The Feature

Zero Faith in Zero Defects

E-Week ran an interesting story today on Oracle’s Fusion Applications. Among other things, the story broke the news that Oracle has instituted a zero-defect policy for the first release of the Fusion Applications. I personally got a bit of a chuckle over the zero-defect policy. Based on experience, I have zero faith in zero defects - especially for an initial release.

Zero defects is a very worthwhile and commendable goal, but one practically impossible to obtain. The nearer a project comes to delivery, the more pressure is applied to compromise on the zero defects goal. As any project manager worth his or her salt will tell you, the key issue in project management is balancing the classic triple constraint: cost, schedule and quality. Choosing an absolute standard for any one of these constraints will increase the value of the other two. In the case of zero defects, costs increase and the schedule grows longer.

Now couple a zero-defect policy with the promise that the Fusion Applications will be released in 2008. We now have some absolute boundaries on not one, but two constraints: zero defects delivered by the end of 2008. Assuming that the quality and schedule constraints can both be obtained (and I’m only conceding this point for the moment), that leaves us “wiggle room” with only one constraint - cost. Simply put, hitting both the schedule and quality goal will likely cost some pretty big piles of cash. Hmmm, saving cash versus software quality…which concern do you think will take priority?

What usually happens is that, as the project comes close to the budgeted cost ceiling and the delivery day draws near, the decision is typically made to compromise on the zero-defects goal rather than exceed the budget and deliver late (for additional references on this trade-off, recall the early versions of the 11i E-Business Suite). I anticipate that the same trade-off will be made here, probably sometime in early 2008.

A zero-defects policy is a wonderful goal early in any development project. And I’ll tip my hat to anyone delivering a perfect initial release within budget and on schedule. However, experience indicates that software quality will usually lose out to cost and schedule. Do I expect the first release of Fusion Applications to be of higher quality than the early releases of the 11i E-Business Suite? Reading John Wookey’s words from that E-Week article, he sounds pretty serious about quality, so I’d say “yes”. However, any customer expecting zero defects should prepare for disappointment.

Oracle E-Business Suite R12 Pre-Release Product Demos

In late September, Oracle will be hosting a series of pre-release demonstrations of E-Business Suite R12 applications. Through this program, OAUG members will have the unique opportunity to preview new features and functionality of selected R12 applications before they are generally available. The demonstrations will be held remotely via Web conferencing, and will be conducted by members of the Oracle Applications development team who have a deep understanding of the products.

To participate in the demonstrations, user group members must sign the Oracle Confidential Disclosure Agreement (CDA), and must have licensed and implemented (or be in the process of implementing) a current version of the Oracle Applications product(s) being demonstrated. Oracle will use the customer contact information submitted via the online enrollment form to send the CDA and other pre-demo materials.

Participation is limited to OAUG members in good standing, and each session is limited to 50 dial-in ports, to be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis. To enroll in the individual demonstrations, please complete the online enrollment form by Friday, September 8, 2006.

Oracle will be soliciting feedback from the program participants and may ask you to participate in marketing activities associated with the demonstrations, including providing customer quotations that may be used for R12 marketing purposes, such as presentations at Oracle OpenWorld 2006.

More information on the E-Business Suite R12 user group/special interest group demonstration program including detailed descriptions for each demo and a demo schedule, is available here.

The Importance of Being 12

With apologies to Oscar Wilde for the title of this post, may I take a moment to consider the importance of Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12? R12 is due for release in the last quarter of 2006. As more information becomes available, each Oracle customer will have to decide for themselves whether or not a move to R12 has value for them. Some of us may opt to stick with what we have until the Fusion Applications picture becomes clear. Some will see value in R12 and make the leap in relatively short order. Others may move to another product line (or apps vendor) altogether. Irregardless of our individual choices, R12 is important to everyone in the applications market space (including those who are not Oracle customers) because it’s an important step in the progress to achieving Oracle’s ambitious vision for Fusion Applications.

Please don’t misconstrue my meaning: R12 has importance, at least for Oracle E-Business customers, for reasons other than Fusion. R12 has 12 new application modules and over 2,300 new features, including the SWAN user interface, sub ledger accounting, new HRMS localizations, improved support for APAC manufacturing practices, Retek integration, and several new industry-specific business flows. Discounting R12 without seriously considering whether it holds significant value for your organization would be foolish, and I don’t mean to do so here. But my contention is that Release 12 represents a significant proof-point in the Fusion Applications evolution, and that the importance to Fusion is R12’s most essential feature.

