reduced. This results in a significant challenge for oranisational development professionals in implementing change in an organisation. Can the organisation afford to take too long to adapt? How do you assist your employees to adapt to the change? How do you know you are changing in the right direction, as you might have missed something on the fringe?

The issue that faces many over us is if you surf close to the fringe how do you stop yourself from a wipe out? However if you do not surf close to the fringe, innovation might become more difficult to find, and at what cost.

My thoughts. Think Deviant.

Now who should I take out for lunch?

Unlimited money?

I colleague asked me an interesting question a few days ago.

“If you had unlimited funds what would you recommend to a medium sized organisation (3000-5000 people) as an HR/Payroll platform where today there are many different tactical tools in place and a trend towards an ERP platform in other portions of the business? Would it be a pure ERP solution or something else?”

I started to think about the different potential solutions. While it would never happen it is interesting to go through the motions of what would your ideal solution be. Being able to describe your solution helps give you an idea as to the steps that could be used in any organisation regardless budget. Such a “vision” can then be used as a framework for all work within the HR/Payroll system space as you know what you would ideally like to see in place.

My answer, while it is very hard to describe a solution in a few words as you are likely to miss very important portions, also having a two or three word motherhood statement gives you nothing concrete to focus on, here is a summary of what I said.

While the organisation has a trend to ERPs, that may not be the right answer for HR/Payroll, there are many different factors that need to be taken into account. While the back office changes are manageable the deployment of employee and management self service has a far greater impact on the organisation and as such you would need to ensure that the ERP vendor’s solution matched the organisational culture, if not then a point solution would be required for this portion. This type of analysis needs to be done in all areas of the organisation to determine the right solution.

I can almost guarantee that even if your solution is a single ERP vendor, implementation will take a while, even with the fast tracked approaches. How long will it take you to deploy to payroll, recruitment, ER, OHS, remuneration, benefits, training and self service to employees? Not to forget knowledge management areas of the business. During this time you will still want to be able to report and consolidate data from different systems. As such a parallel process of data standards should be undertaken. This way an OHS system will have the same location codes as the payroll and you can effectively analysis the information.

Also all employees should be allocated a unique identifier that is permanent. this identifier can then be used in all systems until consolidation (if that is the preferred end result). It also allows effective data inter-change solutions with system such as IT, building security etc.

I think you get the idea. I’m sure I have missed lots of areas, however it is easy to see that such a simple question can have such a diverse and complex answer.

Blogs the new social network?

Jeremy Zawodny has posted an interesting item on how blogs might be the new “professional lubricant” (aka network). He is right on the money, unfortunately still only in some job markets. Blogs are the new networking device for many people, mostly technical in nature at this stage, however this will change over time.

Many bloggers are finding that their blog acts like a viral marketing program of themselves, in a similar way as Phil Wolff wrote about a couple of months ago with regard to an ideal employee referral programs.