1. Critical – this controls nuclear power plants, medical equipment or aircraft control systems.  If it breaks a lot of people die.
2. Enterprise Class – If it breaks I cannot run my business (pay my suppliers, pay my employees, serve my customers)
3. Trivial – If it breaks I can’t check the latest sports results, or post my opinions on my lunch to facebook and twitter

The tolerance of the consumers of each of the above software for failure is quite different and as such the speed with which new features can be delivered and implemented will differ.  If the pilot of your plane sees a pop up on his screen right before he takes off saying “An update is available for your autopilot software, would you like to install it now?”;  would you want him to click ‘Yes’?

I build Enterprise software, which is the middle ground.  I certainly have to spend a lot of my time ensuring that what we build is robust and reliable, but there is plenty of scope to innovate.  I respect the people who build there other types of software as they each have their own unique challenges.  Critical software has to be totally safe and reliable and those pressures are obvious.  What I class as trivial software is a challenge because you have to move with the market and bring out new features and innovations very fast and keep your customers very happy and engaged because they can move easily to another product.  What is trivial software to the users may well be critical to your ability to make money and pay your own bills.

Do you agree with my categories, or do you prefer to slice it another way?  Is trying to categorize software a futile exercise?  Am I just trying to be controversial by calling some people’s life passion trivial?  Have your say in the comments below.

So my idea here is that we make use of the data we have about a person and what they do to get the small amounts of data that they really need to them, even though they didn’t know the data was there or that they needed it.  This is perfect for enterprises software because we have a lot of data about your life inside the enterprise and also a lot of data about other people similar to you and we have a whole load of data very relevant to you so we just have to pull those things together – should be simple right?

I will give an example that I noticed where this is done badly.  When I first had children, I bought new born diapers from amazon, then I started buying slightly larger diapers and then I bought a book on potty training, my buying needs progressed in a somewhat predictable way.  Amazon continued to recommend potty training books and diaper related items long after I had bought my past potty training book.  This is a case of good logic to figure out people who buy X also buy Y, but not good to be really smart and predict how my needs progress over time.  In the enterprise our needs also change over time, so we should try to predict that and help you get what you need.

So to give an example in the enterprise, I might want to recommend an online training resource on managing my employee’s expenses or doing performance reviews after I am newly promoted to a manager title, but I should not blindly push that to every manager even if they have been a manager for many years.  In finance the reports I have on my homepage would change based on my activities in the system, if last quarter I was the person approving last minute adjustments for the Slovakian Ledger, then maybe I want to see some reports on the Slovakian Ledger a little earlier in the cycle to get ahead of the process this quarter.  However if I happen to be set up as an approver for the Slovakian ledger but have never approved anything in that ledger maybe I am not going to be interested in having those reports pushed to me.

As you can imagine the possibilities are huge and very exciting, I have barely scratched the surface.  I’ll be giving this a lot of thought and bouncing ideas of smart people.  Your opinions are also very welcome, use the comments below.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.

This year I am presenting, working on the demo grounds and meeting up with customers/partners and I hope catching up with a lot of people I don’t get to see in person very often and maybe having a drink or two with them.

If you’re reading this blog you may be interested in some of the same things I am interested in and might even want to come and see me so without further ado, here is my What, Where and When

Sunday September 31

For me this is OUAG day, a lot of Special Interest Group meetings so I will be around in Moscone West all day.

2.00PM in 3008 in Moscone West * Session ID * SIG10511 – Oracle Applications User Group (OAUG) GL Special Interest Group Meeting

I will be presenting about Oracle’s own implementation of Fusion Accounting Hub, which they have been live on since June.  More details of the subject here.  I think it is a very compelling story and am excited to share it and answer any questions on it.

I will likely go home and watch the live stream of Larry’s keynote from there with my kids (that means we might be in the same room, but not all actually watching – 7, 5 and 2×3 year olds are not so interested in the future of Enterprise computing).

Monday

9:45 – 2:15 Demo grounds – Applications Demo Grounds in Moscone West – ‘Oracle Fusion Financials Offers Revolutionary Reporting and Insight’

Working on Demo Pods is hard work, very hard.  Always busy, wide variety of people and questions and conversations.  A great place to come and interact with people and ask your specific questions and see exactly what you are interested in.

