RIP Bloglines

The once innovative and popular online RSS and news aggregator Bloglines will discontinue service on Friday, October 1. The Ask.com team that operates the site has essentially said that social media sites like Twitter and Facebook killed it.  Bloglines was the first feed reader I ever used, and I still have a 'subscribe with Bloglines' badge on the right sidebar, (don't worry if you can't find it, I don't think anyone else has either).

From a blog post on the Ask.com site, the underlying reasoning behind the shutdown of Bloglines is as follows:

...when we originally acquired Bloglines in 2005, RSS was in its infancy. The concept of “push” versus “search” around information consumption had become very real, and we were bullish about the opportunity Bloglines presented for our users. 
 
Flash forward to 2010. The Internet has undergone a major evolution. The real-time information RSS was so astute at delivering (primarily, blog feeds) is now gained through conversations, and consuming this information has become a social experience. As Steve Gillmor pointed out in TechCrunch last year , being locked in an RSS reader makes less and less sense to people as Twitter and Facebook dominate real-time information flow. Today RSS is the enabling technology – the infrastructure, the delivery system. RSS is a means to an end, not a consumer experience in and of itself.

To me the money quote in the post from Ask.com is the line about 'being locked in an RSS reader makes less and less sense to people. RSS readers (and for the remainder of this post, let's just use Google Reader as our example, since I am 99% certain no one is reading this post in any other RSS client or application), offer the powerful capability of delivering to you the news items, blog posts, and other website updates automatically, in a persistent manner, and make them easily consumable on your schedule (or just as easily ignored).  

They were, and still mostly are, a private and personal kind of experience. Sure Google Reader has built in additional capabilities for sharing items with people that are following you on Reader, and for connecting these shared items with Google Buzz and Twitter.  But some of these integrations require several manual interventions, and you have to admit if you are someone that has linked their shared items on Google Reader to your Twitter account to automatically Tweet, you are solidly outside the mainstream of the average blog reader.  And in terms of the uptake of 'following' on Reader, as of this writing I have 4,613 followers on Twitter, and 68 on Google Reader. Your mileage may vary.  But a 'shared item' on Reader connects with me in a way that a Facebook post or a Tweet doesn't, in Reader I am pretty sure my contact actually read the piece before propagating it to their connections.

Ask.com is making the determination (that very well may be true, it is hard to know), that simply consuming content in an RSS Reader is no longer 'good enough'.  We have, as users, to be able to easily spread that content out across our social networks like Twitter and Facebook, and in turn, we need to be able to mine our networks to find and consume content pushed or shared by our connections.  That news item, blog post, or funny video of kitty antics accrues more value to us, and to the network, the more that is is shared and circulated.  I get it, in fact that is pretty obvious. I would love this post to get widely shared around the social web, passed from Tweet, to Facebook wall, to Google Buzz, and back around again in a self-sustaining frenzy of consumption.

But before any of that can happen, I need someone to actually read the post first.

Which is exactly the capability that Bloglines was and Google Reader still is, so good at.  It is sad to me to see Bloglines disappear, but what would be worse I think is if we stop focusing on engaging with good content individually, personally, and for our own development and understanding while anxiously seeking out the Retweet button. Great content absolutely should be shared, but it needs to resonate with you first, and if RSS devolves into just the plumbing for sharing content, then I think some of that connection will get lost.

By the way, the Retweet and Like buttons are at the end of the post.  

I know, I am a hypocrite.  RIP Bloglines.

Have a better idea?

Over the weekend I read an interesting post on the User Interface Engineering blog titled 'Please, let me redesign your airline for you' that chronicles some well-known, (and some lesser-known), attempts by unaffiliated designers to suggest improvements to American Airlines' website, Delta Airlines boarding cards, and the main portal page for Delta's Sky Club. Redesigned Delta Sky Club Portal by Zach Evans

In all cases these re-designs and suggestions for improvement to existing systems and processes were unsolicited by the airlines that 'own' them, but were put forth by customers, the true end users of these tools and products.  In some cases, the designers are extremely dedicated and loyal customers, and by offering up their talents and time to contribute these ideas and improvements, they are almost begging American and Delta to please improve the user and customer experiences to a level that is commensurate with the dedication and loyalty they have demonstrated over the years.

Sure, the AA home page and the Delta boarding card as they currently exist probably do need an upgrade. And yes, as is noted in some of the comments on the UIE blog it is pretty easy for any designer to slap together a mock up for a new web page or to offer up an improved user portal design without having to consider any of the real and practical restraints that the actual designers and administrators of these systems simply have to contend with.

But the fact that these redesigns were developed independently and offered up to the organizations freely indicates three things about the current situation with these systems:

1. There are passionate and loyal customers

2. The systems themselves are lacking in some important ways

3. There are many users able and willing to offer improvements and new ideas

Loyal customers, systems that are lacking somehow, and a population of users some of which able and willing to assist, especially since as frequent, even constant users of the systems and processes can likely tell you exactly what is working and what can use some rework.

I think that the same can be said for many of the systems and processes that HR organizations present to their user communities.  

The redesigns for the airline industry tools and sites tend to focus on making things simpler, identifying and presenting the most important information more plainly and clearly, and finally serving to make the actual business transaction better and more efficient.  No one buys a ticket on AA for their cool website, but they want the website to help make their ultimate goal, getting to their destination safely and on time, easier.

I think the same could be said for most workforce technologies. They exist primarily to make employees and managers jobs easier, but often they get lost in a stew of features, links, and help text serving eventually to frustrate and confuse users.  I would bet that many of your employees and managers have some great ideas about how your systems could be redesigned to support them in their jobs more effectively.

That's my challenge for you today - ask one employee or one manager how they would change one of the key workforce systems that they use every day.  You just may get an incredibly useful and powerful suggestion. 

