The new wild west is your Second Life

Keen observers will have noticed that Second Life is a growing phenomenon with lots of opportunities in all sort of areas. The initial inhabitants of Second Life are/were pornography and gambling, gambling has recently been baned. Recently (last 12 months or so) corporations have been trying things out in Second Life, conferences have been run and a general process of learning what can we do with this new world.

However like the early internet (say pre 1998) you need to be careful. Cam Reilly from The Podcast Network explains his recent experience with regard to land rentals.

About three weeks ago, I rented my first land in Second Life with the idea of experimenting to see how TPN could use it to spend more time with our community. I rented the land from an avatar called Rich Bulloch (who also apparently goes by the avatar Dog Fargis).

All was fairly good until:-

This morning I found out that Rich Bulloch, who was renting the land himself from a Gigs Taggart, is behind in HIS rent and as a result, I’m getting evicted from my island. Gigs claims he hasn’t heard from Rich is over a week and Rich is way behind on his rent. So Gigs is evicting us! We can rent the land ourselves from Rich but he wants US$114 a MONTH. Remember I’ve already paid Rich about US$150 for SIX MONTHS. That’s a pretty big rental rise and way more than I had budgeted for.

This highlights how unregulated Second Life really is and that people and organisations wanting to get involved need to do their homework. Cam admits he did not do too much research as he wanted to learn by doing, but how many other corporations can afford the same process?

Another example of how wild Second Life is, Australia’s government owned broadcaster ABC had their island was destroyed by hackers earlier in 2007.

Calendar synchronisation

Long time readers will know I have been searching for the ultimate calendar synchronisation system to keep my Corporate calendar, sync’d with my mobile device (now Palm Treo 750), with my Google Calendars (multiple). This has become more important now as one of the Google Calendars is being used to coordinate who is looking after our son since the separation.

Currently my Palm Treo is set up with Exchange synchronisation for all of my email, tasks, contacts and calendar items, when I connected via USB my Notes are also synchronised. During business hours things are keep update every 5 minutes, outside business hours once an hour. (A note to Microsoft why can’t I syncronise my Notes over the air like everything else, is this a factor of ActiveSync, Outlook, or Exchange?)

What I want is my second Google Calendar synchronised to my device, and then back into my Outlook.

I have previously tried ScheduleWorld and found issues with timezones, which is a big issue given all my work meetings are across multiple timezones. ScheduldWorld is also a bit over the top for what I needed, basically it wanted to become the hub for my calendar data, sorry that is my Treo.

Over the weekend I started testing out GooSync a complete “over the air” synchronisation service, I even paid the £19 for the full service option, but there is 30 Day money back deal. The installation was easy, my only issue was I screwed up the subscription purchase and seemed to have got my Visa card banned by some security service, this might not be such a bad thing!

Overall it is working nicely. I have been adding appointments in all 3 places and they are appearing correctly in the other locations! My only complaint is GooSync can’t do automated sync’s.

Hidden costs of software projects

Today I have been writing content about selection and implementation of HRIS systems. One area where I have spent a bit of time, probably too much, is around identifying costs and benefits.  Many for HR professionals the implementation of an HRIS is the first time they have been involved in a software project, and therefore are sometimes not aware of these things.

Software implementation projects tend to have many hidden costs that you need to ensure are captured as part of you business case, and managed during the project. Example hidden costs are:

  • Lost of productivity during implementation, such as re-training
  • Lost of productivity through poor user support
  • Opportunity cost of management
  • Pilot costs
  • Internal resources working on the project
  • Internal marketing costs
  • Change management
  • Data conversion/Data cleansing costs
  • Tech-“savyness” of HR
  • User support both technical and business issues
  • Ongoing software and hardware maintenance

Getting me to help you recruit

Using LinkedIn for recruiting is not a new idea, actually using any social network software for recruiting is not new either. But I wonder what the success rate is? I suspect low.

I have received lots of notes over the last few years from recruiters wanting to connect or looking for applicants, most I ignore.

Today is a little different as I received a note, not a connection request, from a recruiter that I am actually responding to.

Why? Because of the approach.

  • First it was targeted, they are looking for a “Director of Technology, Human Resources”, which was the subject line and immediately got my interest.
  • Second the first words were “Please excuse the intrusion”, an acknowledgment that they were taking time out of my day.
  • They went on to give a quick background of the job in 2 sentences, then stated why they contacted me, cause of my background essentially sucking up.
  • In the end an offer to send me the briefing document to forward to possible interested parties and then thanked me again for my time.

Personally I find that this approach works well both in email and over the phone, more than likely I will bite. The steps are simple:-

  1. Acknowledge that you are taking time out of my day
  2. Make it relevant, the more targeted the contact the higher the chance of success
  3. Flattery gets you everywhere
  4. Accept if I don’t reply it is that the contact is not relevant enough or I am just too busy

The opposite, trying to randomly connect in the network, a “hey can you help?” or “are you available?” note, just does not work.

Educating HR on metrics & technology

As I mentioned a few days ago I have been asked to help re-write a topic in AHRI’s Professional Diploma of HR looking at measuring and reporting on the effectiveness of HR and selection and implementation of HRIS systems. Over the last few days I have been re-reading lots of books and articles I have floating around to develop the content.

