RSS and Microsoft

Over the weekend there was a fundamental change in the technology landscape that we all work in. At Gnomedex Microsoft announced that they are building support for RSS into Lornhorn, the next major release of the Windows OS. Lognhorn is due to go into beta testing late this year and with RSS tightly integrated into the OS things are going to change in a BIG way.

There is so much content out there discussing what this means I am yet to fully understand the implications, and I suspect it will take me about a year for this to happen. (6 months pondering what they will do and then 6 months with the actual software to figure out what they did.) But from an HRIS/HRMS/workplace application vendor point of view there are going to be some major things that can start happening.

Scoble has a good list of commentary on the technology communities reaction. Dave Winer (the father of RSS) provides support as well. We can also see the benefit of a social network happening. When Microsoft announced the support there was a mixture of positive and negative reactions. Phil Ringnalda provided some feedback and then within 24hrs Microsoft replied and said they would incorporate his feedback!

Some of the possible uses I see, and these are only a few that come to mind:-

  • Job postings via RSS direct to the job seeker’s system
  • Policy notifications from HR
  • Workflow notifications, with presence awareness integrated
  • Learning program delivery

While many of these things can be done today, when the fundamental technology is built into the operating system it is a lot easier for application developers to leverage. Therefore more applications use the technology and it become pervasive.

This is definitely a watch this space announcement!

Commitment vs. Engagement

Dub Dubs writes a follow up to his analysis of Northwetern University study from earlier in the month. Where he was struggling with the differences between engagement and commitment, like many people.

In his recent post Dubs is saying you cannot have engagement without commitment and just because you have commitment does not mean you have engagement. To this fact I would agree completely. Lets look at this a bit further.

The whole conversation that has been going on around engagement over the last couple of months is really good as we are working through the different aspects of engagement within the workplace. (I was going to post a link to a Technorati search but there seems to be a large amount of spam on the subject from Blogger which makes the search useless)This is obviously a good thing as the current trends in the recruitment marketplace are indicating that skilled employees are getting harder and harder to find. As such it is far cheaper to keep the people you already have. This means that engaged and satisfied employees are less likely to leave, saving you money!

There have been lots of studies on the cost of hiring therefore every employee you have that is engaged and satisfied adds to the cost avoidance line in your business case for retention programs.

links for 2005-06-25

HR Blogs OPML file

I have updated the HR Blogs OPML file with some more blogs I have found over the last week or so, around about 200 blogs there for you to review. Several things to note:-

  • You can point most RSS readers directly at the file http://www.specht.com.au/HRBlogs.opml and they will load up all of the blogs in one go!
  • You can now view the file in Internet Explorer in a human friendly format, sorry I have not worked out how to get Firefox working, if you know how to fix this I would love to find out but my XSLT skills are very poor and I have had to reuse some files from Joshua Allen of netcrucible.com.
  • There is a permanent reference to the file now on my sidebar