systematicHR

I think it’s apparent that I love talking about portal. Much of what I talk about is fairly theoretical and visionary considering not all the technologies are actually fully capable of delivering what I’d like to see, but we’re getting closer. Part of portal is easy for HR technologists. Making sure that the functional technologies are integrated on the back end and brought forward to a usable user interface for the end user and customers is the whole point of a portal. I’m not saying the tasks of making this happen are easy, just simply that it’s obvious. What’s less easy for HRIT people is dealing with those pesky right brainers – the communications groups who tell us how to design things to make them more effective.

Let’s start from the beginning – they even define “effective” differently. To an HRIT person it’s about being adequately and accurately integrated with the right functional databases and having a process that makes sense. We can quantify this kind of stuff. To a communicator, it’s about creating a presentation that draws the user and customer in like a bad reality show that you just can’t escape from. HRIT people want the user and customer to go in, do their thing, complete a task successfully, and leave. The communicator wants them to stick around for a while so they can influence behaviors that HRIT people don’t even understand.

HRIT: “My customer is checking if they payroll was right this week. What do you mean there’s an engagement opportunity I have to program for?!?!?”

Communications: “If we can show them not only their pay stub, but get 10% of them to also look at their total comp statements, we’ll positively impact our engagement survey scores next year which correlates to retention and turnover.”

HRIT: “Your 10% means you’re killing my bandwidth and I need to buy a new server.” (has been secretly wanting one for a year anyway)

Communications: Listen, it’s just a few extra words on the screen and a couple of hyperlinks. Oh yeah, and your design is really ugly, but it didn’t match our brand standards anyway.”

Let’s face it, communicators can draw people in as much as they want. But if HRIT hasn’t implemented useful tools, no amount of design is going to keep someone there. On the other hand, for HRIT to really see some great results from their implementation efforts, they need communications designers to really flash up the site.

HRIT is in the business of integrating silos of data. The communicators are in the business of creating an environment and culture around everything that happens in the organization, including your HRIT “stuff.” With them, you have a high traffic site that people love to use. Without them, you have a site that people have to use without abundant enthusiasm that their day was actually better because of you, even if it was.

We’ll continue the discussion tomorrow…