R12 will be the first complete E-Business Suite release on Fusion middleware. This is the next step in a series of iterations toward Fusion applications technology that started with the Early Adopter Program for integration of 11i with the 9i Applications Server. While R12 is definitely not a Fusion Applications release, delivery of a high-quality E-Business Suite release on Fusion middleware will constitute a major milestone on the road to Fusion Applications.

E-Business Suite customers are about to find out just how well and reliably Fusion technology works with our apps environment, and the entire applications space is about to discover just how much progress Oracle has made in integrating all the moving pieces of this giant and complex technical puzzle. In other words, the rubber is about to meet the road…it should be an interesting drive!

Interview with Luke Kowalski from Oracle

I had a privilege to talk with Luke Kowalski, an Oracle Corporate User Interface Architect. Mr. Kowalski and the User Experience teams are making sure that the applications are as functional and great value to their customers as they are usable, eye-pleasing and intuitive to their users. Read on for the excerpts from our online chat. You can join the conversation by providing your questions as comments to this post.

I appreciate you are doing this. Please tell us how you got started with Oracle.

I came from a couple of stints at startups. One was bought by Netscape, where I worked in server UI for a couple of years, and the other was almost bought by Microsoft. I have been at Oracle since late 1998. I worked on e-commerce applications, back when being on the team got you an invite to Larry’s house in San Francisco. I then managed the server UI group and subsequently transitioned to an architect position.

What are you responsible now?

I now bridge the User Experience groups at Oracle. I work on partnerships, policy, UI technology, usability, and a number of marketing efforts around User Experience. Most of my time is spent helping either the Apps Middleware team (Thomas Kurian), or the VP of Applications User Experience, Jeremy Ashley.

Will you be so kind and describe the design process? How do those different groups work together?

We have had human factors folks here for the last 14 years. It is an engineering driven bus, but the executives have made considerable investments in user experience. This tends to show in our applications, servers, and the tools UIs.

As with any user centered design process we start by talking to the end user. They help us gather requirements. We then validate those against existing or new marketing data. We transition to low fidelity prototypes and we show them to user groups and in the usability lab. The next step involves a technical validation. As in: “Can we build it?” We repeat, just like the shampoo bottle says: design, get feedback, iterate, test, etc.

The silver bullet in the design process is the idea that we get to embed design patterns (UI building blocks) into the developer tool (JDEV). Before…we had guidelines and a police force…it did not work.

In the When Design Is Not a Problem white paper you co-authored you talked about “overcoming barriers in technology, organizational structure, legal, marketing, documentation and quality assurance (QA), and development tools” to have a design impact. What barriers do you see ahead of you as you design Fusion Applications?

Very few. John Wookey bet a lot on user experience. It is one of the key differentiators and exit criteria for any team in the apps division. UX works very closely with Jesper’s strategy, Fusion Middleware, and other stakeholders to ensure that we deliver the right applications, of the right quality. Have you heard about our Design Partner Program? This is where we involve Peoplesoft, Oracle, Siebel and other customers early in the development process. They tell us what they need!

No, not really. Tell me how do you define a user? Is that a CIO or people who would use the software?

Decision makers are not always the same as the end users. They often have different needs. We cater to the end user (productivity), while keeping the business/financial prerogatives in mind.

You also mentioned the marketing barriers. I totally agree when you say that “business requirements can often be at odds with those articulated by the end users. CIOs making purchase decisions have very different needs from the employees actually using the software”.

Oracle has recently spent a lot of energy articulating its Fusion strategy to its customer base (CEOs and CIOs). What do you think is the best way to get end users passionate about the future releases?

Allowing users to participate in the design process has been motivating for us and the companies we work with. We usually get positive reviews when we invite folks over to the lab to see the new software, or we often go to them (contextual inquiry method).

I agree that nobody cares if a piece of software is usable, if it cannot be implemented or sold. But it also goes the other way: how do we avoid selling software that sells, looks great on datasheets but is unusable, or unfriendly to the users? How do you make sure bad design does not “fall through the cracks”?

Every product goes through concept/prototype/final reviews. That is the process in the applications division. Design patterns will save some labor, of course. IOW, there are only 3-4 ways to do a Master/Detail, or a wizard flow, or whatever. Most important review is the conceptual one.

It is often too late to change anything when we see the finished product in the lab the only thing possible then is “lipstick on a pig”. Information architecture, feature set, and flows have to be right first. Layouts, widget choices, Look and Feel are almost secondary when it comes to usability, efficiency, or having the right tool for the task.

The devil is in details. When users do encounter bad, unintuitive design, what is their best chance to get it corected? And I do not mean software bugs that can be resolved through Metalink SRs, but mostly bad features that work “as designed”.

