The Urban Myths of Oracle Cloud Implementations – Part II

Here we go for the second and concluding part of the article. Part I dealt with the myths of an Oracle Cloud product that is allegedly not ready; cost of the implementation against on premise; the myth we can get you live in 6 weeks; implementation partners quoting ridiculously low implementation prices and also that anybody can do a Cloud implementation! So lets add to the list of myths and lets try and dispel them.

#006 – Oracle Cloud Cannot be Customised

True – It’s not designed to be customised. You configure the cloud "service" to meet your organisation’s needs, but you cannot access the back end database and you cannot customise the code line. But why would you? Best practice processes and management information are embedded – so why would you want to change it? Why as an organisation in transacting basic back office business processes are you any different to the company next door – HR is HR, Finance is Finance. I would argue differentiation for competitive advantage is a front office activity and not a “commoditised” back office transactional task. “Efficiency and Effectiveness” are the watchwords of the back office, and Cloud gives you both!

Oracle Cloud can be extended through configuration, but again I would challenge as to how much configuration you really need. Also if you truly have something that is “unique” and required to make your business operation function, then Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a consideration.

PaaS is not however the “universal panacea”; it is a powerful tool set that if used correctly allows a client’s bespoke business processes to be configured, integrated and provide a consistent User Experience with the Oracle SaaS products.

CHALLENGE: In the first instant ensure your implementation partner knows the Cloud product suite and can demonstrate how it can be applied to your business. This should be through the use of best practice and standard configuration where possible, but they also need to be able to demonstrate and back it up with client reference-ability. Where have they done it before? What was the approach? How did they address solution gaps? – just some of the valid questions that should be asked.

#007: You Need Light Touch Project Management and Governance – It just Costs too Much!

Really? Good Project Managers and good governance models ensure projects get delivered on time. Great Project Managers do all of this and ensure the project is not only operational successful with the business but the customer (the users) are happy with a positive experience. They also will save you a fortune along the way. Equally a bad Project Manager will cost you a fortune!

CHALLENGE: Try putting Cloud in without good project management and governance then be prepared to get your cheque book out! Cloud is positive disruption and it’s going to change your business therefore it needs to be carefully managed and management needs a governance model that allows fast effective decision making.  

#008: We Can Move You From E-Business Suite R11 to Cloud in 12 Weeks

Get Real please. Yes - technically we could lift your current years worth of transactional data out of EBS and load it directly into the Cloud inside 12 weeks against a default configuration but the levels of compromise would be significant – Would you be happy at the end? I doubt it; Will you start changing things? – Definitely; Will it cost more in the long run? – Absolutely.

Everyone wants to be delivering value as quickly as possible, but be sensible and spend a little time in determining what is the right journey into the Cloud for your organisation.

For those of you that have spent the last 10 years customising the hell out of your on-premise system trust me you don’t have a lot of credibility if you look at a customer and tell them your going to migrate their payroll in 12 weeks? Do we just not test anything properly these days and just lob it into the Cloud and hope it just works? – if you do all I can say is I am glad I am not on your payroll.

Everyone has a different journey into the Cloud. Good implementation partners LISTEN and SEEK to UNDERSTAND a customer’s business and then work collaboratively with them. Throwing something in and not understanding the operation itself, is paramount to disaster.

CHALLENGE: Viable? – Well try and answer these questions - What’s your data quality like? What are you doing about data cleansing? What’s your appetite for risk around payroll and other key financial business processes? What’s going on around your organisation that will impact an implementation in this time frame? How mature as an organisation are you in regard to business change? Will you have to change your operating policies and procedures if you adopt Cloud? Are you willing to “compromise”? Remember you still have to address all of these questions and now you have to do it in less than 12 weeks!

#009: Vanilla – It’s all Out of the Box

It’s not! - All Cloud systems require configuration and at the very least you have to load your data. So effort is required. The smarter implementation partners will provide a degree of pre-configuration through methodologies and accelerators to speed up the implementation. And please remember there is no such thing EVER as an Out of the Box Payroll!

CHALLENGE: Get the Implementation Partner and Oracle to show you what you are getting and make sure it’s the current release and not something that may or may not be delivered in the future. Ensure your expectations are set correctly, but also keep in view what your being sold won’t be what you will go live with as new innovation will have been delivered through the upgrade cycle.

