2017 DOAG - Thanks to My Friends

I mentioned in my last post that I had been accepted by the DOAG and had to break my commitment as I have extended my trip to Australia to include New Zealand.

I didn't like to let down the DOAG, and I had two presentations. One is a customer case study on DHL, who are owned by Deutsche Post, so lots of local interest, and then my 'Extending HCM with VBCS'.

Luckily Luc Bors from eProseed, our development partner was already speaking at DOAG so he is able to give that presentation, and a colleague of mine in the UK, is going to present the DHL case study. Ramya will be better than me she was part of the implementation team.

DOAG is a great conference, it's fun and I know you will all enjoy it.

2017 ODC APAC Tour

The 2017 OTN APAC Tour kicks off in 10 days, although not sure if it should be called Oracle Developer Community APAC Tour. now they have changed their name.

Last year I had hoped to join this tour, but at the last minute, things didn't work out. So I am really pleased to say I will be going this year.

Originally I had submitted for New Zealand and Australia but it appeared I would only be in Australia, so then applied for DOAG. Then I was asked to do New Zealand as well as it is more cost effective and that is fantastic but didn't want to let DOAG down, however that is now sorted (next blog) and my flights are booked and I'll soon be on my way.


It is a long, long way to travel I don’t really mind I have my own coping techniques for the actual journey. This is an region where cloud applications are starting to be adopted and somewhere where I always get really good conversations with the customers delegates.

•               Wellington, NZ : November 20^{th -} - https://wlgotnday2017.sched.com/
•                Auckland, NZ : November 22^th - https://aklotnday2017.sched.com/
•                Sydney, Australia: November 24^th  – https://sydneyotnday2017.sched.com/
•                Melbourne, Australia: November 2^7th - http://www.ausoug.org.au/
•                Perth, Australia: November 29th - http://www.ausoug.org.au/

There are three presentations that I will be giving during the tour:

• Extending Cloud HCM presentation on Visual Builder Cloud Services. I gave a basic version of this as a webcast for APAC earlier in the year so I want to add some more functionality to that presentation.

•  Government EBS to Cloud Case Study.  Specifically in Australia there are a lot of public sector users of Oracle on premise and I know the story will be relevant to them. I’m not quite sure what Oracle have done around the security physical security, here in the UK we have a data centre dedicated to Public Sector, but what I can assure people is that as the need is there then Oracle will react to it.

• Back to Basics. This is one that I did in Croatia just a couple weeks ago which is back to basics on cloud applications. In the days when we were waiting for Fusion to be released, I did it a series of presentations that looked at how it was built, the principles behind it, how essbase is baked in etc. All the sorts of things for understanding how was put together, particularly for those who support that side of their systems today. I know that Oracle sell you a cloud solution and in theory you don't need to know this and you can’t touch it, but it’s what you been responsible for for quite a long time and you do have an interest in what’s going on. I was asked by Croatia where I had given the original presentation many years ago if I would update it. This was a very interesting exercise, to see how far it has come after five / six years availability.

So those are the presentations I will be delivering and I’m really looking forward to the conversations. I think it’s a couple of years since I’ve been to APAC, and I know the adoption of Cloud Applications has ramped up. Certus has an Australia office and in the last year they have implemented a few systems, most notably for People's Choice.

From a personal perspective I love that it’s summer there and I love how Christmas is celebrated one of my favourite memories of two years ago was the massive Santa Claus in Sydney built out of beer crates!  This is going to be fun for me, again ,I’m going a few days early to see a friend in New Zealand , then the first weekend I’m going to dive in Sydney, Manley Bay which is somewhere I love and then I have the opportunity to in Perth.  I’m going to get stay with that Penny Cookson, one of the driving forces behind the user group there. I’ve even managed to work it so on the way back I get the chance to visit a great aunt in Singapore just for dinner at the airport as I pass through. 

Thanks for the great opportunity and I’m really looking forward to spending time with other presenters, especially the ones I haven't travelled with before and going back to user groups that really appreciate me being there. So I hope I see, if you haven’t already registered, do so, it’s going to be a great set of events.

Oracle User Experience - Starts with Listening to the User

Standard Life (now Standard Life Aberdeen) were an early customer in 2011 of HCM Talent & Performance; part of HCM Cloud Applications. They run this in co-exisitance with their Oracle eBusiness Suite.

As an early customer they developed a great relationship with Oracle Development and are members of both a traditional Customer Advisory Board that works with Product Strategy and also the Oracle Usability Advisory Board (OAUB)

The User Experience team have in their remit to talk to customers, listen to them on how they work, and have them validate current design patterns and processes Oracle are working on.

As well as talking to new customers, and customers who sign up to their outreach events, such as Users Groups and Cloud Days, it is important to both the UX and Product teams to work with some customers regularly and this is what they achieve through their advisory boards.

