The Human Capitalist

Continuing My Web 2.0 Journey

I spent the past few weeks continuing my ambition of becoming a Web 2.0 worker. My pursuit started over a year ago with the creation of this blog (TypePad) and becoming a member of the Enterprise Irregulars (Google Groups).  Although I am still a novice web 2.0 worker, here are some recent personal enhancements:

Migrating to Google Personalized Home Page - I have switched from Yahoo and Pageflakes and am now aggregating all of my information, personal and business-related, in one-place using Google personal homepage.  This includes my Gmail, RSS Feeds, widgets for weather, scores, stocks, news, and company trackers.  I have also added a Box.net widget where I can store documents online and now leverage Google Notebook as an easily accessible repository of notes from all of my many briefings.  I love Google because it is clean, easy to search, simple to add new widgets and feeds, continues to enhance and integrate functionality and incrementally adds new products frequently.

Adopting social bookmarking.  I recently put all of my relevant bookmarks online on del.icio.us.  The tagging and notes capability make it easy to access public domain information for my research.  I found that the bookmarked pages in my browser were poorly categorized and almost never frequented.  With del.icio.us, and the tagging capability, I can now easily find stuff by the keyword identifiers.

Building out my social networks.  I continue to build my socials networks especially LinkedIn (although at a slow pace).  LinkedIn is a great tool to keep up-to-date on past and present colleagues.  To be honest, I feel a little guilty every time I send out an invitation because I sense the person on the other end may feel like I am looking for a job.  Nonetheless, I still find the tool valuable.  I have also started an online profile at Jobster, but have yet to spend the time to make it valuable for me now.  Maybe I'll test drive the free job posting soon.

Enabling RSS on my mobile device.  I have downloaded newsclip for my Blackberry Pearl and have created some of my daily web feeds including the newly created Enterprise Irregulars aggregation feed.

De-widgetizing my blog. In an effort to continue my efforts of simplicity, I have actually started to delete some of the embedded widgets on my blog.  Although I am a long-term believer in widgets and mashups, I find many of them today inhibiting because of poor performance and awkward designs that don't match my site design.

Any suggestions to continue my web 2.0 journey?

Is Transparency a Good Thing?

The author of Freaknomics, who also writes a blog, wrote a post today about "The Beauty (and Danger) of Transparency".  The nuts and bolts of the post basically talks about how the new senator from Montana, Jon Tester, has opened up his calendar for all to view...

"Jon Tester, the new senator from Montana, posts his daily appointment schedule on his website for all the world to see. According to this A.P. article by Mary Clare Jalonick, such transparency is “fulfilling a promise the Democrat made in his campaign against Republican Sen. Conrad Burns last year. Burns attracted heat for his relationship with Washington interests — most notably convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff — and ethics became a central issue. ‘It gives people better access to what I am doing,’ Tester said.”

Looking at his schedule for January 25th, someone should tell him he should manage his calendar better because he is triple-booked at 9:30AM and double-booked at 1:00PM.

Update: It looks like Sen. Tester is only providing visibility on a weekly basis and does not provide a repository of past calendar events beyond a one week period.  Transparency, Sen Tester, is only important if it can be viewed over a sustained period of time.  I'm sure his constituents would like to see his voting record on key issues and understand whom he met with in the 3-6 months leading up to the vote.  That is transparency, sir.

The End of Job Boards As We Know It?

Many have been predicting the end of the traditional job boards such as CareerBuilder, Monster, and Dice for some time now.  Yet the big boards still continue to chug along just as the web 2.0 ankle-biters continue to throw stones. 

What has been on the rise, though, are niche job boards that are starting to appear on many blogs and websites.  Some of the most popular blogs including TechCrunch, GigaOm and VentureBeat have even built their own job boards.  In the case of TechCrunch, the effort entailed little effort including "...$2,000 to hire a coder, obtained a paypal account, and hit the button."

