Hey everybody! I’m baaaaaaack. Yes, it’s been a minute…or two…or three. LOL. But, as promised from my Kscope25 blog post, I intend to get back into blogging. I have a few things to say about the Narrative Reporting product suite and I can’t wait to share my tips & tricks and learnings with you! There are roughly a dozen posts planned. I just need to sit and write them.

For this return post, however, let’s catch up for a few. Now that I’ve retired from Kscope, the Oracle ACE program, and technical conferencing in general, this is one of the only channels I’ll be using to share wisdom for those who want it. And by the way, a big thank you to all of my supporters who continually ask me to get back into blogging and spread knowledge. I’m thinking of you and my current & past customers as I write these posts.

Caveats/safe harbor/and other legalese: this blog site is not intended to replace Oracle’s Cloud Customer Connect (“CCC”). If you are not a member of CCC, I highly encourage you to sign up for an account there and note you must have a company email address to sign up. There are forums for each Oracle Cloud EPM product and the Narrative Reporting one is managed very well by Dave Roberts (the Reports+ product manager) and Tom LeFebvre (the Report Packages/Task Manager/+ product manager). They and others can assist you with any weird errors, strange behavior, interesting design questions, and more over there.

Field notes: the state of Oracle Cloud EPM reporting

First up, what’s the current state of Oracle Cloud EPM reporting (as according to me LOL)? Narrative Reporting is all I’ve been doing for years now and I’m very happy to be in this space. Where my work goes tells me a lot about Oracle EPM, EPM reporting in general, and how customers view the solution set.

Recent observations from the field:

1. My work is primarily advisory now. Every project of mine in the past few years has involved helping customers understand what Oracle EPM reporting solutions are a good fit for their processes and where. Then, educating them on best practices. With the high number of reporting solutions available in Oracle EPM, customers, especially larger customers, are still confused about the Swiss Army knife of available Oracle EPM reporting tools and the skillsets required to learn, develop, and administer them all. This is to be expected. Many customers want an all-in-one reporting tool. And they will always ask for one. A.I., I’m looking at you to fill this gap.
2. As predicted years ago, A.I. is everywhere. Like, everywhere. Does reporting seem like a good place for A.I. to take over? IMHO, both yes and no. In line with Oracle’s vision for EPM reporting, I do believe A.I. should do a lot of the heavy lifting development of reports. But can it replace a human completely here? That idea is scary to me. Not because I don’t think it’s possible, but because it would mean humans are taking a back seat to critical analysis skills. I’m not ready for the singularity and I hope we continue to fight dumbing ourselves down for technology.
3. Reporting tools are becoming more and more complicated every day. As I keep telling my customers, we are far from the time where you could just “pick it up.” I’m in the middle of drafting a new training strategy for NR Reports at my current customer and the evolution is obvious. I used to teach a 1-day class on Reports and now I’m pushing 3 days. There is so much to learn. Of course, customers don’t have to learn every little feature. However, do you want reporting that doesn’t require a bunch of touches and hard-coding and is actually a good fit for what you’re trying to do? Do you want A.I. as part of your reporting strategy? Do you want to know how your data works? (um, most end users and developers don’t actually know this) I find at very large customers the basics of multi-dimensional databases are necessary before I even have students touch NR. Too much is changing and thrown at employees in Accounting and Finance. What is being asked of them is a lot more than what was required of us 25 years ago. It’s not uncommon for me to find out that my customer end users have been forced to learn 12 other reporting tools and across a variety of systems. #hugs
4. Every project I’m on now is with large customers. And every project is a combo ERP and EPM project. This has forced me to expand my learnings on what the overall Oracle reporting spectrum looks like and how it fits together. It’s a lot.
5. Every customer I work at has many non-Oracle reporting tools. Tableau, Workiva, Power BI, smaller tools like Alteryx..they’re everywhere I go. With the size of customer I usually work for, this makes sense. This division wants this tool and hired someone who had that skillset. That division is trying to be a good steward of the new software the CIO/CFO/CTO/C-whatever has decided to bring in and needs to learn X skillset. Who wins this battle? All of them. The nuances in features continually justifies this. Back to that all-in-one reporting tool request…
6. Did you hear the news in the past 48 hours? OneStream just went private again. Another week, another interesting technology headline. And in-between all the other news…
7. Overall, the state of Oracle EPM reporting is strong. Reports has become a household name, especially now that FR has been formally “sunset.” Report Packages, unfortunately, has been lagging behind. It’s still missing key features that competitors (ahem, expensive competitors) have run away with. Smart View will always exist, but at least that’s the only Excel Add-In name I hear now (although I know you die hard legacy Essbase Add-In fans exist out here). And Excel is still the #1 reporting tool overall for even the very largest of companies. It cracks me up every time a customer at a very large firm sheepishly tells me their primary reporting tool is Excel. Don’t feel bad. You’re not alone. And Excel is still the right reporting tool for many situations.
8. Some nostalgia. Remember when Narrative Reporting was first released? That was (cough) over 10 years ago, back in 2015. I’ve been working with the tool since the beginning of 2016 when I first wrote the book back when the tool was called EPRCS (Enterprise Performance Reporting Cloud Service). The solution looked different back then and, much like most of Oracle Cloud EPM, has evolved to meet the needs of Oracle EPM customers. Management Reporting, now called Reports, has fully taken over, FR (Financial Reporting) has finally been sunset in a big way, Disclosure Management is long gone (and forgotten), and I know very few customers now who are still clutching onto on-prem.
9. Finally, one of the most notable faces in the Oracle EPM reporting world has retired.

A tribute to Al Marciante

In case you haven’t heard, Al Marciante, one of the most prominent figures in Oracle EPM and, more notably for me, Narrative Reporting, retired after ~28 years at Oracle. It happened almost quietly last September. Fortunately for me, I was at what I believe was his last formal public appearance in his Oracle EPM role, a Dallas partner-sponsored user group meeting put on by Olympus Consulting.

I both heard the news for the first time there, and said my goodbyes to Al there. Al did write up a sweet goodbye post on LinkedIn where there were so many wonderful and supportive comments from the community.

Al, you were an absolute pleasure to work with. Thank you for all of your support over the years and for being so kind and generous. I’m sure I speak for everyone when I wish you well on your retirement adventures! We will miss you. You deserve every bit of happiness that comes your way. (sniff, sniff)

What’s next?

As mentioned, I have a handful of blog posts I’d like to write. And more may come up with my current project.

A word of caution, however. I’m not going to spend the time to see if anyone has ever posted the same NR tips & tricks before. I don’t have a lot of free time nowadays. I’m also not going to see if Oracle has a CCC post or YouTube video about these same features, either. There may be some overlap. But, as I always say, the more the merrier. It behooves us all to get a variety of perspectives.

How often will I blog? Yikes. Not going to promise anything there. I have a few trips planned this year so it is very much a touch and go situation. However, I hope to get everything written by…the end of the summer? I guess we’ll see. 🙂

Until the next post! It’s nice to be back.