#010: Doesn’t Need Support, Oracle Cloud Upgrades Automatically Over a Weekend

The Technical Upgrade is a weekend activity however the upgrade cycle, so long as no major problems are identified, is 3 weeks from start to finish - You have to regression test the upgrade against your Cloud configuration before implementing the upgrade against the Production instance.. You will also get a choice of when to upgrade within a 3 month window – but remember you will be upgraded!

Cloud needs support, and not just technical support. The Service Management function is more important than ever with dealing with Cloud applications. Oracle does not, and to be honest isn’t geared up to provide that constant “customer attention” for the smaller to medium size customers. It’s ok scaling your sales organisation, but if you don’t scale your customer service and support organisation – then you are just asking for operational problems.

CHALLENGE: How are you as an organisation going to support the system moving? This is where partners can play a pro-active role. Who better to help the customer continue their journey into the cloud than the partner who worked alongside you to implement. A good partner gets to know your business and your people, these relationships underpin any good support arrangement, which should also be pro-active and not only manage the upgrade cycle for you, but also to advise and constantly guide you on the product. So ask if your implementation partner provides an ongoing support service to manage upgrades and the Oracle relationship for you. For example Certus provides engage® Business Support Services, not only to our existing customers but also to customers that we didn’t undertake the original Cloud implementation for.

In Summary…

Controversial - absolutely! but if you haven’t got something to say that provokes thought and debate, then really you have nothing to say. As Thomas Watson, Founder of IBM said “Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the danger of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of 'crackpot' than the stigma of conformity”. So let’s see who agrees and disagrees….anyone care to debate, or comment, I love a good argument!

The Urban Myths of Oracle Cloud Implementations – Part I

For those that follow me on a regular basis you will know I don't use my posts to discuss Oracle Cloud directly as I would rather concentrate on the trials and tribulations of running a small medium business. But after listening to the many urban myths that seem to be miraculously circulating recently and seeing much misdirection I feel compelled to step up onto the soap box and set the record straight in a 2 part special expose!

Certus has been dedicated to working with Oracle Cloud since 2011 and I am proud to look back and say we were amongst the very first true pioneers that saw the potential of how Cloud would become the next paradigm shift in the Oracle technology landscape that would truly enable digital business transformation of the back office. Today this potential is a firm reality.

A Changing Landscape and Language

Language that entered the EMEA Oracle Sales team vocabulary in early 2012 like “customer journey” and “customer experience” was very much influenced and I would even go far as saying created by Certus in our early sales pitches. I have seen more of my presentations copied and manipulated over the years than ever before – as they say “plagiarism is the best form of flattery”. Our dedication, positive customer advocacy, and thought leadership has allowed us to develop close working relationships with the Oracle Cloud development teams where we constantly provide feedback as to how the Cloud is implemented and works in practice.

Over the past 5 years we have seen many organisations of all shapes and sizes across different industries be brave and become early adopters of the Cloud. Others are, understandably, still undecided – however with momentum of Cloud based products across the industry and all future commercial application development now being undertaken in the Cloud it really is only a case of when Organisations move and not if. However one has to acknowledge that each organisation has its own journey to make and consequently the route taken will be somewhat unique. Business after all is all about timing!

Certus is, and always will be, a customer focused delivery organisation with the  focus on ensuring a positive customer experience. Today we have over 20 Cloud Customers (some of the biggest brand names in the UK), 16 successful implementations live, 75+ Cloud modules implemented ranging from single pillar to multi-pillar Cloud implementations that are currently in progress. Many of these have been global in nature so I think we can make claim to say with some authority that we are one of the most experienced and leading active practising Oracle Cloud consultancies in the world today. (Note: There are not many of us, and one less after KBACE being acquired last week).

At Certus we believe firmly from the outset in establishing an honest open relationship with our customers. We want our customers for life and this can only be achieved by being transparent. Equally we have to combat the many detractors out there, who advise and talk with minimum to actually no experience of cloud implementations. Just because you spent the last 20 years implementing Oracle E-Business Suite or PeopleSoft does not make you a Cloud expert. This was something that even the Founders of Certus were faced with in 2011 when four of us got together in a hotel room for a week, with 100+ years of experience and come Friday we had retired to the pub knowing we were no further forward in working out how the Cloud could be implemented “better, cheaper, faster” than we were on the Monday morning when we started – Now that’s not a problem today, but it took us 3 years to learn our trade and as anyone will tell you the rate of Oracle innovation hits you so quickly staying on top of the product is a constant challenge.

