I'd like a calculator that plays music, please

Everything keeps getting more and more complex even at the same time as technology is meant to make our lives easier.

Compare the TV remote control you use today to the earliest ones you remember.  Today's remotes have enough buttons and functions to select, pause, rewind, fast forward, slow mo, super slo mo, record, mute, and probably a dozen more things I can't remember. And that is just for the TV itself.  

The latest in remote control technology, such as the Logitech Harmony One, can support up to 15 separate devices, 'making it easy to control even the most complex home entertainment systems'.

That's pretty cool, I guess.  I mean who really wants 15 separate remotes scattered about.  Let's not quibble over the details like what happens if the 'can control 15 different devices' remote malfunctions, or goes missing, or the dog chews it up and chaos ensures when you can't access your recorded TV shows, play tunes, or close the garage door. And is there anyone that actually has 15 separate devices that could stand remote controlling anyway?  No you can't count your kids/animals/in-laws in that reckoning.

But cynicism aside, we know that technological advances in consumer as well as enterprise technology generally do make our lives easier and more enjoyable even while introducing progressively more of a burden on our capacity to understand and adopt to them.

Having access to the controls of 15 different devices at once is truly fantastic but if all you do with that power and capability is tune into the latest installment in the misadventures of The Situation and Snooki, then the promise of the technology is largely wasted, and you likely overpaid to boot.

But the problem is that simpler is not always better. Having to get up off the sofa to change the TV channel was a royal pain, and arguments to my 9 year old to the contrary, it did not make us better people.  

As KD pointed out today on the HR Capitalist, more and better technology doesn't always deliver the kind of essential capability that the organization requires. The technologies certainly help us and the organization 'do' things better, more efficiently, etc, but we still need to know what things to do in the first place. 

The real innovation in remote technology won't just control more and more devices, it will help bubble the best shows up to the top of the list, and not just the ones I have watched in the past, but maybe the ones I could use to round out my overall game.

Once again, a post without a real point, but I can't take the time to sort one out.  I think my smartphone is finally charged back up and I need to get back to email, texting, Tweeting, reading the news, and watching a few YouTube videos.

As for the title of this post - it was inspired by the image on the left, proving that as far back as the 70s we wanted our gadgets to do more and more. 

Admit it, you love the Bedazzler

Remember the Bedazzler?

The little stapler-like tool that lets one attach rhinestones, studs, and stars to clothing and other items? In the words of a classic TV infomercial pitch the tool - 'Takes things from dull to dazzling'.Flickr - Linda Libert

Just in case there is anyone reading that does not remember the Bedazzler, the basic idea was that you take an old or plain looking shirt or pair of jeans and via the careful and artistic attachment of (fake) jewels and other decorative attachments, the article of clothing would be transformed from a boring and typical piece into something unique and special.  The benefit (at least as described by excited TV pitchmen) was the rescue of clothes and other objects, and the ability to imbue some personality to plain articles.

That old pair of boring jeans, or that plain, solid color t-shirt immediately become one of a kind 'artworks', that can revive and revitalize a tired wardrobe and instantly transform the wearer into a kind of unique and distinctive personality.  Why be boring when you can be Bedazzling?

And you, or perhaps more accurately, many of your organizations love the idea of the Bedazzler. 

How so?

Think about that old legacy ERP system that you are using for HRIS, or the technology behind your intranet or employee portal, or the home-grown Microsoft Access and Word-based system a few smart folks from IT hacked together nine years ago to do some rudimentary talent and succession planning.

As time goes on, and with budgets constrained, and resources are tight the organization has likely been forced to make-do with what you have had, and most updates/enhancements/improvements to these systems (and perhaps to the underlying processes they support) are not at all that much different than slapping a few rhinestones on your old pair of jean shorts.  Sure, the first few stones and studs look good, they add a bit of flair, and in the case of your systems, a bit of functionality. And just like 'Bedazzling' a pair of jeans, adding incremental pieces of capability to your old systems is cheap, generally easy to do, and often provides some short term excitement and satisfaction.

But eventually the excitement and the ability to continue to meet the demands of the business with a cheap set of rhinestones runs out.  And then Bedazzling stops being fun. No matter how many fake jewels and colored studs you slap on those jeans, they're still the same old, tired jeans underneath.  

Eventually you'll fill up the jeans with glam, there will be no more room for additional enhancements, and you'll be left with a one of a kind custom monstrosity.

And that is not very dazzling.

The Talent Wheel

Yesterday Mike VanDervort sent me a link to this, a really powerful, yet simple graphical and interactive World Cup schedule calendar tool.

