Ahhhh, it’s that time of year again (except that it’s 2-3 months later than usual). The weather is cold (actually, really freakishly cold), people have just come back from an amazing winter holiday (and have hopefully renewed their faith in humanity), and abstract submission season seems to have died down a bit.

But then…

Kscope18’s new abstract submission deadline hurtles around the corner and, just when you think you’re out of the weeds, hits you over the head. Oh no! It’s time to SUBMIT YOUR KSCOPE ABSTRACTS! Kscope18 abstracts are due Friday, January 5th at 11:59pm PST. For those of you who waited until the very last minute…and yes, we know that ~half of Kscope abstracts are submitted the night before…this post is for you.

Why You Should Present at Kscope18

ODTUG Kscope is…awesome, amazing, inspiring…exhausting? I’ve presented now at all of the major American conferences and I still think Kscope is the best technical Oracle user group conference out there. I’m only a little biased.

At Kscope, not only do you gain fantastic technical knowledge that you can apply directly to your job,

but you can hang out with your Oracle Product Management and Development friends,

have fun with like-minded nerds, like only nerds can,

dance the night away,

and party like it’s 1999…er, 1986?

There’s also a certain pride in being able to share your knowledge and save someone else from a looming or potential crisis.

I’ve heard countless stories of how someone got to talk directly to an Oracle, industry expert, or customer presenter and got advice immediately. Sometimes that’s worth the admission price alone. It warms my heart every time, as education is a big part of ODTUG’s mission statement.

See this post from Dietmar Aust for life-changing speaker inspiration!

What You Should Submit

Hmmm…so you’re convinced that Kscope is the place to be in June…but what do you submit? We have tracks for many fantastic Oracle technologies, including the ever popular “emerging tech” category. Take a look at our track lineup for Kscope18.

Update Jan 5, 2018 (abstract submission due date): looking at the current abstracts submitted, there are a few holes to fill (for those of you still looking for topic ideas):

• Don’t forget that Kscope is not all about Cloud. There are tons of customers still on on-prem and they need your wisdom! Don’t forget about those folks!
• We also need foundational, “101” type abstracts. Every technology has the potential to be new to someone at Kscope. What are the basic principles of modeling data? How does one become a better SQL coder? How does a person write better business rules/calc scripts in EPM? How does one get started in APEX? What are the important design principles when creating data visualizations and dashboards?
• Have any topics on cross-track learning? What should a database developer know about APEX? What should an EPM developer know about BI?
• Emerging technologies – do you have an interest in how Machine Learning, IoT, Chatbots (and now even Blockchain) relate to ODTUG’s technology communities? Submit an abstract today that shows how emerging tech intertwines with your technology of choice! Submit your abstract within the appropriate ODTUG community track that it relates to.

New to abstract submission? Use the accepted Kscope17 abstracts as a reference point.

The end goal is to submit a quality abstract backed with your wisdom, a catchy title, and a killer description that will hook attendees (and content selection members). You can submit up to 4 per primary presenter total (meaning, across all tracks)…and yes, we check.

Worried about lacking presentation skills? Don’t be afraid! This year we have planned a new webcast series designed to help speakers improve their presentation skills.

So submit your winner abstract this week and in June cross “present at a conference” off your bucket list! Good luck!

What You Shouldn’t Do

But don’t forget! This year we have changed things up a bit. Take a few extra glances at your abstract first draft before pressing Submit. We have added a public voting process that weighs each abstract title and summary on its own merit. Public voting isn’t the only judging criteria, but it’s worth an extra review of your abstract to ensure you’re sending over your very best effort.

Not sure what else to do or not do? Luckily, Oracle conferences have been around for decades. Some additional resources:

• My detailed abstract submission blog post from Kscope16
• The replay of the “How to Write a Winning Abstract” Kscope17 session by Natalie Delemar and Danny Bryant
• Wisdom from Oracle’s very own Jeff Smith, both here and here
• An education from Kellyn Pot’vin-Gorman
• And many more online resources – Google it!

Already submitted an abstract and see something here that makes you nervous? Don’t worry – log back into the ODTUG website and tweak your abstract. They aren’t considered “final” until the submission due date and time.

Random Inspiration

A random movie clip to inspire you toward abstract greatness!

Need topic ideas? The below sections include topic recommendations from the track leads and other knowledgeable resources. The topics listed are a great start, but don’t hesitate to think outside of the box! #yougotthis

Recommendations for #orclapex and #orcldb Submissions

Your amazing content chair on the “traditional” side, Jorge Rimblas, has put out a blog post with topic recommendations from his track leads:

http://rimblas.com/blog/2017/12/kscope-submission-ideas/

Check it out!