What do you hate the most about work?

What do you hate the most about work in general, or your job in particular?

The low pay?

The crappy hour long commute to the office just to sit in a cube and spend all day communicating electronically with your colleagues, thinking all the while, 'I could have done all this sitting home in my PJs and saved two hours in the car'.

The shaky bathroom habits of your co-workers?

How about this one - the annual performance review?

Yep, the annual performance review typically rates pretty high on the list of unpleasant activities that employees and managers have to endure.  We (mostly) hate them, we (generally) feel that they are a valuable and necessary activity to try and ensure employee efforts are aligned with overall organizational objectives, and that employees are provided the platform and opportunity to learn, develop, and simply become more engaged in the jobs and careeers.

And (theoretically) we tie the outcomes of the annual performance review to some if not all compensation outcomes.  The whole 'pay for performance' idea, (I bet you have heard about it).

But generally, despite the decades of managerial attention, scholarship, and execution, many if not most of us have come to the conclusion that 'performance reviews suck'.

Tonight on the HR Happy Hour Show we are going to take on this topic head on, with two of the founders of an interesting and innovative technology company called Sonar6.  Sonar6 makes performance review and succession planning software that promises to help your organizations execute a performance management process that doesn't suck.

How can technology impact the performance process in such a dramatic manner? How can a new and different approach turn 'suck' into 'fun'?

How can a couple of guys from New Zealand make a big impact in the world of HR Technology?

Tune in to the HR Happy Hour Show tonight, 8pm EDT, to talk with Sonar6 CEO John Holt and Co-founder Mike Carden and find out.  Better still, jump into the conversation by calling in at 646-378-1086.

Note : If you are not familiar with Sonar6, take a look at this 'Brief History of Sonar6' video:

Thanks guys at Sonar6 for staying up late calling in from the future to join us on the show.

Designing Experiences

The Hermitage is a massive museum of art and culture located in Saint Petersburg, Russia. One of the largest and oldest museums of the world, it was founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great and open to the public since 1852. Its collections, of which only a small part is on permanent display, comprise nearly 3 million items, including the largest collection of paintings in the world. It’s close to 2,000 separate rooms make for a daunting proposition for visitors, as simply seeing and finding items and collections of particular interest can certainly be difficult.

As the museum approaches its 250th Anniversary in 2014, it has engaged the services of renowned architect Rem Koolhaas to ‘modernize the art museum experience’ for visitors, while staying true to the history and tradition of the institution, and also under the constraints that no new buildings will be constructed, and no existing structures will be significantly modified.Kandinsky - Composition VI - 1913

What does this have to do with business, HR, or technology?  Perhaps not much, but I was looking for an excuse to run a post with a Kandinsky picture.

Well the three main operating principles that Koolhaas has adopted in his re-design of the museum-goer experience can, I think, be applied to many organizational and system design (or re-design) projects.

Principle 1 - Understand how customers really use your products – not how they “say” they use your products.

Whether it is by an over reliance on policies and procedures, deploying internal knowledge management systems that proscribe a rigid hierarchy and taxonomy for information storage, or explicit and detailed enterprise systems user guides that all attempt to define and control employee interactions, many organizations not only fail to see how their products and services are used, they demand or require a specific method of interaction.

How can HR and IT organizations do a better job at understanding how their products and services are being used? By really observe use patterns in the field, and not just ‘tracking’ them for one. Sure, your latest masterpiece on this year’s Benefits Open Enrollment process has suddenly become the most visited page on the intranet, but is it actually working?  What sections or pieces of information are the most important? Where do employees go immediately after accessing the information? 

Principle 2 - Create as many opportunities as possible for interaction between the customer and your product

In a museum setting, we’re not really talking physical interaction, but rather ways to foster more mental and emotional engagement with the collections.  By creating more opportunities for slowing down, contemplating, and in Koolhaas words "do(ing) everything possible to “diminish the obligations of a directed path”, the architects are attempting to better connect the customer to the experience.  

Inside organizations I think there countless opportunities to allow for more exploration, crowd sourcing, and discovery.  Does your culture overschedule people with hour upon hour, day upon day of a seemingly endless series of meetings?  Have you set the expectation that every e-mail has to be opened, read, and responded to immediately? Do you spend the first six months of a new hire’s tenure indoctrinating on ‘This is how we do things here’, rather than ‘Here is what we need to get done, here are the constraints, have at it’.

Principle 3 - Implement best-in-class practices from around the world

While chasing ‘best practices’ is not always sound advice, (usually it just puts you in catch-up mode, since once you identify which ‘best practices’ to emulate, and take the time to mimic them, the creators of said ‘best practices’ have already moved again to newer, and better practices, leaving you emulating yesterday’s good ideas). To me the ‘around the world’ angle of this principle is the important one.  It suggests looking beyond the typical sources of inspiration, (companies in the same industry, other local organizations, and competitors offering the same kinds of products and services).  Maybe your large organization can learn a thing or two from a scrappy start-up, your design for a boring B2B product can be energized by the iPad, or your enterprise software can actually look, feel, and be as fun and intuitive to use as Facebook or Amazon. Inspiration and ideas can be found practically everywhere.

Last thought, often when trying to change anything, we can get caught up in the barriers or constraints. But barriers and constraints will always be there, and in fact can for you to get more creative and focused.  Koolhaas has to take a 250 year old massive institution and re-design the experience in the next few years, while not changing the structure, layout, or much of anything else - I’ll bet your barriers and constraints are not nearly as daunting.

Note :My friend and fellow blogger Victorio Milian at his Creative Chaos Consultant blog has written about the importance of design and design thinking for HR professionals, and I highly recommend checking out his work on this topic.

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.