Last week Oracle visited Standard Life Aberdeen in Edinburgh for two days, with Product Management giving them updates on Release 13, and the UX team holding interviews on usability.

View from the Office Window

As Certus were also working with Standard Life Aberdeen , delivering training on new components of HCM Cloud to be adopted; they invited us to observe the two days. Certus are also members of the OUAB Advisory Board and I am an OAUX Advocate, so these are people we know very well.

The two days of sessions, contained lots of interactive discussion, especially around user adoption and feedback. 

The individual sessions were also well received with the UX team leader sharing a comment from one of the participants “he looked through his list of issues from last time and to his pleasant surprise, every single issue had been resolved and he was not able to come up with any new issues that he could identify this time around.”

I would like to thank Aberdeen Standard Life, especially Sarah Wormwell, Head of People Technology & Change for the invitation, and Oracle UK for their hospitality at The Home Restaurant.

If you would like to hear direct from Sarah, about what it means to actually 'Live in the Cloud' come and hear her presentation at UKOUG Apps17 on Wednesday December 6th.

2017 hroug - Croatia

I came to #hroug2008 and although I really enjoyed it there were not any english speaking presenters and I found that intimidating. However now the SiOUG and hroug events run back to back, it is very different.


The event is still held in Rovinj but now on an island at the Hotel Istra. To even get there you have to go by boat.

It is a beautiful setting complete with its own castle which is where my sessions were held.

My VABCS presentation was on the drinking v sleep patterns of delegates which is the main source of conversation at this event. I felt very old as I was tired before the parties started each day. 

This mobile app even clicked into the detail - my own skills are improving! I like to make the effort to do something very conference specific, it shows the delegates it isn't simply cut and paste.

Taking advantage of the wonderful surroundings, I managed another dive, and a couple of early morning swims to the next island and back (about 200m). The visiting speakers even had an afternoon off when only local people were presenting and they took us to the nearby town of Pula, and gave us a walking tour. Beautiful.

The parties are legendary but I didn't really take part, although when the whole island is the party venue even in bed you can hear the music.


My second presentation was a 'back to basics' for Fusion SaaS applications. When I was here in 2008 the developers asked what it would mean to them, so now they are mainstream I thought it a good idea. I found an old presentation on understanding fusion and set about updating it. The principles are the same, but so much has moved on, and is now reality not theory. I loved putting it together.

The Croatia event was not too far from where Slovenia was and again I had Roel Hartman as a driver back to Ljubljana for my flight home.

Thank you hroug, it was fun.

2017 SiOUG - Slovenia

Just as quickly as I had unpacked from #OOW17, it was time to think about the next 2 conferences. Slovenia and Croatia.

I spoke in Slovenia before in 2011. I was invited by Joze Senegacnik  who I knew from the Oak Table. I had had a wonderful time and we stayed in Portoroz on the coast. 

I didn't blog about that conference but I did comment on the three most wonderful user group presidents and I do remember that Doug Burns was with us and moaned (about everything).

Anyway nowadays the Slovenian and Croatian events are back to back. They both take place in holiday resorts, immediately after the holiday season ends. Cheap hotels but still good weather and beautiful settings. They are both only an hour apart and it works well.

Unfortunately I got accepted late to Slovenia and missed the opportunity to get funded by the ACE program but decided to go anyway, self fund, and make a mini break out of it.

I flew into Ljubljana, the capital, and got collected by the hotel. Most people had a hire car, but because I won'

t drive on the wrong side and because I could get a lift once the event started, this was the best way for me to travel.

The Monday night had a party with a Beatles tribute band. However I was tired, so after a walk outside along the beach for an ice cream, I had a reasonably early night.

The hotel was about 1km away from the one we stayed at before, but I had remembered there was a dive shop there. So my extra days were spent diving. 

The conference kicked off on the Sunday night with a speakers dinner. It was about 40 minutes away by coach and a wonderful family restaurant. Joze had baked bread for the starter and I could have just eaten that, the walnut and date sourdough bread was amazing.

We also had a 'maize' or corn soup, however with his accent I was sure the host said it was mice soup, and reacted accordingly. Every one laughed at me.

They had quite a good agenda for Cloud Applications and I was particularly interested in one on ##PaaS4SaaS that was Mobile Cloud Services with Innovation Cloud. However I was very disappointed as it seemed to me to be just marketing for Innovation Cloud.

There was one on cloud security for GDPR which was very interesting, and I even managed to win a prize for knowing what date GDPR comes into force.

My session was on the Tuesday and it was my Extending Cloud HCM is as simple as ABCs. Well it would be if Oracle hadn't renamed it VBCS!! When we arrived at the event each of us was given a card to complete for which meals we would attend, so I though it would be good to use that as my demo. Although at one point I was afraid the wifi wouldn't hold up so I had a webcast on my PC ready to play with me speaking over it.