The image at right is a screen shot from the interactive tool, but the image alone really does not do it justice, I recommend taking a minute or two to check out the site and try out the graphical calendar.

In a simple, one page display the calendar allows the user to display data about the World Cup schedule in several dimensions - by participating country, by Group, by date, location of the stadiums, and by stage of the tournament.

For example, clicking on a country name on the left hand side of the wheel displays that team's scheduled games with date and time information, highlights the locations of the games and their dates.  Alternatively, selecting a specific date on the wheel will display all the games for that date, with teams, time and location information highlighted.  

For a World Cup fan, the calendar is a bit addictive.   

After playing with the tool for a bit I wondered if the ideas from the powerful, simple, and kind of fun application of the World Cup calendar could be applied in the workforce technology context. Imagine the sections and spokes on the wheel begin populated with organizational dimensions like functional department or region, core competencies or specific skill sets, current or future major organizational initiatives or projects, and perhaps details like past performance appraisals or position in talent pools for succession plans.

As a project manager or business leader looks to staff a project, or find a potential candidate to fill an important new role, he/she could navigate the 'Talent Wheel', highlighting the relevant skills, experiences, or other important information from the spokes of the Talent Wheel.  The tool would then present the relevant information in the center of the wheel for display or optional export. 

Or perhaps the Talent Wheel could be configured to better reflect and display organizational reporting relationships in today's large and much more complex matrix structures.  Since organizations and workforces are much more complex than the schedule of a sports tournament, perhaps the wheel could be designed to accept a few input parameters before the display is actually generated, allowing the user to narrow or more precisely design the Talent Wheel.

Either way, I think the main points to consider are these - the World Cup calendar presents moderately complex, multi-dimensional data in an interesting, powerful, interactive, and fun manner.

Can you say the same thing about the systems that you are using to analyze workforce data?

Or if you are a designer of such systems, are the tools you are creating as engaging to use as the World Cup calendar?

Do your users actually have fun using your solution?

Thanks Mike for pointing this out - it is surely an addictive site!

The Vernon Farm Calculator

For the last few years there has been much said and written about the importance of accurate, timely, and relevant workforce data to support and guide managerial decision making and to ensure that human capital strategy is aligned with and can enable the execution of business strategy.

It is an easy argument to make, but certainly a much more difficult promise to deliver. In large organizations workforce data tends to be scattered across a wide set of disparate systems, from ERP, to ATS, to possibly Talent Management tools. Not to mention the scores of offline spreadsheets and databases maintained by HR and and line managers.  How many mid-size to large organizations out there are still calculating and processing employee annual salary updates on a slew of manually distributed Excel spreadsheets?  Go ahead and admit it, you are certainly not alone.

And even if the organization does have the technical capacity to collect and begin to analyze this information, it can be a challenge to present, communicate, and deliver the data in a meaningful way to the people that the information benefits the most - the line managers, supervisors, and front-line in the trenches folks.  Their need to make better informed decisions about how to leverage existing capability and how they may need to develop new capability to deliver customer service, create opportunities, engage employees is essential, and all the best data collection and and analysis tools will fail if the delivery mechanism does not resonate with these key users.

The image at right is something called The Vernon Farm Calculator.  It was manufactured in the 1940s as a tool to provide farmer's with ready access to important information about crop sizes, unit of measurement conversions, yield calculations, and a host of other important data points that the average out in the trenches farmer would need to analyze, assess, and then execute his or her strategies to arrive at the best possible outcome.  Sounds a bit like what today's managers need to do as well, just substitute mares, bushels of corn, and the combine's last service date with employees with a certain skill, production schedules, and historical sales data.

I think as designers and implementers of information systems we can learn a few things about the delivery of essential intelligence to our users from the design of the Vernon Farm Calculator.

Portable

The calculator is designed to be a portable, carry along with you or toss it on the front seat of the truck kind of tool. When the farmer is out at the barn or in the fields and needed to do a quick calculation about pigs, or wheat or whatever, he or she did not need to stop what they were doing, drive back to 'Farm HQ' or even worse, put in a request to the Farm's HR or IT department to run a report.  And as an added bonus, the calculator was made of tin, not cardboard, which ensured it would stand up to the rigors of the farm environment, and not need to be 'upgraded' or 'maintained' all that often.

Multi-use

The calculator did not just serve one purpose, it informed the farmer across a wide range of important data types that all taken together were going to be critical to the overall success of his enterprise.  He or she did not need to carry around one 'tool' for assessing crop amounts and another tool to calculate the expected marketplace value of the new set of pigs.  The folks at Vernon had to have consulted with real farmers and gotten to know the wide range of information that they would need to make the calculator a useful and practical resource.