We mined Metalink for usability issues…not that successful. The best way is to sign up for the design partner program! We do work with account reps and I have dived in on a few usability fires one via Larry, for a Fortune 50 company. That was fun.

It seems like the design discussions happen at too high of a level. On the other hand, it takes very passionate and committed users to spend time documenting and requesting improvements.

But usability issues are bugs. We file them as such internally and get them resolved.

They are not bugs; they are “features”! Now we are getting somewhere…

User groups are an excellent venue. We work closely with OAUG.

The OAUG provides many good tools to users with the Enhancement Request System, Forums, etc. to communicate their needs to Oracle.

Out of the 4 main applications suites now owned by Oracle (Oracle EBS, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards and Siebel) which one you think is best designed? How are you choosing the best features? That must be a lot of fun!

We use cold and hard facts. Siebel and Peoplesoft have had a bit more of a design mindshare. Now we are creating the perfect blend.

And you do not have to wait till Fusion. We are making incremental improvements, adopting a new look and feel for R12, leveraging all the cool things that the application server will get us (declarative UIs, skinning, composite application, Workplace UI shell). A lot of things are possible with 10.1.3. Not that 11g will not kill the competition…

Seeing few R12 screens, they looked “Peoplesoftized”. Where can people see some “sneak peeks”?

We will be showing lots of cool, new stuff at Open World. We are also showing some stuff to early adopters, companies in the design partner program, testing with target users, etc. We have done previews for user groups, at conferences, and just showed a whole bunch of stuff to analysts.

We have a couple of screenshots on the User Experience web site.

Shouting Out to JDE and Siebel Customers

I’m involved in an effort sponsored by Oracle to develop profiles for Oracle apps customers and divide those profiles into customer types, so that Oracle can develop roadmaps to Fusion Applications for each of those different types of customers. This effort is a collaboration between Oracle and The International Oracle Users Council (IOUC). You can learn more about it here. We’ve been working this effort for several weeks and have gathered together a good sampling of E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft customers. However, we’re still working to collect information from JD Edwards and Siebel users. So I’m “shouting out” to JDE and Siebel customers.

If your organization is a JD Edwards or Siebel customer wiling to share some high-level technical information with Oracle, you have an opportunity to influence the direction of Fusion Applications. Please leave a comment on this post with an email contact before August 15, 2006. I’ll be happy to help you create and submit a profile.

Ketchup or Mustard? SOA and Enterprise 2.0

By now, we’ve all read and heard that Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the foundation for the next generation for Enterprise Applications. In fact, I’ve written in support of such a proposition myself. Lately, however, I’ve found myself reconsidering my viewpoint as I’ve run into the concept of Enterprise 2.0. Choosing between the SOA and Enterprise 2.0 approaches for Enterprise Applications is like choosing between mustard and ketchup for my burgers…the best burgers have a bit of both.

Dr. Andrew McAfee is an Associate Professor at the Harvard Business School. Amongst other things, he authors the faculty blog The Impact of Information Technology (IT) on Businesses and their Leaders. Dr. McAfee’s blogging includes quite a few articles on the concept of Enterprise 2.0.

According to Dr. McAfee, “Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.” He continues to break down the concept with the following definitions:

Social Software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities. Platforms are digital environments in which contributions and interactions are globally visible and persistent over time. Emergent means that the software is freeform, and that it contains mechanisms to let the patterns and structure inherent in people’s interactions become visible over time.

Freeform means that the software is most or all of the following:

• OptionalFree of up-front workflow

• Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities

• Accepting of many types of data

In contrast to Dr. McAfee’s definition of Enterprise 2.0, XML.com defines SOA as “…an architectural style whose goal is to achieve loose coupling among interacting software agents.” In other words, SOA is an approach for getting modules of code and/or different computers to interact with each other.

In light of these definitions, there are a couple of important conceptual differences between Enterprise 2.0 and SOA that may impact your perspective much as they did mine.

SOA is concerned with communication between computers, eliminating the need for intervention or interaction by people. Enterprise 2.0 is concerned with collaboration between people with the aid of technology.

SOA is an approach that must be imposed, preferably at the beginning of the architectural design process. Imposing a structure usually constrains the ability to apply “lessons learned”, as a set of goals, or business rules, or a vision must be defined so that the structure will support achieving the desired end-state. Enterprise 2.0 organically develops as time passes. The trick here is to have a means of identifying and communicating the patterns that emerge. Those patterns become the structure.