One of the first areas I have begun looking at is Return on Investment, or ROI. ROI is critical for both understanding the effectiveness of an HR organisation/program and critical to justifying expense on an HRIS system.

This lead me to dig out an old book of mine, “Third Wave Project Management” by Rob Thomsett, written in the early 1990’s much of the content is a bit dated but still a very good read. I was looking for references to Gane & Sarsen’s software development methods from the late 70’s. In the book Rob works through how to use Cost Avoidance, Improve Service and Increased Revenue to measure value when building business cases.

By the way Improving Service, which is what lots of HRIS business cases are built on, should always have a secondary benefit of  avoiding costs or increasing revenue.

My new Palm Treo 750

Over the last 6 months or so I have been wanting, needing and wishing for a new phone, I had some basic specifications that I wanted which were not to outlandish. Back in JulyI was lucky enough to test out a loaner phone from HP, the iPAQ 6965 and refined my requirements.

About a week ago I got a new Palm Treo 750, which meets most of my requirements:-

  • Windows Mobile 5.0 for push email and seamless Outlook integration
  • HSDPA
  • 240 x 240 screen resolution
  • QWERTY Keyboard
  • Bluetooth 1.2
  • Ok talk and stand by time, if you turn off Bluetooth
  • Vibration alert
  • Alarm clock, calculator, typical document viewers (DOC, XLS, PPT, PDF)
  • Size 112.9mm x 59.3mm x 21.3mm, almost right on my specifications

The biggest let down is no Skype, Yahoo IM or Wifi. But with an xSeries data plan from Three I have a fair bit of data usage available to me.

I am enjoying the fast internet speeds, push email and full Outlook integration. Being able to stay on top of my email is great and so far it is not taking over my life. If I modify some of the way I have implemented GTD I feel I could really take advantage of the device to make me more productive.

What has happened in the past few months

Long time readers will know that this blog has been a bit of a waste land for a while now. I felt it was about time I informed you as to what has been going on.

Over the last little while my 13 year marriage has fallen apart and just under 3 months ago we separated. Long complex story that I won’t go into, but obviously this has meant I have been spending time on other things.

Add to the situation a significant increase in work volume from my day to day job the blog has been neglected.

In the short term, I cannot promise things will change, but they will in the longer term. I am helping the Australian Human Resource Institute (AHRI) rewrite their Professional Diploma of Human Resources, specifically a topic on HRIS and metrics. I need to complete the work by the end of October on top of everything else, busy busy. I suspect it will focus my thoughts back on HR, management and technology generating new content, which could end up here. Time will tell if this is the case.

Slide show available online

I have put the slides from last night’s presentation online at SlideShare, they can be viewed via http://www.slideshare.net/mspecht/intro-for-hr-on-blogs-web-20/, only issue is you miss out on my fantastic commentary.

A couple of points

  • The cartoons are all Hugh Macleod’s of gapingvoid fame
  • To review the buzz words you need to view the CommonCraft Show videos
  • To learn about Web 2.0 you should read ClueTrain
  • Finally look through the links at the end as 90% of the content is found there, and you don’t need my commentary

Employees and Web 2.0

One of the topics I covered during last night’s presentation was how to build safeguards within your organisation so that employees for who were interacting in this brave new web 2.0 world. (Converts of Web 2.0 you might think I have lost it so before you all stand up and walk out hear me out first.) There were basically 3 topics I covered:

  1. Ban everything while inside the firewall
  2. Build a policy
  3. Educate

Banning everything is just no possible or practical. While you might stop access from inside the firewall, hence remove the “lost productivity” or security risk but employees will still be able to use the tools from home. This means that accidental publishing of content that is confidential or inappropriate might still happen, and you will probably piss them off as well.

Building a policy is great as it informs HR, and management about the issues but policies typically don’t change people’s behavior. Therefore you still run the risk of inappropriate content ending up in the Google cache.

Educating your employees is the key. This way you make sure employees, managers and HR understand the ground rules and what can happen if they “stuff up”. Some of ideas I laid out where (all from a great Corante post in 2004):-

1. Stop and think.
2. Use your loaf.
3. You can disclaim, but you can’t hide.
4. Keep it real.
5. Respect the channels

Above all empower and trust your employees.  This really should be the way you manage everything in the “new world”, ok it should be the way you manage all the time. 🙂

Web 2.0 and HR

Over the last few weeks I have been preparing a presentation on Web 2.0 and Social Networks to give to a group of HR professionals. The topics I plan to cover are:-

  • Provide a quick overview of what this all is
  • How they help employees use them for good not evil
  • How Enterprises can use the tools, aka Enterprise 2.0
  • How HR can help in the implementations

The presentation uses the idea of FUSE (Find, Use, Share, Expand) where I have pulled together ideas and thoughts from many other people into a single presentation, with attribution. There is also heavily (maybe not healthy) dose of gapingvoid cartoons.

One final thought, during the process I actually realized how big these topics really are and how easy it would be for someone to get very confused.