Simple

The Vernon Farm Calculator came with a one-page user guide.  Sure, the print was kind of small, but all the essential information for the average farmer to be able to get information and insight to help run the farm was on one page.  And better still, important operational instructions for some of the more complex features of the tool were printed directly on the face of the tool itself.  So in many instances there was no need to refer back to the one-page guide.  I think that this kind of simplicity in operation, the ability to distill the important features and instructions to their base level, and the capacity to put the most needed 'help' information in plain sight are all lessons in design that can be taken from the farm calculator.

Relevant

The farm calculator was only about one thing, providing the farmer with easy access to information that would help him or her have a better chance at succeeding in their business.  That's it.  There is no extraneous functionality, no clutter, nothing that detracts from the design and the ultimate delivery.   I think we can also take a lesson here, it the information or the hot new feature that we think, as designers or implementers think is wonderful, if it truly does not directly assist the managers in making decisions needed to execute their business, then it surely is superfluous.

That's it - the end of a too long post about a 1948 Farmer's tool.  Those farmer's were on to something for sure.

 

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Note - The Vernon Farm Calculator is an example of what is called a Volvelle.  Volvelles have been around for hundreds of years, you can learn a bit more about them here.

Too many choices?

Tonight on the HR Happy Hour show we will be talking about Work/Life 'Fit', and how organizations, specifically the HR professionals in organizations can better understand how to design, implement, and measure the success of workplace flexibility programs. Our guest will be Cali Yost, of the FlexStrategy Group and WorkLife Fit, Inc., writer at Fast Company, and an expert on workplace flexibility

In preparation for the show, I thought to write a 'Technology for Flexibility' kind of post, digging in to some of the many available technologies that organizations have and can bring to bear to better support more flexible, and in many cases more virtual work. Technologies like Google Apps for e-mail and office-type productivity, DimDim for fast and cheap screen sharing and web conferencing, and Socialtext for content creation and collaboration, internal microblogging, etc.  There are scores of solutions ranging from crazy expensive, to 100% free, and everything in between.

But then I thought, the problem for (most) organizations and HR professionals that may be wrestling with the decision of how, or even why to implement more flexible working arrangements (that often have an element of remote working to them), has almost nothing to do with the technology.  Even I, as a technology person, have to admit this. Most large organizations have already embraced the kinds of technology solutions necessary (VPN, company-issued smartphones, web conferencing, collaborative online workspaces) to encourage more workplace flexibility.  In fact, some would argue that these solutions have indeed created the kind of flexibility that the organization desires, employees are 'working' when they are at work in the office, and they can continue to be tethered to 'work' when they are not in the office.

That is the ultimate in flexibility is it not?  No matter where you are, work is right there too.  Sort of like that nagging bug you pick up after you get stuck next to 'Mr. Coughing the Entire Flight Guy' on your last business trip.

To better underscore the point that technology is only a (small) part of better and more evolved workplace flexibility strategy and execution, consider this quote from author and speaker Gil Gordon in a speech given at a Telework conference:

The technology for telework is very good and continues to get better. This does not mean it is perfect, or that it is always the right price. But the best news is that we have plenty of technology - hardware, software, and telecommunications - to allow telework to be effective.

I have seen many of my US clients having a difficult time trying to select from among this big list of technology. There are too many laptops, too many kinds of remote-access solutions, and too many kinds of applications software. What is needed is a way to create packages of tested solutions for various kinds of telework situations.

Gordon goes on to note later in the speech that 'culture', not technology is the true barrier to increased adoption of telework in organizations:

In many cases we have failed to recognize this kind of integrated, connected aspect of telework, and we have also failed to recognize that the very culture of an organization changes when we start to change some of its parts. The very best telework programs I have seen are the ones that involve a lot of planning to consider these cultural changes, and also anticipate what else in the organization must change for telework to succeed in the long term.

By the way, these quotes was from a speech made by Gordon in 1999! We will figure it out eventually I am sure.

So if we believe the basic points of Gordon's talk, that increased adoption of flexibility (at least in the form of telework arrangements) as far back as 1999 presented not a technical barrier, but a behavioral one, then drawing up a list of all the myriad technologies that are available that could support increased flexibility adoption seems a bit like a waste of effort.  

We know these technologies, we have them already, in fact we have too many of them.  Many of you are walking around with 90% of the 'technology' you need for increased workplace flexibility in your back pocket, (or in a belt holster if you are this guy).

So for once, on a technology blog, I will agree that at least this time, it is not about technology at all.

I hope you can join in the fun, tonight at 8PM EDT on the HR Happy Hour show.