Morning Prep

Today is my long day of presenting. But, after today, I’m done! I won’t need to carry my heavy laptop around with me!

I’ll start the morning by attending a session, then go into a pattern of presenting a session, attending a session, presenting a session, attending a session, and so forth. Luckily, 2 of my 3 presentations today are panels (i.e. they don’t require any preparation) which will keep my stress levels in check and help the day go by easier.

Artificial Emotional Intelligence (Adrian Png, Insum)

I realized only this morning that the topic of A.I. was on the Kscope23 docket. My buddy Adrian who is an Oracle ACE Director and knows a lot about a lot of things is presenting on this. I can’t help but attend one of his cutting edge sessions.

In this 30-min session, Adrian covered the history of Artificial Emotional Intelligence (AEI), current applications of it, and a general overview of how it works. It was very nerdy and very interesting.

My Session: 10 Reports Features You Should Be Using

Reports is hot at Kscope23! I’m glad there’s so much interest and it seems to be growing! I’ve been slowly collecting a list of features customers seem to forget about or don’t know exist. I put them into a session and was happy it was well received. I also included a handful of bonus features.

The Oracle Fedora Feud: Battle of the EPM Titans (Argano)

This time slot was the vendor time slot. I generally go to the Argano one every year because it’s sure to entertain. They pitted EPM against Essbase in a Family Feud style game and asked audience members to participate. It was hilarious!

My Session: Oracle ACE Lunch & Learn Panel: EPM (with Oracle ACEs and Oracle ACE Directors)

Edward moderated the panel this year. I joined the stage with Kate Helmer (newly promoted Oracle ACE Director! Woohoo!), Vatsal Gaonkar, Geordan Drummond, and Glenn Schwartzberg. It was a lively discussion with only a few controversial questions (and responses). It was also Glenn’s final ACE panel ever, as he is retiring.

Oracle EPM Product Management Panel (Oracle EPM Product Managers)

ODTUG Kscope is fortunate to have so many Oracle EPM product managers in attendance each year. I hope that never ends. It’s a huge investment from their team, and the ODTUG community is grateful to have direct access to them. They arrived in number, representing all of the Cloud EPM products.

This was a panel session, so with no formal format. Unfortunately, the acoustics in this room made several questions and answers hard to hear. Here are some of my key takeaways from this session.

What is the vision for the ERP integration roadmap with EPM? Mike Casey recommended BI Publisher for current reporting needs. In addition, customer use cases for future integration enhancements can be posted to the Idea Lab.

Future of FR? There is a small list of parity items left to be resolved in the cloud. They’re hoping to resolve that gap by next May. When that happens, Oracle will announce the sunsetting of FR ~6 months later. This only applies to Oracle Cloud EPM customers and not on-prem.

Forms 2.0? Being released soon. There will be an application setting that allows you to switch from Forms 1.0 to Forms 2.0.

Redwood? This is the standard theme moving forward and all new enhancements will go here first. As mentioned in Shankar’s presentation yesterday, the other non-Redwood themes will be going away soon and be replaced with Redwood and 2 new themes called Light and Dark. Customers will need to move to Redwood to take advantage of upcoming new features like Dashboards 2.0 with Forms 2.0.

EPCM? HPCM moved to the Cloud in 2016. They decided to integrate the standard EPM Cloud platform with PCM (to create EPCM) to be able to innovate in the future.

It’s hard to keep up with what feature is where in each tool of Data Integration. Mike Casey’s session will talk more about this tomorrow, but customers should expect more features to move between the tools as they consolidate and eventually deprecate Data Management. In another session on Wednesday, Mike Casey specifically said they’ve been trying to deprecate Data Management for 4 years now. They’re slowly getting there.

IPM – is this going to replace customer jobs? What are the use cases? How do customers gain consensus with their leadership to adopt it? It’s not going to replace jobs, but enhance them. This is inline with what leaders want their people to do – to spend time on more value-added activities. IPM is a step into a brand new area for most organizations–it’s a change management question. It seems like most customers would want to be more efficient.

Pipeline can run any integration you can define.

How much is the digital assistant? It’s no additional cost as long as you have access to the underlying platform already. You can contact Mike Casey for more information.

Native vs. Standard mode for Smart View in Cloud EPM? Standard mode is the default moving forward and on all new deployments. Oracle will announce the deprecation of Native mode soon.

IPM insights is only available for Enterprise Cloud EPM customers.

When will it be possible to put reportable system metrics on Dashboards 2.0? Good idea! Log enhancements in the Idea Lab.

Enhancements for the integration of Strategic Modeling with the rest of EPM Cloud? Use data maps to move data from SM to a reporting cube, as there are no enhancements planned to create a separate, compatible cube.

Every Cloud EPM customer (except government) is going to be on Gen2 by the end of the year.

My Session: Best Practice Advice: EPM Reporting Experts Panel

Last year’s EPM Reporting panel session was so well received, it ended up being standing room only at one point. Shankar does a lovely job setting the stage with an overview of Oracle EPM reporting content, which kick starts the Q&A. He actually created brand new content for our session!

I reprised last year’s panel by inviting Shankar, Geordan, and Kelliann again. Al decided to join in on the fun as well. It was a hoot.

Panel: Is AI Good or Bad? (Heli Helskyaho, Holger Friedrich, Abi Giles-Haigh)

This was a casual 30-min session in the Exhibit hall. It ended up being a fun discussion with lots of interesting opinions. Most of us agreed that we’re terrified of the capabilities of A.I. and where it could go when bad actors are using it. And we agreed that no one is really ready for it, it needs governance, and it also needs ethical boundaries.

The panelists told us real stories of how A.I. has already gone down crazy paths, which made the scaredy cats even more fearful. But, it was a refreshing and interactive conversation and the whole audience got to weigh in.

In the end, we decided collectively there are use cases for both why it’s good and bad. To be determined…

Nightly Activities

My first stop was the Tuesday happy hour event. I’ve been forgetting to take a picture of the exhibit hall, so here is a lovely photo of the ODTUG booth and some of the vendors.

I then went to change into some more comfortable clothing and ran to catch the shuttle to the offsite Argano event with Tracy. Argano always puts on a great event, and this year’s was at the Green Valley Beer Garden. I spent the entire night catching up with my buddies from a past life and managed to get a Ted Lasso-themed t-shirt in the process. Thanks to Argano for an excellent event!

My EPM family is spread across various companies after being in the industry for multiple decades. It’s always nice to stop, catch our breaths, reconnect, and wind down together.

This was my latest night out so far!