3:15 PM – 4:15 Oracle Fusion Financials: Overview, Strategy, Customer Experiences, and Roadmap in Moscone West – 2003 (presented by my bosses)

I’ve been working on some interesting stuff recently and you should get to see some of that in the demo section of this session, might be some mobile content and something social as well as the revolutionary reporting and insight.  I will not be on stage, I’ll be at the front somewhere but have a small role in the demo playing an accountant called Ted Brown.

4:45 PM – 5:45 PM Oracle Fusion Accounting Hub, Coexisting with Your Current Financials Systems in Moscone West – 2003

Tuesday

10:15 – 11:15 Oracle Fusion Accounting Hub Case Study: Global Deployment at Oracle (CON8846 ) in Moscone West – 2005

Similar to my session on Sunday but done better.  The Oracle Finance Department and the Oracle IT team discuss how they implemented a Global Chart of Accounts and migrated to Fusion Accounting Hub and the business benefits they gained.  They will present this much better than I can because they drove the project and will tell it how it is, I cannot recommend this session highly enough.

1:15 PM – 2:15 PM Oracle Fusion Financials: Customer Adoption and Experiences Moscone West – 2003

Hear about customer implementations and how they have benefited from Fusion.

5:00 PM – 6:00 PM How to Score an Eagle on a Par 5: PGA Migrates to Oracle Fusion Applications Moscone West – 2003

I had the pleasure of visiting this customer a couple of times, although I was so busy talking about Fusion with them I didn’t get a chance to play golf.  A great set of people and a great story about how to get the best out of Fusion Applications and the embedded BI.

6pm – 7:30pm BizTech sponsored OAUG event, it will involve a set of presenters who wowed crowds at the OAUG Collaborate event this year, I’m going to chat for a few minutes about Fusion Financials and how it can Coexist with your R12 EBS or other financials systems.

6pm onwards – Frontera Consulting reception – Hoping I can meet some of the people I have worked with on a Fusion Early Adopter Customer;  Frontera were the implementation partner on one of the first Financials Customers to go live.  Yes, this clashes with the above event, I will figure that out somehow.

Wednesday

9:45 – 2:15 Demo grounds – Applications Demo Grounds in Moscone West – ‘Oracle Fusion Financials Offers Revolutionary Reporting and Insight’

As above hard work, but if you have questions it’s a good place to find me or my colleagues from product development.

Blogger Meetup – If you blog about Oracle, come and meet kindred spirits.  Sign up here.

Here are some other sessions of Interest, that I might not be able to make but if I could, I would.

Monday 12:15 PM – 1:15
PM Infosys Enables Better Finance Decisions at Al Shirawi, Using Oracle Fusion Accounting Hub Moscone West – 2012 -

If I can get away from my demo pod for a few minutes I’d be interested in this presentation.  I talked to this customer once during their implementation, but mostly things went really smoothly and the Infosys team handled the implementation very well.

11:45 AM – 12:45 PM Oracle Fusion Applications: Cloud Applications and Services Overview Moscone West – 2001

Cloud, expect a lot of talk about cloud all week, in a lot of sessions.

CON9432 4:45 Monday Oracle Fusion Accounting Hub, Coexisting with Your Current Financials Systems

CON9445 Wednesday 1:15 Information Excess Versus Information Access

I should be getting a preview of this session later this week, understand the real power and value of Fusion Financials

I started out in the UK for 2 years before moving out to California in 2000 where I have been ever since, in the 300 building you see on the left.

The earliest Applications release I started out working on was 10.4 and I think the database version was 7.  I still have a promotional VHS cassette that all employees were sent when the 8i database was launched and a license plate holder with the tag line ‘the internet changes everything’ which I got on my first day starting at Oracle HQ.  I also have more Polo Shirts, hats, bags and vests with the Oracle Logo on than I care to count.

As I said earlier the only constant has been change and I’ve seen a lot of interesting changes, shifts and fads come and go.  Here’s a list of the things I can recall in a somewhat chronological order

• Character mode Apps
• Client Server GUI Apps
• Browser based Apps
• The Millennium Bug
• Providing 24 hour cover over New Year 2000, when nothing happened
• The emergence of the internet
• The dot com boom
• The dot com bust
• The Network Computer (including Larry showing a network computer on Oprah)
• Oracle starting consolidation in the Enterprise Applications space
• Web 2.0
• Social Apps
• The Cloud

So there’s a few of my favorite things, feel free to add yours or comment on mine in the comments section below.

