Scenario Planning: Pivoting from Pandemic to Proactive

On a scale of 1-10, how far off was your 2020 budget? Feel free to go as high as 14.

We started off 2020 with a great deal of promise: “the roaring 20’s 2.0” with perfect 2020 Vision. Two months in, the global economy got slapped in the face with the reality of being a global economy. And yet, we persevered. How? By reacting quickly.

Reactionary Scenario Planning

Once the pandemic became real, every company that’s still in business quickly came up with multiple scenarios for how the impacts of coronavirus would affect the lives of their employees, the lives of their customers, and the life of their business. We took the information they had (which back in March 2020 wasn’t very much) and created financial plans. Most people had three scenario plans ranging from “short-term recovery” to “multi-year recession” though we all hoped for the best.

We took those scenario plans and we compiled a set of actions: What we would do if that particular scenario came to be the right one. Short-term recovery? Minimize discretionary spending. Year-long economic hit? Stop our least profitable products and locations. Multi-year recession? Stop everything that isn’t making money, cut costs dramatically, and determine how long until the money runs out.

And then the data started coming in. The economic dip was deeper and faster than 90% of the predictions anyone made, so we revised our scenarios down. The economic recovery after the massive drop was faster than 99% of the predictions, so we revised our scenarios up. COVID-19 turned out to be more deadly, longer-lasting, with cases and deaths coming in multiple waves, so we extended our scenarios around recovery. The vaccines were developed and approved faster than any in history, so we allowed for scenarios with faster resumptions of more traditional spending and economic activity.

2020 was a year of – to coin a new term I hope doesn’t catch on – Reactionary Scenario Planning. The CFO of Coca-Cola called it “Scenario Management.” Yes, we were coming up with possible scenarios, but only in response to events. We were looking ahead by responding to what had already happened. We spent 2020 reacting to the world. Things happened to us; we did not happen to things.

Proactive Scenario Planning

You made it. You’re in 2021. And many companies made it through the year by Scenario Planning. Japheth Jev, CFO at Triumph Power and Gas in Nigeria said in an article on Financial Management News, “We let the management and the board understand that this crisis would definitely affect us, and it was going to affect our customers' businesses and destroy some of our revenue lines. We assessed the risk and ascertained the level of impact that we are going to suffer. And we also introduced scenario planning. To be frank, I never appreciated the importance of scenario planning until the advent of COVID-19.” [It’s a great article, by the way, and you should go to https://www.fm-magazine.com/news/2020/dec/japheth-jev-managing-cash-during-coronavirus-pandemic.html and read some of Jev’s wisdom on crisis planning.]

But now 2020 is over (and no offense, 2020, but good riddance). We’re planning our scenarios for 2021, and we need to pivot from being backward-looking about potential scenarios to being proactive about the scenarios we want to make happen. Take a pause, look ahead and say, “now that the end is in sight, what are the most plausible scenarios for 2021 to 2025.” It might be “Global Expansion” or “Delayed Expansion” or “Let’s Definitely Not Expand Ever.” It could be anything from “our new products launched well in 2021” to “well, that didn’t work.”

On that note, you probably should throw in a worst-case scenario, because in the words of a great Cylon prophet, “All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.” There will be another catastrophic event, so take the time now to plan for how you’ll respond to it, so you’re not reacting in the moment.

You will find that there are too many possible scenarios for you to plan for, so group them together into broad categories that cover the 3-5 most likely general cases. Expand them – drive them off KPI’s, so they’re easy to revise – into full financial scenario plans. Then take those plans and come up with a set of actions to prepare for those scenarios and how to respond to those scenarios if it turns out to be reality.

Most importantly, make sure those scenario plans are circulated widely. If some of the plans are dire – otherwise known as the “start updating your resumes” scenarios – make sure everyone knows what to do to avoid those scenarios.

Make 2021 the year where things don’t happen to you; you go out and happen to things.

Next Steps in Making the Pivot

Each year, I conduct a global survey of Business Analytics. Last year, I asked over 250 companies how they were doing in the world of reporting, analysis, planning, and consolidation.  If you want to see where you should be planning before it happens and you find yourself reacting to it, I’m unveiling the results on a webcast the last Wednesday of January. You’ll learn how your Analytics & EPM (Enterprise Performance Management) stacks up against the rest of the world so you can get there before everyone else. To register, go to:

http://epm.bi/webcasts

If you have any questions, ask them in the comments or tweet them to me @ERoske.

