What Links Premier League Football to Enterprise Planning?

New technology is exciting, to start with the use cases are part of the marketing process, but as people start to understand the capability, it will become more main stream and the bit I love, useful for organisations.

This week I had the opportunity to talk to people in person about this at an event jointly hosted by my employer Inoapps and Oracle, in London.

The event was entitled 'What can Fully Connected AI-driven Finance, HR and Analytics Do For Your Business'.

Oracle technology especially in Analytics uses Machine Learning and AI to give us far more than just statistics, they allow us to plan for the future, based on patterns from the past. Real insight and foresight.

To get the message out, Oracle partner with sport. This is not simple sponsorship to get their name seen, it is about using their technology to improve the sport.

I think most people have heard about their partnership with Redbull Racing in F1, but they also partner with Premier League Football where they provide real time insights for the viewer. 

This was the hook for the day, Oracle would talk about how the technology I would give customer examples in business, they would show how it is used in Premier League, Inoapps would talk about how we used it to raise our recent funding and then how no technology transforms without change. 

Lee Bonfield works for Oracle but he is also known for his Fantasy Premier League podcast and was an obvious choice to be the Oracle advocate for their partnership with the Premier League.

The venue for the day was the London Stadium, once the heart of the 2012 Olympics but now home of West Ham Football Team, an ideal location for this event.

I'm not a football fan but I loved the location. I was part of the implementation of E Business Suite for the Olympic Development Authority, that was created to host the Olympics in London, so it almost felt full circle. Walking up to the stadium was quite magical.

My session with John Gardner from Oracle was on Planning and Budgeting Cloud used with Fusion Applications. He talked about how much data we have, and how to use it to make a real difference. I got to do what I do best, interrupt John and give customer examples, what it actually meant to organisations and the challenges they overcame.

Then I interviewed ur Chief Finance Office, Ally Rule. He told our story and our recent investment success. Key to this story is our use of Oracle. We have Fusion HR and ERP, some amazing APEX applications to support industry specific needs, Oracle Analytics to bring this data together and Planning and Budgeting to give us that foresight. Ally explained that when we were looking for investment we selected an organisation to help us build the proposal, the analysts assigned to help us were taught Oracle Analytics by our in-house team and then let loose with our data. When Investors did their due diligence ,Inoapps were able to run every scenario they asked for and drill down behind the figure, in real time. 

Inoapps is an Oracle partner that uses Oracle to improve organisations businesses and Inoapps is also our most important customer.

Despite my lack of interest in football I enjoyed Lee's talk and my colleagues finished the content with talking about the important of change when adopting any technology. 

After a quick lunch there was a tour of the stadium and I loved the legacy of the Olympics still found around the stadium.

Great content, great discussions and so great to be away from the screen.