I’m very excited about this and at the General Ledger Special Interest Group meeting at Oracle OpenWorld this year I will outline The functional and technical architecture of the system, some details of the implementation.  I’ll also make sure to leave plenty of time for questions.  Watch this space for details on timings and location, or follow me on twitter where I will of course post details as we get closer.

Timeliness is one of the three key attributes required for BI to be considered embedded BI (the other two are relevant and actionable) and I wanted to give a business example of where timely is relevant.  Let’s imagine I am approving an expense report for one of my overseas employees’ home broadband costs for June, July and August;  I don’t know if the amount they are claiming is reasonable and I don’t recall if they already submitted an expense for June already.  So embedded BI here I want is average costs of broadband in that location (from external sources, or maybe average of all employee expense claims in that location) and some information on previous expense reports, it would also be good to see that amount in US dollars too.  All this information is available in my Enterprise Application and I can get it quickly, I should not for example wait until the amount is transferred to the General Ledger and converted into US dollars at my Month End rate published from my Treasury team, an approximation based on a rate from an external web service or last month’s rate will work for this purpose.  If I get this information in a timely manner, it is there when I review the expense report and I can approve right away and save my time navigating to other places to research this and also avoid any late fees from the credit card firm arising from a delay in my approval.

The example above does not require aggregation of huge amounts of data in an offline data warehouse, nor does it require an eye catching 3D animated Chart; these exciting things do have their place and they are very impressive in demos but I find the simple use cases that bring real improvements to the way people work are the ones that resonate really well when I talk to Users.

Now it’s your turn to agree or disagree with my assessment of things, the comments section is right below and I would love to hear your thoughts.

First you should check out the Fusion Financials YouTube channel, which has some nice demos with voice over by my former boss and now strategy director Zoe Read.  I have embedded my personal favorite below

Then there is a two minute overview of Financials on Oracle.com that really only scratches the surface but captures the essence of why the reporting is so compelling very well.

If you have questions after that, feel free to ask them in comments section below…

My schedule seemed to be light, but as always I forgot to factor in still doing my day job and talking to a lot of interesting and knowledgeable people (you all know who you are).  I got a way too early flight out of SFO and went straight to meet my fellow SIG members and present about Legal Entities in R12 and what you can do with them in payables and receivables.  Lots of good questions both during and after the session, from customers and implementers.  In the evening I caught up with Jake of AppsLab fame and some of the Webcenter development team, who I hadn’t met in person before (a special shout out to Noel Portugal (@noe_portugal) who I have known online since the early days of OraTweet).

On Monday I did a lot of my day job in the morning and arrived a few minutes late for an Inter / Intra Company session with Lee (@BTLeeBriggs) and Thomas (@ThomasSimkiss) to find the room was too full and they were turning people away, a repeat was scheduled for Wednesday which was also well attended.  This confirms my theory, Intercompany is a really interesting topic that everyone wants to hear about.  I then had lunch and a really good chat with Debra Lilley, both enjoyable and informative.  Monday night was a fairly quiet night, catching up with work and a stroll along the strip for an hour.

On Tuesday I had a lot of work to do in the morning(anyone seeing a pattern here?) and then I attended the multinational SIG, where we discussed the many applications of a secondary ledger and chart of account design, these are always very interactive sessions where I get to learn from others and hope I contribute something worthwhile.  Then I made some time to check out the demo booths, I saw a large crowd at the Fusion Financials booth, who looked captivated by the product as you can see.  I was not working the demo booth at this event, but  expect to be on demo booth duty at Open World this year, so you have advance warning to add it to your schedule and come and see me there.

Wednesday was my last day and I was a guest at the Fusion Financials session doing a demo of the Fusion General Accounting Dashboard and also an  example of social integration that enables more streamlined collaboration around a specific business process.   This is using the Oracle Social Network technology in webcenter and we had some fun with the iPad and iPhone apps too, it’s always good when you get a round of applause during a demo and as you can see from the picture people were watching intently.

Then it was to the airport and back home.  The conference went way to quickly, but I did get some invitations for other conferences later in the year and then there is OpenWorld not too far away so plenty of chances to get my fix.

