The Feature

What Do You Want in Oracle Fusion?

April 10, 2006 on 7:34 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Worth Noting | 3 Comments |  Print |  Email

I enjoyed every Oracle Fusion media story, blog blarticle, or conspiration theory out there. What’s not to like? The Fusion has all aspects of a real-life drama with big money, celebrities, layoffs, and destroyed competitors. But when the dust settles, it will come down to a simple question: What’s in Fusion for me and my company?

It seems that Oracle is figuring out what Fusion means to them and is better articulating their plans to the public. As of today, you could summarize Oracle Fusion as follows:

• Existing Oracle, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel applications will be supported until 2013.
• Oracle EBS 12 and PeopleSoft Enterprise 9 will be the last pre-Fusion applications released in late 2006.
• First Fusion Applications will be delivered in 2008.

I am not worried about what Oracle will do. They are a smart bunch with all the resources in the world. They will keep doing what made them successful over the years. If you follow the Fusion developments, you already know that Oracle “will not be merging the existing Oracle EBS, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, or Siebel code”, but instead, they will “take the best features from all acquired solutions and start developing brand new Fusion Applications”. John Wookey and other Fusion architects have stated several times that “Fusion will be an upgrade, not re-implementation”, and “the customers should standardize their processes and retire their customizations to most benefit from Fusion”. I am more concerned about what the rest of us will, or will not do.

I fully support the idea of standardization and no customizations. However, you can only avoid customizations if the functionality you need is provided with the standard application features. Oracle, like any other vendor, can only deliver so much in every release, and only “the best features” that you asked for the most (or sell the best) get the nod. And this is where it gets interesting. What does “best” mean? And is “best” good enough? What will get eliminated?

We All Get the Applications We Deserve

We get what we ask for. In case of Oracle Applications, we may get what we asked for with a multi-year delay. The feature scopes for both Oracle EBS 12 and PeopleSoft Enterprise 9 have already been finalized. If you want to impact the scope and direction of Fusion Applications, the time to act is now! Smart Oracle customers have been doing it for years. Have you asked yourself what you need for your next Oracle implementation? Did you get together with your teams to review your business requirements and needs? Do you want your existing customizations be replaced by standard Fusion functionality? Here is what you can do to get involved:

• Get your company on Oracle customer advisory boards
• Be an active OAUG or OIUG member
• Attend user conferences, application days and workshops (like an upcoming COLLABORATE 06)
• Join the Oracle Special Interest Groups (SIGs) or Geographic Interest Groups (GEOs)
• Submit Oracle Enhancement and Fusion Feature Requests
• Stay informed. Check the Fusion website, read Oracle Magazine and Profit Magazine, follow the Oracle Executive Blogs and Application Product Managers Blogs (no link, they do not exist yet)

Now, out of curiosity, I looked at the OAUG Enhancement Request System to get a sense for a number of the submitted enhancement and Fusion requests. Below are the totals for some selected applications:

I don’t know about you, but that does not seem like a lot to me. What is happening? Are people not informed, or are they skeptical about the process? Personally, one of the most frustrating parts of being a consultant is not being able to get directly involved in improving the applications. I don’t work for a preferred Oracle client, I don’t want to pay thousands of dollars to attend user conferences, and I don’t want to submit enhancement requests if I don’t know whether they get proper attention and be accepted in the next release. I suspect I am not alone.

Calling All Passionate Users!

If you are an expert user with real-life, hands-on experiences and ideas on how to improve the applications; if you want to get involved, but don’t know how or none of the available options works for you, then let’s try something different!

Let’s use blogs productively and keep a weblog of our Favorite Fusion Features. Let’s compile a list of improvement tips, enhancement requests and your best features in Oracle, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel applications. You can be as specific as you want. Let’s have discussions about what enhancements and features make most sense, and then log Fusion Requests before the Oracle’s June deadline. There won’t be any wrong questions or bad ideas (or at least, we’ll let the “group intelligence” decide).

Your involvement can be as easy as providing comments on a blog post, or creating a list of your application best features and enhancement requests and posting them on the weblog. It will up to you to decide. Send a link to this post to your colleagues and friends. Subscribe to the Favorite Fusion Features posts and comments!

Devil Is In Details

So in order to put my time where my mouth is, I have launched the Favorite Fusion Features series and started putting together enhancement ideas for Oracle Applications. Feel free to review, comment, and provide your own tips and ideas. My hope is to find more passionate users and consultants who will do the same either on their own blogs, or here at the Feature.