So being a customer delivery focused organisation I find it very frustrating when the Oracle Cloud and the approach to delivery is questioned and challenged by those so “called advisors” who have very little knowledge, but unfortunately have significant influence on organisations decision making process. I want every implementation to be successful and customers of Oracle Cloud to be advocates of the product. Hence it’s now time to create some positive disruption and in the spirit of collaboration and knowledge sharing clear away the Cloud marketing and sales spin by dispelling some of the urban myths that have been built up by highlighting the reality.

So for all prospects and existing customers – enjoy! and hopefully you will take some insight away. Controversial – yes; but you wouldn’t really expect anything else from me.

10 Urban Myths, The Reality and the Challenges that should be laid down

#001 - The Oracle Cloud applications don’t work and aren’t ready

In 2011 this was true, Oracle was late to the Cloud, something they admit themselves today and the early versions of the product felt like they were rushed out. However this is NOT the case today.

Certus has personally implemented or is implementing the Oracle Cloud suite at Financial Services Organisations, Telecos, Utilities, Media, Sports Bodies, Local Government and most recently we have started at the Office National Statistics - the very “first UK Central Government implementation”. If it didn’t work we would know about it! So for those that say it doesn’t work – prove it! – My challenge is direct - how many Oracle Cloud implementations have you undertaken yourselves? where and when? Show us where is doesn’t work and demonstrate it.

Are there gaps in the product – yes there are? This is also true in competitors’ products and in Oracle's on-premise legacy products. Oracle are pumping $6 billion dollars a year into R&D and the gaps over time are being closed. For business processes that are so bespoke to an organisation, Oracle has Platform as a Service (PaaS); as set of tools that allows you to build and execute these processes, integrating them into the primary SaaS suite if you need to.

CHALLENGE: For those spreading doubt and misdirection I say to the decision makers of organisations to challenge, come and look at what we have done, and more importantly who we have done it with. Reach out and talk to Customers of the Oracle Cloud directly. No power-points or canned demo’s this is real! For Certus our Customers are our advocates not only of the product but also of us as an organisation. A partner that implements well and has a happy customer has nothing to hide.

#002 - Oracle Cloud is Just as Expensive to Implement than On-Premise Solutions

False – Oracle Cloud is Faster and Cheaper to Implement than On-Premise Solutions. The caveat however is you need an implementation partner that knows what they are doing though!

From our experience Oracle Cloud is 40-50% cheaper in regard to Oracle legacy on-premise implementation costs. The primary reasons being that numerous best practice processes are already embedded in the Cloud product and gone are the days of writing many bespoke workflows for what amounts to standard functionality. As a consequence the Cloud can be implemented quicker than traditional Oracle legacy on-premise packages, thus it is cheaper.

Time to value is achieved faster, by adopting phased implementations – build and deliver your overall Cloud vision one step at a time. Remember your paying subscription charges as soon as you sign the Oracle Cloud Services agreement so it is in your interest to go-live as quickly as possible – however this must be realistic! You still have to configure, develop interfaces (if required), test and transition. Also you have to be aware of the upgrade cycle and where this falls. All of this impacts your deliver plan.

Equally the product has incredibly powerful embedded Management Information capability. No more 200 days of report writing effort, try 5-10 days of training instead ensuring that the customer is totally self-sufficient and understands that they are part of a wider community where they can share reports they build with others.

CHALLENGE: Beware of the Consultancy that’s puts forward an 18 month implementation plan for a single big bang approach, or wants to spend 12 months designing your Target Operating Model and mapping “as is” to “to be” business processes and wanting to use the legacy Oracle Application Implementation Methodology (AIM) to document requirements. You should be live with the core modules in and around 20 weeks maximum and your implementation partner should be standing YOUR system up within a week or two for you to move into prototyping! Also if they cannot articulate the upgrade process – you need to question why not? Its fundamental in relation to Oracle Cloud Operations.