Share your thoughts on the conference in the comments…

So over the next weeks and months I hope to bring you some interesting Fusion Applications posts and I will continue to mix in Ebusiness Suite and general tech topics as always. You will also see me getting a little more active on twitter again so please follow me there too and let me know what you think and what you would like to here more details about.

I joined Oracle in 1997 working out of the UK, in a team split between Redwood Shores in California and the UK; my first project was working with people in The Netherlands and my boss was in Finland. So working globally is nothing new to me. At the moment my team are located in California, New York, U.K., Bangalore and Hyderabad. I have almost 15 years experience working in remote teams, to me it is the norm but some organizations are still getting used to it. So he are a few techniques I have found useful.

1) One team – Everyone is equal regardless of location

If you try to have one team your treat as an outsourcing team you will fail. You need to treat everyone as art of the same team and have everyone involved in design, code, test, etc. Having one location do a design and pas it to another team to code is not going to work. If you treat everyone as a single team you will be more productive, get the best out of all members of the team and have better motivated people who will stay in the team longer as they will get better opportunities to learn and grow. If you disagree with this, the rest of the post is not going to be relevant to you.

2) Get to Know Each Other

I did something called “Knowing Me, Knowing You” where each team member has to interview another and write up a little article about them. This should be trivial and light hearted and it’s essential that you decide who interviews who, to make sure everybody talks to somebody they don’t know well yet. After you have all written the articles, then post them in a central place and you can all read about each other.

3) Use Timezones to your advantage

You can get 24 hour coverage, so nobody should have to work through the night on critical issues – pass them around the globe. There are challenges here as you can lose efficiency with different people working an issue if it is not done right. I always recommend a warm handover – so you speak live to the person you’re passing the issue to and they get a chance to ask questions. Dropping them a mail and going to bed is not the right way!

4) Pick Up the Phone

It is very easy, particularly in a tech company to use electronic communication (IM, email, blogs, ec) all the time. These are great tools, but when you are remote you should use all the different communication tools available to you and sometimes you need t pick up the phone and talk.

5) Regular team meetings

This is something I have always struggled with, I don’t want to create a meeting that people don’t want to attend and get no benefit from, people’s time is valuable. However if I stop having regular meetings people feel they are out of touch, so I do my best to bring valuable content ie. not me droning on.

6) Have some fun together

Take a few minutes of team meetings or interactions for something light hearted. This checks everyone is awake and listening and lightens the mood, remember it will be early morning or late a night for some people. It is also good to share pictures of any team meals or events in each location with other locations. I was amazed when some team members in Hyderabad shared this Bollywood flash mob they were part of, great to see another side to them.

So these are 6 thoughts I had, but it is not the complete picture and I’d like to here your thoughts. The comments sections is below…

Fusion Nation Red Vest

This year at Oracle OpenWorld there will be a lot of people in these red vests.  We are part of what is dubbed ‘Fusion Nation’, consisting of early adopter customers, partners, system integrators, user groups and a few Oracle dev folks (that’s where I come in).  All these people have been working in depth with Fusion Applications and are more than happy to talk to others about their experiences.  I collected my red vest today and I have to admit it is a high quality garment and I have already been asked more than once “How do I get one of those?’ (They are not available, try ebay after the conference ends).  It comes with a red satchel and also a button saying ‘Ask me about Oracle Fusion Applications’.  So if you see somebody wearing the vest, feel free to stop and ask them, they’ll be happy to talk as people are very enthusiastic and excited about the product.  Debra may not stop when she gets started.

I am closing this post with the first music video ever in this blog.  Whenever I hear the term Fusion Nation, I can’t help but sing Janet Jackson’s 1990 hit ‘Rhythm Nation’, switching out Rhythm for Fusion.   Click on the video below if you want to be humming the song involuntarily too.  The rumor that Janet Jackson will join Steve Miranda on stage for his keynote on Wednesday are probably starting to circulate about now.

To be, or not to be, that is the question.

I decided to write this post in response to a post on the Talented Apps blog, by Sri Subramanian discussing how we process lots of information from feeds, twitter and emails and mentioning that adding people to the cc: on an email is ok as long as the subject is good so they can filter.  I disagree.  There is a very big difference between email and feeds (RSS, twitter, facebook feed, blogs etc), one is like me going to a bookstore and browsing and the other is like junk mail, let’s compare the two.

