The Feature

Take the Oracle Financials Product Strategy Survey

August 12, 2010 on 7:07 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Oracle Press | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

Oracle Financials Product Strategy is conducting a survey to gain insight into how customers are using Oracle Payments solution. This survey targets payments professionals (payment administrators, payables analysts, payables managers, cash managers, etc.) and explores payment processing in customers’ organizations.

Payment processing in the context of this survey means initiating a request to pay supplier invoices, payroll expenses and other external and internal financial obligations by check, ACH, WIRE and other electronic or traditional forms of payment — all the way through to the payment execution by your financial institution. The survey takes approximately 25-30 minutes to complete. The results of this survey will be used for determining which business functions are most critical for payments and where Oracle can consider improvements to the existing solutions.

Please complete the survey or forward it to the appropriate people in your organization to complete and submit no later than August 13, 2010. If you require assistance in accessing the survey, please contact julia.baeva@oracle.com.

OAUG Invites You to Present at COLLABORATE11 in Orlando

August 11, 2010 on 8:59 am | by Marian Crkon | In Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

OAUG invites you to submit a presentation proposal and share your approach to Oracle Applications in an education session at the COLLABORATE 11: Technology and Applications Forum for the Oracle Community. More than 5,000 attendees will gather for the user-driven education and networking event April 10 – 14, 2011 at the Orange County Convention Center West in Orlando, Florida. Proposals are now being accepted. The deadline is Friday, October 1, 2010 at 11:59 p.m. EDT.

Get more information about presenting at COLLABORATE 11, including tracks, specific industry- or product-related areas of emphasis, presenter requirements and the presentation submission processes.

Note These Important Presentation Submission Dates and Deadlines

• October 1, 2010, 11:59 p.m. EDT: Presentation abstracts due.
• Week of December 6, 2010: Accepted presenters notified.
• January 12, 2011: Acceptance of the compliance agreement due.
• March 1, 2011: All presentation materials including white paper and presentation slides are due.
• April 10 – 14, 2011: We look forward to seeing you in Orlando!

Did You Take The OAUG Community Assessment Survey?

July 20, 2007 on 6:55 am | by Marian Crkon | In Oracle Press | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

The Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) is asking for your help to help its members maximize their investment in the growing family of Oracle Applications. Please take a few minutes to participate in an online survey. Your participation will help the OAUG determine:

• its five- and 10-year strategic direction;
• the value of the services currently offered;
• the value of potential future offerings; and
• overall member and community satisfaction with the user group.

This is your chance to let the OAUG know what direction it should take in the months and years to come, and to provide feedback on how the OAUG is meeting your needs. The OAUG exists to serve the Oracle Applications community, and they need to hear from you to know how they are doing.

You may access the survey online. Thank you in advance for your time and participation.

Oracle Business Intelligence – A Chance To Get In The Game

February 21, 2007 on 7:49 pm | by Floyd Teter | In Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

Oracle Applications Development is creating a Customer Advisory Board (CAB) for Oracle Business Intelligence Applications. This is a great opportunity to participate in the development of Oracle’s BI products.

The CAB will work closely with the Oracle Development team to validate the strategic direction, provide and review requirements, review designs, evaluate architectural blueprints, including data warehousing options, deployment options, and provide timely feedback on usability, deployment and ownership experience. Customers will be able to contribute and influence critical decisions to make the release a success.

Ideal candidates for this CAB are large Oracle E-Business Suite customers with complex reporting needs, who have implementations across more than one major functional area, or have one or more Oracle Applications instance.

Experience with Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (formerly Siebel Analytics), Oracle Warehouse Builder or Daily Business Intelligence is desirable but not essential.

If your organization is considering a single integrated solution for your reporting & analytics, or if you are planning to implement a data warehouse on Oracle Applications, serving on this CAB may be a great way to influence Oracle’s product direction to support your needs.

Hal Kazi is Oracle’s Group Product Manager for Business Intelligence Applications, and is putting the BI CAB together. If you are interested, you can contact Hal directly at hal.kazi@oracle.com. Be sure and mention my name when you contact Hal; if I provide enough referrals, maybe he’ll get me one of those cool penguins from last year’s Linux announcement at Oracle OpenWorld!

Oracle Applications Unlimited Events

January 15, 2007 on 8:00 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Oracle Press, Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

In case you missed it, here is an invitation to the launch five new releases of Oracle applications products.

Join Oracle representatives for an “unprecedented event in the history of business software”. On January 31 and February 1, 2007, Oracle will launch five new releases of our applications products around the world. You’ll learn how to take advantage of your current investments while preparing for the next generation of business.

