Mike Schubert

Those of you working for smaller, private companies may not have been exposed to the vernacular I am about to rant about. The same may hold true for government employees. But for whatever reason, when you get into a company with 10,000+ employees with shareholders, etc. you end up speaking a different language. A new website, Unsuck-It has come to the rescue to help you decipher these words and phrases so that you will understand what the person is REALLY trying to say. Here are a few examples:

Drink the Kool-Aid - Meaning to follow blindly. I assume the origin from this was the Hale-Bopp comet people that all drank poisoned Kool-Aid thinking they were going to join aliens on the tail of the comet. If nothing else, they left quite the legacy on corporate America.  Update: Drew corrects me via comments that "but the origin is from the mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana in 1978 when Jim Jones convinced his followers to drink poisoned Kool-Aid."

Disambiguate - doesn't clarify sound so much better? I actually used this word in a meeting yesterday to poke at someone else's overuse of flowery language.

Operationalize - make it work. Could you imagine if management actually said you need to make something work? That would sound like they had a product that didn't work. Hmm....

Social Media Strategy - Hahahaha. Defined as "Typing into text areas." So true. I'm reminded of our social media guidelines at work, and the minor uproar they caused.

And my favorite: Ping Me - I recently said this to someone and haven't heard from her since. Coincidence? Further proof that you should avoid corporate speak in all of your conversations with non-co-workers. Check out Unsuck-It and see what words and phrases you should be avoiding.

I am joining a project at work that will revamp our intranet architecture and allow us to continue to bring innovative and cutting edge capabilities to our workforce. One of the issues that we've seen over the past few years had been that rich applications that have integrated with our portal have been too tightly integrated. In several cases, they have the capability to hog resources or even take a server offline due to a catastrophic fault. This is one of the areas that we want to prevent in the future and are working with our partners to articulate this desire.

This week, one of those partners was in town to talk through our needs and the analogy I came up with was that "Farmville should not take down Facebook". That is to say the Facebook is an application platform that provides base services (demographics, content, wall updates, etc) to applications that can then use them to do interesting* things. This is similar to a corporate intranet that knows who a user is, what permissions they have, and what their demographic information is and then exposes those to applications and portlets based on their permission. In my current environment, there are some of these constituent applications that use the same resource sets as the portal platform and thus, they could negatively impact the performance of the intranet. In V.Next this should not be the case.

*Pre-emptive snarky comment: I do not consider Farmville or any of those games to be "interesting things". In fact, I've never played a Facebook game. It's merely illustrative of the type of Platform as a Service (PaaS) model that we are striving for.

One of my missions in developing web applications for a Fortune 15 company is to emulate the dominant design of well known internet applications when designing new functionality for inside the company. I occasionally am beat up for not doing this. One recent example was an RSS reader portlet. The goal was to provide people with a customizable portlet on the McKNet homepage that would allow them to subscribe to various feeds within the company and see the 3-5 most recent updates for those feeds. When my management team saw the proposed product, they questioned why it didn't look and work like Google Reader. I tried not to laugh - you might imagine that it comes down to money. This was one function point out of 8 proposed in a quarterly maintenance release that was being worked on full time by a single programmer. I don't know for sure, but I'd say that Google Reader took someone more than a week to develop.

One of the things I've been involved with lately is establishing "maintenance" pages for each of our applications. These maintenance pages are just meant to say "sorry - we've got some planned maintenance going on, here are some links to other content that you may be looking for that is not currently impacted by our maintenance." Finding examples of dominant design for this are a little more difficult, since you have to find either a reputable site that is under maintenance or read a blog post about it. Today, I tried to go to My Cigna based on some mail I received yesterday and found they were under maintenance. Perfect! Here's a screenshot of what I saw:

This gives me a good idea, but also points out the pitfall. The idea? Let them know when the maintenance window is planned to end. In this case, it says "The site will return at approximately 12:00pm on Sunday, March 28th.". The down side is that you have to keep up with the page and make sure that it reflects an accurate date and time. You'll see I included the status bar from Windows to show that today is April 18th - 3 weeks after the above referenced date.  So now that I think about it, this isn't the greatest of examples. Guess I'll have to keep fishing for a dominant design of under maintenance pages. 

My focus this year is on nutrition and quality events. For the first time since 2007, there is no full distance Ironman triathlon on my race calendar. I am hoping this will allow me to focus on shedding more weight and building my capacity rather than focusing on getting ready to "get through" a 140.6 mile race. I have picked a handful of triathlons including 2 half-iron distance endeavors. I have also set my sights on 4 or 5 marathons with the goal of going under the 4 hour mark for the first time.

On the work front, my responsibilities are slowly increasing. I have a small portfolio of projects that I'm slated to deliver by the end of March and it is giving me a good taste of the rigors of resource, risk, and plan management at that level. The budget and scope are smaller than the largest project I managed, but has been a good way to get my feet wet in this arena that I hope to fully move into one day. During the 2nd half of 2010, I will likely be involved with revamping either our dot com or intranet platform (or both!). I'm looking forward to the opportunity to continue to grow. I'll yap more about this in March when I look back on my tenure at McKesson.

There have been many articles over the past couple of years telling you to watch what you say online. The same holds true for who you associate with. Your Facebook, My Space, Blogger, etc. pages are burned into the archival powers of the Internet for years to come. You are leaving footprints every step of the way. Many have warned that this information may be used against you when applying for jobs. And that is true - I know hiring managers that will do a quick Google on your name before hiring you (note to self: take down picture of me & Michael Phelps).

We are starting to see incidents of companies disciplining employees for their online behavior. Offending postings don't have to be made on your employer's computers or networks and they may well be made during your personal time. While you may think the constitution protects your freedom of speech, it only does so to the extent that the government won't stop you from expressing yourself. If the private sector takes umbrage with your words, they are free to dole out the discipline. It would be just like dis'ing your friend - he wouldn't be pleased, why should your employer be any different?

A recent article expoesed this phenomenon in the world of journalism. A reported had sent 'Friend' requests to managers so that they would join his Facebook page. Only, they weren't really his friend. In fact, one turned him in for his ciriticism of the company. A News Media Guild representative summed up the situation:

“We have seen about six Facebook problems over the last two months, with employees — maybe managers you have as friends — reporting potential issues to management,” union guild chief Kevin Keane wrote in a memo to union members last week. “You must be careful who you allow on as friends.”

To take it a step further, you need to really be aware of the friend of a friend concept and not put anything negative out on these social networks. I know you still will, but I at least warned you.

Read More --> AP Reporter Reprimanded For Facebook Post; Union Protests