Recommendations for #orclepm and #orclbi Submissions

In addition, the talented Tiffany Briseno, your content chair on the EPM/BI side, has gathered insight from the EPM and BI track leads and conference committee members:

Advice from Teal Sexton, EPM Reporting, BI Analytics and Visualization track lead and ODTUG’s 2018 Leadership Program Coordinator:

• Pros and Challenges of Ad Hoc Reporting (i.e. how to make it work and/or what to avoid)
• Successful use cases/customer stories on using Predictive Analytics
• When Predictive Analytics goes wrong (a good powerful story about getting the wrong “prediction”, the consequences and how to avoid this)
• Self-service BI and the decentralization of BI in organizations (what works or what doesn’t work well)
• Customer Stories about how BI is evolving in their organizations
• Trends in BI from Oracle’s perspective
• When can BI be moved to the cloud for large enterprises?
• Visualizations: Using d3 and other embedded code in OBIEE narrative
• How to do visualizations well, based on best practices (Tufte’s principles and others)
• EPM Reporting done well: vendor or customer stories
• Best practices for EPM Reporting (drilling from summary to detail, etc.)
• EPM Reporting from the cloud
• Building powerful reports with better performance
• Static reporting: When to use static reporting and when to move on to interactive reporting

Advice from Michael Rainey, Big Data & Data Warehousing track lead:

• Data Modeling (relational and non-relational)
• Data Governance
• Data Integration (ETL, streaming, and everything in between)
• Emerging technologies (serverless, open source, etc)
• Migration of data and/or processing to the cloud
• Improving performance for data transformations, data processing, data loading, etc
• EDW and/or Data Lake architecture

Advice from Julien Coudrette, Financial Close track lead:

FCCS:

• Introduction to FCCS
• Customer success stories
• Transition from HFM to FCCS
• Transition from Enterprise to FCCS
• Key differences between FCCS and HFM
• FCCS rules development
• Supplemental Data Management
• Close Management
• Integration with EPRCS
• Integration with EPM Automate
• How to make the hybrid cloud actually work
• FCCS members naming convention best practices
• Security in FCCS
• FCCS and PBCS working together

HFM:

• Introduction to HFM
• Customer stories
• New features of HFM 11.1.2.4
• HFM optimization / fine tuning
• Rules tips or best practices
• Performance improvements
• New version of the FR studio for HFM applications
• Integration with cloud products
• New automation ideas

Other Close Topics:

• Lease Accounting
• Fast Close
• ARCS
• TRCS
• Country by Country Reporting
• On-prem SDM or Close Management

Advice from Tim German, Essbase Extraordinaire and the Kscope18 Conference Committee’s “Data Disentangler”:

I’m personally looking forward (of course!) to hearing from real live OAC customers, especially those that are taking advantage of new capabilities vs pure “lift and shift” of on-prem apps. We should also be seeing early adoption Enterprise Data Management Cloud projects live by June.

But I’m also expecting we’ll see new technical solutions and use cases that are equally relevant to Cloud, On-Prem and ‘hybrid’ platforms. Last year I was especially intrigued by some of the non-finance data use cases and I hope that area continues to grow.

Our new submission categories of “Real World EPM” and “Multi-Product EPM Solutions” are a creative approach to a longstanding challenge. Despite broad appeal, it may have been tough to know where to submit this type of session in the past. I’m optimistic that we’ll see a lot of abstracts in these categories for ODTUG Kscope18.

Advice from Tony Scalese, past EPM track lead and current content selection member on the EPM Data Integration track:

Technology:

• FDMEE
• Cloud Data Management
• ODI
• DRM
• DRG
• EDMCS (Enterprise Data Management Cloud Service)
• EPM Automate, Groovy, CLI or Curl (for Master data and data integration)

We are looking for sessions that highlight the above technologies and how they are integral in an EPM solution:

• Customer stories (live, or very close to live) – these sessions are most beneficial for the conference attendees. They can learn what the benefits of the project were, what were the pitfalls to avoid and how has the technology helped achieve operational goals.
• Did I mention customer stories – sense a theme?
• Early adopter stories
• Cloud integration for data and master data
• Hybrid integration – integration of EPM on-premises with Oracle PaaS or SaaS
• Deep dive technical sessions exploring topics that are likely to benefit a wide audience