The wifi didn't let me down, and I successfully built my meal app, deployed it via HCM and then created a mobile dashboard app to show the totals; all in the 45 minutes. Not bad for a non techie. 

Roel Hartman came to watch me as he was giving me a lift to Croatia as soon as I finished, and he tweeted nice things about the presentation. 

2017OOW - OOW Messages

No surprise that #OOW17 was all about Cloud, but that is now cloud across the entire portfolio.

Oracle talked about the content in #OOW17 being the equivalent to a year's education. So no way I could take all that in. To me #OOW is about finding the areas I need to know about, get the headlines and find out who to follow up with. I have another tactic as well, identify the ACE Directors who are in this area as the support we give each other is brilliant.

The headline, in case you didn't realise, was the Autonomous Database. Does that mean anything for me? As a user group leader obviously and so I was really interested and the debate in the ACE sessions on the Friday, gave me lots to think about. 

In my day job with SaaS it is also important. Oracle are now in the data centre business and anything they do to make that more efficient has to be good for us.

Before #OOW17 I identified Blockchain as something I was interested in. I only managed to get to one of the sessions but there was a demo of this in the UX Exchange which was also very thought provoking. The launch of Oracle's own Blockchain Cloud shows just how serious they are. I expect to see this embedded in the SaaS before too long.

In the SaaS world it was all about Release 13, and I'm looking forward to being an early adopter at Certus. I have always been an advocate for these applications and it was great to catch up with Steve Miranda and his team. I still say the UX is the best part but I love how that makes embracing new technology such fun.

Machine Learning was a big area, Chatbots and Adaptive Intelligence are appearing in SaaS, and despite how much of a luddite I am, I look forward to see how these develop. 

I spend a lot of time talking to analysts about Oracle and they seemed pleased with the Oracle Messages. A good summary is this one from Diginomica 

Each year there have been more end customers talking about their adoption of Oracle Cloud and this was no exception. It is exciting times

And then suddenly it was all over and even the clouds left San Francisco.

Return to main #OOW17 Summary

WIT - Welcome in Technology

I attended or took part in a couple of WIT events at #OOW17 and here is what I learnt.

#DEVWIT

My schedule was, as always manic, so I was up first in these lightening talks by women in the dev community, which is sad because I would loved to have heard everyone's stories.

I talked about how I got into IT, which I have shared on this blog before. When I started, IT had just become mainstream, there was no education program to produce the developers of tomorrow, and there was certainly no bias.

But again, I don't think there is a bias today, we just aren't encouraging enough women to look at technology as a career. Or are we? This was just 24 hours after #JavaOne4Kids and there was certainly no lack of girls taking part in that, so I am encouraged.

It's funny that making the perfect cup of tea got me into IT and then 30 years later the great Mark Rittman was almost stumped with the technology behind it!

Then on Monday it was Inclusive Leadership

This was hosted by OWL as part of the Executive Program at #OOW17, and again I was honoured to be invited to attend. This was sponsored by TATA and Ritu Anand who gave their insight on inclusivity.

Next Christy Haubegger talked about why she created Latina Magazine, when she realised there were no magazines for Latin American women, despite them being greater in number than most groups in the US. She more recently produced 'Spanglish'.

Simon Fanshawe OBE who was a co founder of Stonewall, was just so funny to listen to. He had a really serious message about diversity and inclusion and I could have listened to him all day. It is no wonder we as a society have moved so far forward with someone like him who so eloquently and yet entertaining speaks out.

Then Debbie Sterling who created Goldieblox, engineering toys for girls. I loved her enthusiasm and hopefully the little girls of today, will grow up believing engineering is for them if they want it.

There was also Safra Katz talking about her world in Oracle and she talked about the Design Tech High School built on the Oracle Campus which I had seen a few days before. This is great work.

There was a women of the ACE Program set of talks but unfortunately I was unable to take part but know that it too showcased and encouraged women in IT.

On my way home from #OOW17 I watched Hidden Figures and I found myself in tears (not sure what my fellow passenger thought). This was such an inspirational program. The hard thing to take was the level of discrimination, but to me the most important thing was that they were, in the end they were successful because of their outstanding ability and not because of some quota.

Perhaps this will be controversial, but it won't be the first time I have said it. My interest in WIT is not about complaining but about encouraging. At #OOW17 there was lots of encouraging and I want to change the definition of #WIT

Women Welcome in Technology

Tim Hall and I have been talking about this and we are looking at how we can promote this more in our communities.

Let's make #WIT about encouraging everyone, and the inclusion of everyone.

Return to main #OOW17 Summary