In The Know v1.10

Five links to expand your view of HR.

• The IT failures blame game (part 1) (part 2)
  Many IT projects (particularly HRIT) end in complete failure (or a negotiated surrender). The Devil’s Triangle of these projects are the major constituent groups: customer, technology vendor, and system integration consulting firm. Each of these groups comes to the table with inherent conflicts of interest and communications/politcal problems. Projects run into trouble when the customer is less than clear (and internally consistent) about its project and the internal communications required to do the real work of IT: behavioral change in the organization.
  “These relationships become dysfunctional when project participants focus on their own goals to the detriment of shared project objectives. From this perspective, we can say that late and over-budget projects result when competition overrides cooperation among project participants: The Devil’s Triangle explains how economic pressures can drive software vendors and system integrators to act in ways that do not serve customer interests. It also offers insight into the ways some enterprise software customers damage their own projects. Projects succeed or fail based on how Devil’s Triangle participants manage built-in tensions among themselves. The likelihood of success increases when the three groups align their individual goals and expectations in a spirit of cooperation and mutual benefit. Conversely, implementations fail when greed, inexperience, or arrogance emerge as prominent motivations and one party attempts to gain unreasonable advantage of another.”
• Pay it forward? Cooperative behaviour spreads through a group, but so does cheating
  Ethics (positive or negative) are contagious and driven by the culture of an organization.
• The End Of Big Website Builds
  All things must pass. And so it is with the dark star, one size fits all corporate website. Think of it as a learning phase in the evolution of corporations as independent publishers. Today and tomorrow, corporate Internet strategy will involve going to where the audience is. At the heart of the operation, there’s a hub, of course. But the web operations of the future focus more on the spokes and the tire.
  For HR and Recruiting, this means that ‘social recruiting’ or ‘social HR’ are really just lessons in channel development and management.
• Meet the Sims … and Shoot Them
  The Army’s recruiting tool is fast becoming a brand value generation device on a global level. It’s the only HR product we’ve ever seen in the pages of Foreign Policy.
  “One of the most popular video games of all time, America’s Army has been played by more than 9 million individuals. But it was actually developed to aid U.S. Army recruiting and has become one of the most successful military recruiting tools. A 2008 study found that 30 percent of all Americans age 16 to 24 had a more positive impression of the Army because of the game and that the game had more impact on recruits than all other forms of Army advertising combined. Once in the military, the gaming platform has also begun to be used for various training applications, including recently for robotic systems that use video-game like controllers modeled after the ones used to play the game.”
  In other words, a well designed HR tool can be used throughout the employee life cycle to both attract and develop employees while improving the organization’s overall brand.
• Achievement Design 101
  ‘Achievement’ is the name used to describe milestones in gaming.
  After you read this article, you might wonder why game design isn’t a central component of industrial engineering and incentive/compensation design. While the psychologists and HR pros weren’t looking, someone else developed tools for the structure of next generation work. Scan it, bookmark it, let it work in your subconscious and then go back and read it again.

Bonus Links

• The Best Jobs In America
  A single, very readable graphic that show the top 30 Jobs in the economy.
• Execution Really Matters
  This very simple, 3 minute video makes the case for the importance of execution better than any theoretical sermonizing ever could.