#003: We Can Get You Live in 6 Weeks

Really??? I mean Really??? Unless you are running an operation that is so small, probably less than 100 people, in one county in one location, has no back office processes and you are not integrating into the payroll or anything else then yes it’s probably possible, if you also minimise your testing cycles down to nothing.

CHALLENGE: STOP and THINK! - “No one gets a gold medal for achieving an implementation that transforms your back office in ridiculous timescales”. Just what are you getting in 6 weeks? It may look cheap (and it will be!!!), but get ready for the Change Requests, especially if it’s Fixed Price, a lot pain and an upset user base. Remember hearts and minds need to be won over in any business change project. Cloud is an application “People Want to Use, Rather than Being Told to Use”, so don't get sold purely in regard to speed. Challenge what  you think you are really getting?

#004 - Ridiculous Low Cost Implementation Prices

If you bought an expensive car for £50K and then was told the servicing cost was £1 per year – wouldn’t you raise an eyebrow? What really happens when it breaks down? The questions you should be asking fundamentally is how is this possible? and even more importantly what exactly am I getting?

Oracle’s sales strategy is one of “buying” market share by offering heavily discounted prices, which as a customer you should take advantage of. However that doesn’t mean the implementation price should or will be any cheaper. Just because they have offered high discounted rates doesn’t mean the effort to implement got less overnight? In fact this type of cost cutting goes to such an extreme that if encouraged to ridiculous amounts by the customer, all they will be guaranteed is a poor implementation as the partner who wins the contract will want to be out as quickly as possible.

Any such Implementation Partner adopting such pricing tactics will obviously be using “cheap” offshore resource and all of us have seen functions being outsourced and moved to the location that facilitates the lowest cost delivery point. This is nothing new (Michael Porter – you’re still my hero!).

However where the customer gains on price, they will always lose on quality and also miss the opportunity that is afforded to them through leveraging the asset once implemented. Cloud isn’t a technical implementation, it is a business implementation and therefore this means the Consultants must be knowledge-able about the underlying business operations, whether they be Finance, Procurement, Supply Chain, HR or Payroll as well as the Cloud system (which is constantly changing and innovation is made available for every 6 months). If the Consultants don’t know the product – how can they consult on it? and how can they advise you the Customer on your journey?

CHALLENGE: So ask – What are you getting? Who you are getting? Where is it getting delivered? - keep in view the majority of security breaches around loss of customer data happen from the inside and not someone penetrating an Oracle Data Centre from the outside, so keep in view the risk of offshoring. What is the experience of the Consultants? – Remember from a market perspective this is still a new and rare skill, so don’t be paying for a Consultancy to learn on the job at your expense!

#005 – Anyone Can undertake an Oracle Cloud Implementation

If you believe this, you really are in trouble before you begin!

Cloud is not Oracle E-Business Suite, Peoplesoft or JD Edwards. Whilst IPR has been taken from these legacy products and re-engineered, with best practice processes included, we are talking a different product. Twenty years of implementing on-premise systems isn’t going to help you, whilst some of the activities are exactly the same, the approach to the build is completely different if done right. In addition we are talking about a service that due to the rate of Oracle’s constant innovation is constantly moving forward every 6 months. It only seems like yesterday we were just talking about R10, and now R11 is approaching and R12 by the end of the year.

Oracle invest heavily in their partner programme and are just about to announce new Cloud “statuses” to act as an even greater differentiator. Equally the investment required by Oracle partners is significant. Oracle partners have to constantly invest to maintain their status and capability. Look for it! It really does mean something when it comes to Cloud, above and beyond the marketing spin.

CHALLENGE: It’s not the size of a Consultancy, it is the number of trained Consultants you have on the ground that are actually doing implementations that matters. Also look for practices that have a greater employee base in terms of implementation team ratio and not just contractors. The rationale being to do Cloud properly the implementation partner has to constantly invest in its own people with new skills, implementation experience and certifications. Equally what is important are Consultants that can talk the language of business – Finance, HR, Payroll etc…and to do that you need onshore resources that can get close to the business and the customer. 

Good luck trying to do that from offshore and with a contract workforce that is constantly on the move.