Junk mail -  somebody gets my address and specifically sends a message to me and it is delivered right to my door and I have to look at it and chuck into the recycle bin that I keep close to where I pick up my mail.  If I don’t like something I’m sent, I cannot easily stop them sending more.

Bookstore – I look around for a bookstore I like the look of and I go in and navigate to the sections of interest and look around maybe thumb through a few, maybe buy some and read them fully, or not.  I decide when I leave and if I go back there again.

In summary the difference is that email (or junk snail mail) is not on my terms.  I opt in to feeds (or bookstores) and I can opt out whenever I like, but email I have no choice it comes to my inbox and I have to deal with it.  I can set up filters, but that is error prone because I may filter something that I need and miss it.

I love feeds and information flowing from them are great, because it is on my terms but I think people sending emails have some responsibility to attempt to cc: only people that need to know.

What’s your opinion on the topic, is it ok to cc: everyone on your mail, just in case they are interested?  Let me know in the comments section.

photo credit:  StreetAlbum

http://www.flickr.com/photos/streetalbum/3102886548/in/photostream/

[The RISA mentioned in the photo is a company that paints over graffiti - some say it is cleaning up, some say it is destroying street art]

What is the difference between the 11i GRE/LE and R12 LE?

• GRE/LE is upgraded as an LE in R12
• In 11i GRE/LE was often a dummy LE, not real LE structure and had little use
• R12 LE has a more robust definition
• R12 LE is used more by processes and reports across financials

One thing I always plug is the Demogrounds, this is the place to go if you want to spend some quality time with a product and an expert form Oracle on that product.  You will often have a chance for one on one discussions and demos and get to the answers you are particularly interested in.  We will have two dedicated Fusion Fiancnails demo pods this year.   I’ll be there on Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon, so come please drop by and see the most compelling product I have ever had the pleasure of working on, the title is “Oracle Fusion Financials Delivers Revolutionary Reporting and Insight”

I have just started to think about preparing slides and I thought that rather than actually work on them, I would blog and see if anyone had ideas on the type of thing I should talk about (the hip crowd would call it crowd sourcing).  It’s been almost 4 years since that post, so let me know in the comments what more information you would like on Legal Entities in Oracle Apps.

The comments section is just down below, past all the widgets asking you to like the post and share it…

Since deciding to just leave everything in my Inbox about 7 years ago I have never looked back and this study(pdf) seems to vindicate my decision.  I must have saved days or weeks by not filing and I no longer waste energy trying to organize something that doesn’t need organizing.  If I want to find an email I use the Three S Technique(copyright that phrase; me):

• Searching – I use Thunderbird 3 from Mozilla which has a reasonable search, there is also Google desktop search which can search emails.
• Sorting – Usually I search for the person I know sent me an email and then sort by date or subject, sometimes I search for a keyword in the subject and sort by sender.
• Scrolling – I could also add Scan here for another S.  I often just sort by date and scan my eyes over as I scroll through emails and locate what I want.

The other issue is how I deal with incoming emails, filtering them and determining what to action first.  My prime technique is  Scrolling and Scanning, I tend to scan for Senders primary and Subject second and look for anything that might be urgent and deal with those first.  Then as I go through other mails, if there is something I want to come back to later and take some action on, I will just mark it as Unread so I will be able to find it later easily.

So now you know how I deal with the 200+ emails I get every day.  How do you deal with yours?  Do you think I am insane and filing is the only way?  Share your thoughts in the comments.

I was slightly surprised and mildly embarrassed that several people ‘recognized’ me from this blog, it good to here that people enjoy reading it and more importantly find it a helpful resource.  Many people asked when I would start blogging about Fusion, considering it has been discussed and talked about and shown extensively at Open World last year and again at Collaborate.  The answer is not yet, firstly I think most people are really interested in R12 right now given the number of people recently upgraded, in the process of upgrading or planning for an upgrade, secondly I’m not risking any issues regarding revenue recognition and other problems talking about things which are not released.

I did also attend and speak at some R12 sessions and for the AGIS session run by Alyssa Johnson I somewhat hijacked it during the Q&A but Alyssa did a great job and I’m hoping she will send me the slides.  I was impressed to see the knowledge around on R12 now and there are plenty of consultants with good experience sharing specific examples and giving advice to people who are in the process of upgrading.  This knowledge sharing inspired me to get back on this blog, so I am determined to try and get a few more useful posts out there and start some good conversations in the comments.  So watch this space.