Wednesday, January 31, 2007
9:00 a.m. Registration and Breakfast
10:00 a.m. – 1:30 p.m. EventHudson Theater
145 West 44th Street
New York, NY

Hosted by Charles Phillips, Oracle President, and John Wookey, Oracle Senior Vice President, Applications Development. These events aim to highlight how Oracle applications can help you work globally, think globally, and manage your business globally—so you can make better business decisions, based on better information, with better results. You can get more information here.

Demystifying Fusion – OAUG’s Three-Step Fusion Program

November 16, 2006 on 7:32 pm | by Floyd Teter | In Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

The Oracle Applications Users Group (OAUG) has just announced a new educational series under the “Community Thursdays” eLearning program: “Demystifying Fusion – OAUG’s Three-Step Fusion Program”. I can promise you that this will be a good series, because I’m a co-host…so you can complain directly to me if the series is missing the mark and we’ll get it fixed (how I got involved in this is another story, but if you check OAUG’s Fusion Council site and scroll down to the announcement about the new Fusion Council Co-Chair, you’ll get a flavor for how it happened and who to blame).

The idea of the Demystifying Fusion sessions is to “lift the curtains and show how the magic tricks are performed”. What that means is that we’ll be doing more than just running through PowerPoint decks (although there will be some of that too); we’ll be running demos with various components of Fusion Technology relevant to Fusion Applications. In addition, we’ll be providing some guidelines for helping you build your organization’s road map to Fusion Applications. The first session (given at noon EST and again at 8 p.m. EST on Nov. 30th) will lay out the program and some basic concepts regarding Fusion Technology and building your roadmap.

If you are an OAUG member, you can sign up for the first session here. If you’re not an OAUG member yet, you must join in order to attend these sessions: send an email to membership@oaug.com to get more information. You’ll get the value of the nearly negligible membership fee back just from the information in these sessions, so don’t hesitate to join up.

I hope you’re there when we lift the curtains!

Zero Faith in Zero Defects

August 31, 2006 on 7:35 pm | by Floyd Teter | In Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

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.

Shouting Out to JDE and Siebel Customers

August 10, 2006 on 10:49 am | by Floyd Teter | In Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

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

August 4, 2006 on 9:00 am | by Floyd Teter | In Worth Noting | Enter Comments |  Print |  Email

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.

IOUG Also Wants Your Input on Oracle Fusion

July 11, 2006 on 9:42 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Oracle Press, Worth Noting | 1 Comment |  Print |  Email

The International Oracle Users Council (IOUG) also encourages you [Oracle Applications and Peoplesoft Enterprise Users] to provide your input to Oracle as they develop Oracle Fusion. Below are several examples of how Oracle is working with the Product Development Committee on a number of initiatives running where users can be involved. The research into Fusion is unprecedented and the IOUC urge anyone not already involved in User Group initiatives to take part. The current PDC Initiatives for Fusion include:

General Fusion Surveys

This survey has now closed with over 2000 users worldwide agreeing to help Oracle with their research. If you missed this opportunity and would like to join in for later research please submit your details for future surveys.

Peoplesoft Product Usage Surveys

Oracle has created an initial set of Product Usage Surveys and a SQR script to better understand how you are using various features and functions of PeopleSoft Enterprise applications.

Since Fusion is starting with E-Business Suite as the foundation, Oracle needs specific input from PeopleSoft Enterprise customers on the use of certain features/functions as they move forward in the planning for Fusion. As Oracle progresses through the planning/design process, there will be additional opportunities for the J.D. Edwards and E-Business Suite customers to provide input.

Fusion Applications Communications Profiling

With announcements of Oracle Fusion, and more recently Applications Unlimited, upgrades to current versions and Oracle Fusion continue to generate questions amongst a diverse customer base. A greater understanding of customer types (profiles) and their application roadmap planning approach needs to be addressed. Oracle desires to retain existing customers and help them better position plans along a value-driven roadmap toward the new Fusion applications platform.

The IOUC aim to gather and deliver constructive input to senior Oracle Applications and Support executives. The project focus is the customer view and experience with Oracle’s communication strategy and messaging with respect to application upgrades (to the current release/version) and Oracle Fusion.

Usability of Oracle Products

The Applications User Experience team at Oracle would like to know if you are interested in participating in Oracle’s Usability Program. Participants in the usability studies will work directly with the User Experience team to provide input on developing innovative User Interfaces, i.e. the look and feel’ for Fusion applications. If you are interested, please complete this form. If you fit the profile for an upcoming usability study, Oracle will contact you directly. All information will remain confidential.

Business Process Modeling

In conjunction with the Fusion Strategy Council the IOUC are working with Oracle looking at the high level BPM for the first Fusion releases.