Lost and found and everything in between

I have been on a bit of a self imposed (and not so self imposed) break. I have just not been motivated to either blog or read my feeds. The reasons, several:-

Firstly. Over the last 3 months I have not found many really, really cool things. There have been cool things but nothing really, really cool to write about.

Secondly. I have been busy with work, the clean up after our first go live and now planning for the next one, in 13 days.

Third. I have been through a PC upgrade at work which killed my RSS reader, Pluck. I have installed a new reader (5th in the last 18 months), RSS Bandit. So far I like what I see, Pluck had become slow in recent upgrades, while my initial (5 hours) usage of RSS Bandit show it as very fast. I have also deleted all of my RSS feeds and will start building them again.

Finally. I have been busy at home, looking for a house to purchase here in Melbourne, while trying to sell up in Sydney. Neither activity has been very easy.

Over the next few hours/days I will be posting some of follow ups to what I have missed. All tapped out at 37K feet using Qumana a new offline blog posting tool I am trying out.

How to evangelize HR

Today one of the most popular corporate sports is to dump on HR. In the 90’s the IT department took the heat, while they are not immune to the sport they seem to have risen above HR as a target. Some of fixes we all talk about is “being strategic”, “adding value”, “providing an ROI” and finally “getting a seat at the table”. But what does this really mean?

During the last few days (and nights) I have had several minutes to think about this and other things. I remembered a recent post by the Guy Kawasaki who has taught us how how to sell the dream, how to drive your competition crazy, rules for revolutionaries and now how to start. Guy talks about how to evangelise a product using his DICEE principle and I thought that it could be modified to evangelise HR.

DICEE is about:-
* Deep. A great product is deep.
* Indulgent. A great product is a luxury.
* Complete. A great product is more than a physical thing.
* Elegant. A great product has an elegant user interface.
* Emotive. A great product incites you to action.

Are the products and services provided by HR deep? Do you provide products and services for first level management all the way up to the executive office? Do they understand the different experience levels and needs of managers?

Are the products and services provided by HR indulgent? Are all employees and managers made to feel special when dealing with HR? Or are they treated as a “number” or statistic.

Are the products and services provided by HR complete? Do you offer a complete package of services, or have you stopped with a shared services centre and not worked out the rest of the delivery chain? Do all methods of service delivery interoperate seamlessly together? It is about the user experience.

Are the products and services provided by HR elegant, easy to use, understand and implement? As Guy says ” A great product doesn’t fight you—it enhances you.” Do your products and services enhance your organisation?

Do they generate an emotive response from the organisation?

I suggest that if we reviewed our products and services and how they are delivered to the organisation along the lines of DICEE there would not be so much “HR bashing” within corporations.

The night shift

Yes I have disappeared, and yes I will reappear. We just have a little project at work that goes live this weekend. I have pulled the short straw and am working the night shift controlling the data conversion and communications with the client.

Back sometime next week.

(It looks like we will be using a wiki for a bug tracking software during the warranty period 🙂 )

links for 2006-02-17

links for 2006-02-14

Listings from the edge

Over the last month or so I have been watching with great interest the growing buzz over Edegio. Last week they had their first every public demo at an SDForum online classifieds event in the Google offices. So what is Edgeio? To quote from their first blog post:-

Edgeio is all about edge publishing. It is our belief that services that try to restrict how users create and consume information cannot ultimately be successful. Users own their data, and services exist not to silo that data, but rather to add value to it. That is what Edgeio is setting out to do.

We will be focusing on classified listings of any type to start.

While a bit abstract the terms “classified listing” has had my attention.

BusinessWeek Online has a great summary of the Edgeio demo which begins to give you an idea of what they are planning. To summarise the summary:-

  1. Register with Edgeio
  2. Post an ad on your blog
  3. Tag it with a predetermined tag “listing” to start with (aka microformats and structured blogging)
  4. Edgeio picks up your item, pings your site and you are off and running
  5. Wait
  6. Sell

Now buyers get tools as well that allow them to search for listings, narrow in on a geography, filter by tags and view the original post.

The tech blogosphere is awash with posts on the topic as they see this new start up as a disruptive move in the classifieds business (Craigslist, eBay, Google Base etc). There are even photos appearing on Flickr from Australia’s very own Kevin Leversee of PandoraSquared.

But what does it mean to job classifieds?

If the tag “listing+job” is used on a blog post we suddenly get a whole new marketplace, I am not sure if it a marketplace that they want to be in. Blogging tools could begin to replace high end corporate job boards allowing recruiters (or managers in smaller firms) to easily post jobs without the need to of specialised software or technical help. Search tools could aggregate the data and provide results back to job seekers. Ok, they can do that today and vertical search is picking up the jobs but this is a new spin on the whole process. Looking further if you take the services being offered by blog search engines, tagging tools like del.icio.us and sharing services such as Zingee and a wiki, most people with half a technical brain could build their own eRecruitment tool for their SME.

Further Edegio will be adding a reputation system which will add to the whole experience. Can Edegio handle the multiple layers/levels of tags that would be required to really get job ads going I am not sure but this is certainly something to watch.

The moves in the online classified market over the last 6 – 12 months definitely mean that this is an area to keep an eye on as the potential disruption to traditional job boards and eRecruitment vendors could be huge.

links for 2006-02-13