…Part II to follow soon…

We all Need Heroes

I cannot remember a time when there has not been someone in my life that I have not looked up to. Whilst there are those people that you admire because of what they have achieved or because they take a stand for something that is highly publicised that makes them famous in reality we will probably never meet them especially if they have departed this world. So let’s explore those individuals that are a little closer to home and have a positive impact on our lives that help us achieve success by providing one of the key ingredients required that of “inspiration”.

Inspiration can be defined as “a person, object, or situation which stimulates an influence upon the intellect, emotions or creativity”. All of us at some point have looked up to people that have had a positive effect on us. But consider this rhetorical question “What stops you becoming a hero in your own life?”

For the majority, our search for inspiration starts with Mum and Dad and then probably a teacher at school. From the beginning these characters play a major part in your story as they exert influence and start to shape you as people from a young age. You usually find inspiration when your not looking for it and it is usually arrives in the form of someone who has your best interests at heart, can see your potential and gets their reward from seeing you develop and achieve your goals. This is balanced by you looking up to them for the very things that they have achieved and for me this is when the cross over occurs from purely mentoring to becoming a hero. They become the same.

People constantly come and go in life especially in your professional career. Personal development is another critical ingredient required for achieving your goals. You will constantly learn as long as you open your mind, be prepared to listen, and constructively question and challenge.

We work the majority of our lives so the working environment from a social perspective takes up a significant part of our lives. The advent of modern technology and online social ecosystems means that there is a much higher propensity for people to continually cross over between our business and personal lives. Life’s mentors and personal relationships can have a profound impact on you as an individual and you often find you subconsciously develop strong emotional attachments.

My Own Story – A Baptism of Fire

As an 18 year old I went straight from school into Lloyds Bank as a Computer Operator (aka – I printed bank statements and made the tea badly). However wanting much more right from the start, I subconsciously “disrupted” the status quo of the work place just by bringing lots of energy, a can do attitude, and an ability to question absolutely everything as I was trying to learn. I was one of an intake of around twenty individuals the first major recruitment in years and no-one really knew how to manage us. What didn’t help is at 18 you don’t even know how to manage yourself. All the things we should teach in schools definitely didn’t exist then. Simple things such as knowing how to work effectively as part of a team which doesn’t come naturally to everyone but is fundamental when in the working environment was something I personally struggled with. Looking back I was totally focused on “me” and not the team or what we were trying to achieve. What I viewed as positive was quite the opposite – in-fact it became incredibly depressing and for a while completely ruined my life to the point I dreaded even going to work.

However I was extremely lucky. A few people could see I had loads of potential but it needed to be controlled, developed and channelled. I came across these individuals who were in hindsight “disruptors” themselves who engineered in getting me seconded onto a special delivery project (no easy political feat back then), that unknown to me at the time was specifically going to be a 9 month “crash course” in developing me both as a person as well as technically.

I look back at it now and still remember the horror, when suddenly and unexpectedly given this wonderful opportunity to work on a beta test programme with the then mighty IBM implementing at the time what was state of the art automation software for mainframe computer operations I was completely out of my depth. I had gone from the bottom run on the ladder to joining the very best and brightest brains Lloyds had at the time. Not only was I the youngest I questioned my intellectual capacity to even do the task being asked and really struggled. I was 20 years old and though I had thought I could do anything I found out very quickly the complete opposite and became completely consumed with self-doubt.

However speaking to those who mentored me then years later they indicated as well as them having “a good laugh at me in private to bring me down to the earth!” this was all part of their master plan to effectively turn the “boy into a man”. This was about controlling and channelling my energy and about how they could leverage my perspective as part of the wider team especially my speed of thought and somewhat unique ability to see how computer operations for a major UK and International Bank could be radically changed..

The project wasn’t about implementing new automated software this was regime change in the very department I had originally joined and had upset - they needed new thinking and fresh blood. What made it worse was the business outcome of the project was going to reduce the headcount by a third (with redundancies) and they were going to send me back for a year to be part of the implementation team to do it! – Popular or what? keep in view my already somewhat tarnished reputation.

However for my mentors the project wasn’t about just teaching me as an individual technical skills and the fledging art of “Project Management” which back in 1991 was extremely new and ground breaking, but a strong focus on personal development - how to work as part of a team; how to lead a team; how to deal with difficult situations and most importantly how to follow and be a team player. Also they taught me how to make the most of my abilities and they laid the very foundation stones that in later years would become my personal competitive advantage.

