APPLICATIONS UNLIMITED
Oracle Applications Unlimited
Pilot Workshops
As part of its effort to align customers’ business and IT strategies
with Oracle’s applications strategy, Oracle has been conducting
a series of pilot workshops with members of the Oracle Fusion
Strategy Council and is developing a comprehensive set of workshops that will be conducted worldwide.
“These workshops, which are a collaborative effort across
Oracle’s development and field organizations, enable customers
to lay out a strategic road map for their Oracle Applications and
underlying technologies as we deliver Applications Unlimited
and Oracle Fusion products to them over the next three to five
years,” says Ian Robertson, Oracle’s senior director of global customer programs for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
For the past six months, the hands-on workshops have been
conducted with companies such as QUALCOMM, Subaru of
America, and Kaiser Permanente. They engage a broad range of
expertise throughout Oracle to address customer issues and concerns and build an ongoing program of work, or plan of action,
with customers as they prepare for Oracle Fusion or upgrade to
current releases of Oracle Applications. “Feedback from the pilot
workshops has been overwhelmingly positive,” says Robertson.
“Customers gained a lot of value from the process.” Contact your
Oracle representative for more information.
Recognizing Oracle Applications
Advocates
The Oracle ACE program, designed to recognize and reward
members of the Oracle technical community for their contribution, is now opening the program to Oracle Applications
advocates. To qualify for the Oracle ACE Application program,
candidates should be contributing application expertise to
some or all of the following types of communications: blogs,
podcasts, speaking events, articles, forums, and more.
On the Road with EPM
An excerpt from Frank Buytendijk’s
executive blog
Frank Buytendijk, Oracle vice president of enterprise performance
management strategy, publishes a weekly enterprise performance
management and business intelligence blog. Find it at blogs.oracle
.com/frankbuytendijk. E-mail him at frank.buytendijk@oracle.com.
In the strategy team of Oracle’s Enterprise Performance
Management (EPM) GlobaI Business Unit, we want to ensure
that Oracle defines and leads the future of EPM. Where will
the market, the technologies, and the business be in the next 5
or 10 years?
Strategy is a funny thing. Everyone has a strategy, to some
degree, but it seems hard to articulate at times. The best way of
looking at strategy, at least in my opinion, comes from Henry
Mintzberg. In his excellent book Strategy Safari, he defines strat-
egy not as an exercise done in the ivory tower, before tossing
it over the wall to operations, but as a continuous process. We
set out a high-level goal, more or less define the broad steps we
would like to take, and fill in the details as we go. While we
travel toward our goal, we will see the circumstances change and
we need to take a shortcut or a detour. Organizations that take
this view on strategy are more adaptive and, as a result, more
agile. Being adaptive, instead of being hardwired toward our
goal, helps us to reach goals earlier. But equally important, this
means we learn more.
Contrast this to the grand plan we are forced to stick with. If
the situation changes, tough luck—we can’t. The program is in
place. And only in the next big iteration of updating our strategy
can we apply lessons learned in the meantime. Enter enterprise
performance management.
In a sense, enterprise performance m anagement is the driver
for strategy formulation. Let’s explore
that a little by talking about an automobile “driver” in a literal way, using a
navigation system. Continuous feedback
through dashboards tells us about our
mileage, the estimated time of arrival,
and the system actively tells us how to
avoid the traffic jam. It helps us to adapt
to changes in the traffic. In business
terms, our goal is clear, but we’ll have to Frank Buytendijk
be on the road to see how to get there.
Gone are the days of monster-size strategy sessions, run by
the strategic planning departments. Away with inflexible and
disconnected annual budgeting cycles, dominated by Finance.
Welcome to the days of the information democracy, where
strategy is “consumerized,” like so many other things. Embrace
rolling forecasts based on the business drivers that continuously
integrate operational agility with financial outcomes. Being in
control is about driving change instead of resisting it.
Oracle’s EPM strategy team is no ivory tower, either. Most of
our time we spend on the road. Visiting you. Discussing what’s
on your plate, and on ours, for that matter. We’d love to speak
to you as well. <>
>> FOR MORE INFORMATION
Oracle Fusion Middleware
oracle.com/products/middleware
Oracle AppsLab
oracleappslab.com
Oracle Applications Unlimited
oracle.com/applicationsunlimited
Oracle’s Hyperion’s market leadership
oracle.com/features/hp/gartner-hyperion-06.html
The Oracle ACE Program
oracle.com/technology/community/oracle_ace
Oracle Blog Center
oracle.com/blogs