A few vendors have taken note of this trend and have built a build-your-own-job-board solution.  As I was preparing the write a summary of these new "job boards in a box", TechCrunch beat me to it yesterday with a post titled "The Job Board Bubble".  This new out-of-the-box model enables any blog/website owner to simply create their own job board tailored to the specific audience of the site.  This approach allows the employers to directly target specific prospective candidates and allows the site/blog owners to monetize on their readership and set their own price for a job post.  In this model, the enabling vendors takes a percentage of the post ranging from 30-50%. 

This is definitely something to watch. Some of the vendors providing out of the box job boarding include SimplyHired, Jobcoin, and JobThread.  With the proliferation of niche boards, it will be interesting to see how the eRecruitment vendors respond.  Is this becoming the rise of the newspaper job pages again (although in a different delivery model)?

What's Wrong with SaaS?

In one word...pricing.  Or more specifically increased pricing complexity.  SaaS was supposed to be about pricing simplicity and transparency whereas the software was non-negotiable, pricing was straight-forward (per user), and the vendor maintained a take-it-or-leave-it approach.  Wall Street, in conjunction, embraced and rewarded the SaaS vendors because it has enabled them to build repeatability and predictability into their financial models. 

Today, that SaaS pricing model is under threat of regressive complexity (I'm coining a new term).  Here are two recent examples of that pricing complexity (the respective vendor names have been concealed to protect the innocent).

These are actual pricing models submitted to customers (although I have rounded the prices to the nearest value).  Where is the simple per employee per month (PEPM) structure?  As you will note, the pricing models themselves are beginning to look eerily like their ERP counterparts --- the exact model they are looking to destroy.  It is important to note, in both instances, the salesperson was backed into the corner, one at quarter end, to provide massive discounting for the software.

I've Finally Found My Dream Job - Chief Beer Officer!

Why did I have to learn about this position after the application process ended...

Infuse Your Knowledge

For those interesting in getting smarter in talent management, my good friends at Knowledge Infusion are hosting a series of webinars starting January 24th.  The webinars schedule is as follows...

• January 24, 2007 - The Transformation Continues: Trends for 2007 in HCM and Talent Management

• February 7, 2007 - Developing a Workforce Information Management Strategy: Reporting, Scorecards, Dashboards, and Metrics

• February 21, 2007 - Talent Management Goes Mainstream in 2007

• March 7, 2007 - HR Portal Best Practices:  Creating the Ultimate Employee Experience

To register, visit their website here.  Feel free to heckle Jason and team on my behalf.

Is Kenexa Prepping for Another Large Acquisition?

Last week, Kenexa announced the offering of 3.75 million shares of its common stock under a current shelf registration.  This equates to nearly $100 million in capital based on recent stock price.  If you remember the last time Kenexa raised a significant amount of capital they put it to work pretty quickly in the form of the BrassRing acquisition.  Is another acquisition on the horizon?

Get Grumpy, Be Productive

According to this article, being grumpy on the job leads to more creativity and productivity. 

To start my day tomorrow, I'm going to yell at my wife, smack my dog, and tell my co-workers they are idiots.  Who's with me for the sake of creativity and productivity?

Introducing Jeitosa Group Blog

Karen Beaman has recently entered the blogsphere with her new blog, Jeitosa Group International Blog.  For those that don't know Karen, she has a long-standing career as a thought leader in HR and has more recently return to the consulting world after spending the last year and a half at Workday, formalizing the product strategy and roadmap.   To kickoff the year, she has already outlined her top 5 trends for the year ahead. 

Welcome Karen!

What is an "Application"?

Old Definition (as defined by Wikipedia):  Application software is a subclass of computer software that employs the capabilities of a computer directly to a task that the user wishes to perform. This should be contrasted with system software which is involved in integrating a computer's various capabilities, but typically does not directly apply them in the performance of tasks that benefit the user. In this context the term application refers to both the application software and its implementation.

My (Future) Definition:  Applications are migrating from transactional systems to logical interactions.  Data sources will become public and private, structured and unstructured.  As my friend Dennis Howlett describes, "I want apps that are cool and make me feel good when I use them".  I think applications need to be clean and simple (requires no training and easy to navigate), personalized (the content that I want), and reliable (performance is consistent and it actually works when I want it).  This goes for enterprise applications too!  The vendors of the future will those that embed themselves into the lifestyle of the user.