My mentors spent significant amounts of time with me developing and teaching me how to question not just others but most importantly myself, this enabled me with true insight as to how my actions impacted others around me. I learned to shut up, watch and listen. Rule of thumb, if your not the smartest person in the room then keep quiet, listen and learn!

As for Lloyds when I returned to the front line Computer Operations I was better prepared, supported, and I was passed over to another mentor who looked after me and then took me to another level.

Be Inspired – “Fuel In The Tank”

My mentors became my heroes. I looked up to them and in some ways I wanted what they had. They had a profound effect on my life. Roll on 25 years and some of these people are still very much in my life, they have been my customers, and have even have worked for me (my turn to smile), and some are my closest personal friends. They are my first point of call when I want to think something through and understand the “cause and effect” of a particular course of action before I take it.

These individuals continue to be prepared to invest their time in me and push me to excel. Everytime I achieved a goal they just push me further, indicating that even when I do achieve excellence do I have what it takes to stay there? To do this you need constant “fuel in the tank” by the way of inspiration. However as they constantly point out I am now of an age where I need to inspire myself as well as look to others, especially as I have to lead Certus, a company of 50+ across two continents and growing. How can I inspire others, if I can’t inspire myself?

So how do I inspire myself? I just look at things totally unrelated to Certus as a business directly completely differently and then apply it. For example this weekend I watched a film with my two boys called “Streetdance” – absolutely brilliant, but the story was the clash of cultures and dance styles – Ballet v Streetdance – polarised or what? So quickly apply this to business – Project Management in development – Waterfall Approach v Agile. What’s right? They both are – where do you maximise benefit? by fusing the best bits of both together. (Watch the film – you’ll understand what I am saying, it’s a great film by the way – he laughs and I can’t dance!)

The Overlap between Business and Personal Lives

Something I have touched upon previously before and will continue to do so. Time has taught me to value even more those individuals that have played a significant part in my personal life over the years and their impact on my professional life. This may sound really odd but trust me that when your running a business it totally consumes you and you easily lose touch with those closest around you. It’s a big warning to all who embark on this journey.

But I have my heroes in my personal life, and they are even more important as those in my professional working life. Talking to them gives me total perspective. When I don’t talk to them I miss them, feel empty inside and something feels very wrong. Some people and events stay with you for ever even to the point they can define your life to such an extent that you can never let go.

They love you regardless for what and who you are, flaws and all. They celebrate your successes and become a part of your story as you reciprocate and become part of theirs. When you stumble and fall they are there to pick you up again. This is the very fabric of your life.

Remember - We are all Flawed, even Our Hero’s

Heroes come in all shapes and sizes, but what they have in common is that the true heroes are the ones that can have a massively positive impact on your life, and not just your career. You find these people have such monumental belief in you that you can not only reach but exceed your potential, and become a better person for it, as others around you also benefit. Trust me it’s a lot more personally rewarding when your team is successful and not just you as an individual.

But remember as human beings it’s our flaws in our character that really makes us who we are. The majority of people don’t want to be on a pedal-stall so we shouldn’t put people there. People fail, and you will only get disappointed if your hero does something you don’t perceive as right.

Contribution - Giving Something Back

I am not setting out to be a hero myself but the importance of sharing and developing others is critical. I guess these things go full circle, and I will have already had a profound positive impact on others careers. Selfishly I would say my business would not be successful if I didn’t do this, but this isn’t about Certus it’s about wanting to see people reach their true potential and beyond. As Kevin Stacey says “If you are lucky enough to do well it’s your responsibility to send the elevator back down”.

Whilst I don’t have all the answers I do know this that we all need heroes in our lives. As for Lloyds Bank, this may be the only time in my life I actually say thank you to a bank, and the people there that turned a “boy into a man” and contributing to making me  who I am today.

So to answer that rhetorical question “What stops you becoming a hero in your own life?” – the answer is simple “Only you” as David Bowie said “We can be Heroes, for ever and ever, What do you say?”

Epilogue: This blog was written the day before David Bowie passed away. RIP David Bowie, you were truly a hero to many.