Thursday 27 January 2011

Fusion UX Advocates



The UX team have been so accommodating to the user groups through the PDC around Fusion Applications and helped us to understand for our members. At Oracle Open World we were part of the launch and I got to introduce Steve Miranda SVP of Applications Development, which was such an honour. 

After a more technical presentation I said to the UX team I wanted access to be able to do my own demos. The discussion continued and I realised that development were open to this. I could have just worked with them on my own, but I want the community to benefit and despite popular belief I cannot be everywhere. 

The access has to be controlled and it would require a certain level of base understanding, and then to be of value to Oracle, would need to be presented, so I suggested the ACE  program would be the ideal platform. We are all committed to presenting and learning and have signed NDAs. The program took shape and Steve Miranda backed it. Ideally I wanted it to be like the FMW 4 Apps kits we had a few years back where we got virtual images of the apps and could either follow a script to build SOA integration or do our own thing. The ACE Program is a wide range of expertise across all the technologies, but so is Fusion Apps so the idea of training some of these and them going away, doing their thing and feeding back to development as well as presenting to their followers was very compelling.

But I get ahead of myself, the product is not yet GA so having a copy is not possible and even then takes a while to build a subset of what we would need. But we were keen to get the program off the ground so this week 9 members of the Ace program have been invited to a intensive training day where we will learn the concepts of a few presentations, both functional and technical. We will get material to enable us to present canned demos, perhaps later be able to use a demo system live but be able to start our own unique insights into how these applications will work in our areas.

These 9 are just the tip of the iceberg and definitely a small start to the initiative. The interest has been phenomenal with over 47 of the program expressing an interest, and this will be developed over the next few months with further people being trained over the summer.

Thanks to Viki in the ACE Program for working with the UX team and especially to Misha and Andrew in the UX team who have put this advocates program together.

1 comment:

Misha Vaughan said...

Hey Debra,

You deserve a HUGE thank you for helping to push and shape the program into something mutually beneficial. For somebody who is so clearly technical, you speak user experience quite excellently now!

Misha