Both approaches have their appropriate uses. When the need arises for flexibilty, allowance for minor errors, developing inferences from data, or real-time adjustments outside of stated constraints, there is no substitute (yet) that matches the human mind. The Enterprise 2.0 approach shines in these situations. When the call is for enabling processes that must comply with specified rules or meet strict standards, especially while communicating between different technical platforms or software agents, the structured approach of SOA is clearly the better choice. SOA is an appropriate option when a high level of structure in the technical architecture is required. When the focus is on collaboration, especially iterative learning and collaboration, the Enterprise 2.0 approach fits well.

So, what does this mean for those of us swimming in the sea of change that constitutes today’s Enterprise Applications market? I think it means we need to carefully consider both approaches and how to successfully apply each as we move forward, whether we’ve moving forward with Oracle E-Business Release 12, Fusion Applications, or the next release of any other enterprise applications. For example, SOA may be the right solution for integrating our various business applications, but Enterprise 2.0 may be the more appropriate approach for collaborating on the integration project itself.

The bottom line here is that the successful implementations of the next generation Enterprise Applications will involve use of both the SOA and Enterprise 2.0 approaches.

You can learn more about Enterprise 2.0 here.

What Are Those Oracle Toolbar Icons For?

Here is a thing that should be intuitive and easy to understand but is not always so. It’s one of those “I wish I had a dollar for every time I had to explain”… I wish the Oracle Toolbar icons were as well documented in online help as they are in the Oracle Applications User Guide, (page 2-3, OTN login is required). That would help new users to see the descriptions and learn the funcions when they need to. Hope an overview below will help you with understanding what the toolbar icons there are and the actions they perform:

1. The New icon opens a new record.

2. The Find icon invokes the Find window.

3. The Show Navigator icon invokes the Navigator window, i.e. brings you back to the main menu.

4. The Save icon saves your data.

5. The Next Step icon advances you to the next step of a process.

6. The Switch Responsibilities icon invokes the list of your responsibilities for you to choose another.

7. The Print icon prints the current screen.

8. The Close Form icon closes all windows of the current form.

9. The Cut icon cuts the current selection to the clipboard.

10. The Copy icon copies the current selection to the clipboard.

11. The Paste icon pastes from the clipboard into the current field.

12. The Clear Record icon erases the current record from the form.

13. The Delete icon deletes the current record from the database.

14. The Edit Field icon displays the Editor window for the current field.

15. The Zoom icon invokes customer-defined drill-down behavior.

16. The Translations icon invokes the Translations window.

17. The Attachments icon invokes the Attachments window. If attachments, the paperclip is holding a paper.

18. The Folder Tools icon invokes the Folder Tools palette window.

19. The Window Help icon invokes online help for the current window.

See the Oracle Applications Guide for more on navigation, data entry and other useful tips.

New Features in Oracle Financials and Projects 11i.10

Here is an executive summary of New Features in Oracle Financials and Projects 11i.10 for your reference. I realize I am a year late with this post but since there are still people who are yet to upgrade to release 11i.10 and may be interested in the topic [and since I already have the document ready] and I am going to post it anyway.

The purpose of this document was to provide a consolidated list of new features, functional pre-requisites, and configuration steps delivered with the Oracle Applications 11.5.10 (Financials Family Pack F and Oracle Projects Family Pack M) as they related to our existing or Oracle Applications. It was not the intent of this document to include all features available in the above Family Packs, but focus on the main functionality changes. Likewise, it was not the intent of this document to outline the patch application instructions and list of required patches, but rather focus on the functional impact of the upgrade.

Please refer to the following Oracle release notes on Metalink for complete details (Metalink login is required):

Financials

• About Oracle Financials Family Pack F (includes links to all Financials-specific documents)
• About Oracle Assets in Financials Family Pack F
• About Oracle Cash Management in Financials Family Pack F
• About Oracle General Ledger in Financials Family Pack F
• About Oracle Internet Expenses Mini-pack 11i.OIE.H
• About Oracle Internet Expenses Mini-pack 11i.OIE.I
• About Oracle Payables in Financials Family Pack F
• About Oracle Receivables in Financials Family Pack F

Projects

• About Oracle Projects Family Pack M (includes links to all Projects-specific documents)
• About Oracle Project Billing in Oracle Projects Family Pack M
• About Oracle Project Collaboration in Oracle Projects Family Pack M
• About Oracle Project Costing in Oracle Projects Family Pack M
• About Oracle Project Management in Oracle Projects Family Pack M
• About Oracle Project Portfolio Analysis in Oracle Projects Family Pack M
• About Oracle Project Resource Management in Oracle Projects Family Pack M
• About Oracle Grants Accounting in Oracle Projects Family Pack M