Confessions of an HR Director » Blog Archive » confessions…
I confess that its great to hear business professionals vent their spleen, and move beyond the soft metaphors that usually fill out the glossy company brochures.
Once we start speaking about the true state of things, we might get to move onto finding solutions to the things that bug us, and celebrating the things that make our days shine bright.
Well done !!! (hopefully there is more to come).
Management Blog: Technology only as good as user expectations
It doesn’t matter how good technological innovation is, it will fail
financially if the user reaction is not taken into account.
Working in software development and business intelligence, I have frequently been tempted to add ‘user acceptability’ or ‘cultural impact’ to the list of software features that are being compared between two different packages.
Especially when the user is being asked to populate the software with information (which is required for the software to operate effectively (like it did in the brochure));
I’m tempted to ask
‘Hey what’s the users payoff’ !!!
i) Love of the company;
ii) Joy in seeing the success and meteoric rise to fame of the developers in question.
Or maybe something a little bit more ‘personally motivating’ like
i) Being able to do their job faster
ii) Being able to chat to their friends in marketing without having to create an excuse to deliver documents 
I know sometimes the ‘way things really are’ (read the way users will actually react) is often too hot to write down on a project specification. But if its not put down somewhere (seriously) why do we even bother.
Certainly tech solutions that provide their benefits without getting in the users way, or provide the actual user with some real benefit to their daily world, will have a better grab at success and should be encouraged by us all.
Alex Barnett blog : Microformats Podcast
Microformats ???? Appear to be quite popular in the HR/Tech
industry. I, personally, have no idea what they’re rabbiting on about,
but I think (from the sounds of things) it would be a good idea if i
did 
I’m currently listening to the linked podcast. I’ll let you know how it goes.
technorati tags:microformats
I am an employee of Lettuce Systems www.lettuce.com.au (just to get my bias out of the way early). We’re a software development company that’s chosen to focus on the issues being faced by Human Resource Managers in relation to technology and knowledge management (huge topic I know … tell me about it (nicely ).
You can totally tell I’ve been working in software for too long, because I alway feel compelled to match the brackets up when I make comments inside a set of brackets. I’m not sure if this is correct (or even required). But I feel sure that some sort of nerd-DNA drives me to do it so that’s what I do.
But it’s not all spark plugs and wires. Before I worked in tech I was a bookish management student at the University of Melbourne; so I like to think of myself as a bit of balancing agent between both domains.
I intend this blog to be a place where I gather the links to interesting things I find on the web with regards to human resource management and technology in Australia along with my own thoughts and opinions.
I won’t rabbit on (much longer this is just meant to be a bit of a book mark to override the classic ‘hello world’ start that most blogs start with. As this is my 2nd or third blog in the world I figured there was an onus on me to try and do a little bit better.