7 Signs Your EPM is Lagging Behind Your Competition

Regardless of industry, regardless of size, regardless of duration, all companies have similar issues in their financial analysis, planning, and consolidation areas. From building budgets to financial reporting, how can CFOs, VPs of Finance, Directors of FP&A and Controllers tell if their FP&A teams are falling behind their competitors? Here are seven signs that your Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) environments are stuck in the last decade:

1. Strategy is planned verbally or in spreadsheets. While the majority of strategic CFO’s agree that Finance should be looking forward and not backward, most strat planning is done in Excel or worse, out loud in various meetings. There is no modeling unless someone comes up with a bunch of linked spreadsheet formulas. Strategies are agreed to in conference rooms and conveyed at a high-level via email (or they aren’t communicated at all). Strategies are evaluated by whomever has the best anecdote: “well, the last time that happened, we did this…” The only thing worse than not having a solution for strategic planning is not doing strategic planning at all. Speaking of spreadsheets…
2. Excel is the key enabling technology in your FP&A department. One sure way to tell if your EPM function is falling behind is to ask “what is the single most important tool your department uses when running reports? Performing analysis? Coming up with a strategic plan? Preparing the budget? Modeling business changes?” If the answer to four-out-of-five of those is “Microsoft Excel”, ask yourself if that was by design or if people just used Excel because they didn’t have a better system. Excel is a wonderful tool (I open it every morning and don’t close it until I leave), but it was meant to be a way to look at grids of data. It was not meant to store business logic and it was never meant to be a database. Force your FP&A group to do everything with Excel and expect to be waiting for every answer… and then praying everyone got their formulas right when you make business decisions based on those answers.
3. There is only one version of the budget. No one really thinks that there’s only one way that the year will end up, but most companies insist on a single version of a budget (and not even a range, but a specific number). Not only are EPM Laggards (companies with EPM trailing behind their peer groups) not planning multiple scenarios, they’re insisting that the whole company come up with a single number and then stick to it no matter what external factors are at play. Ron Dimon refers to scenario plans as “ready at hand plans” waiting to be used once we see how our strategic initiatives are enacted. EPM Laggards not only don’t have additional plans ready, they insist on holding everyone in the organization accountable to one single number, outside world be damned.
4. Budgets favor precision over timeliness. Your competition realizes that a forecast that’s 95% accurate delivered today is more helpful than a budget that was 98% accurate 6 months ago. Yet EPM Laggards spend months coming up with a budget that’s precise to the dollar and then updating it periodically at a high level. It’s amazing how often FP&A groups end up explaining away budget vs. actual discrepancies by saying “the budget was accurate at the start of the year, but then things happened.” Budgets should be reforecasted continuously whenever anything material changes. Think about it: if you had one mapping app that gave you an estimate of your arrival time to the 1/100^th of a second at the time you departed and another mapping app that constantly refined your arrival time as you drove, which one would you choose?
5. No one takes actions on the reports. Edward’s Rule of Reporting: every report should either lead to a better question or a physical action. If your department is producing a report that doesn’t lead someone to ask a bigger, better, bolder question and doesn’t lead someone to take a physical action, change the report. Or stop producing the report entirely. EPM Laggards spend an inordinate amount of time collecting data and generating reports that don’t lead to any change in behavior. EPM Leaders periodically stop and ask themselves “if I arrived today, is this what I would build?” Half the time, the answer is “no,” and the other half the time, the answer is “if I arrived today, I actually wouldn’t build this report at all.”
6. Most time is spent looking backwards. Imagine you’re driving a car. Put your hands on the wheel and look around. Notice that most of your visual space is the front windshield which shows you what’s coming up ahead of you. Some of what you see is taken up by the dashboard so you can get a real-time idea of where you are right now. And if you glance up, there’s a small rear-view mirror that tells you what’s behind you. A combination of all three of these (windshield, dashboard, and rearview mirror) gives you some idea of when you should steer right or left, brake, or accelerate. In a perfect EPM world, your time would be divided the same way: most would be spent looking ahead (budgeting and forecasting), some time would be spent glancing down to determine where you are at the moment, and very little would be spent looking backwards since, let’s face it, the past is really difficult to change. In your car, you’d only look at the mirror if you were changing lanes or you were worried about being hit from behind, and business is similar yet most EPM Laggards drive their cars by looking backwards.
7. Labor is devoted to collecting & reporting and not planning & analyzing. If you spend all of your time gathering data, reconciling data, and reporting on data, you’re answering the question “what happened?” Your competition is spending their time analyzing (“why did this happen?”) and then planning to take action (“what should I do next?”). There is a finite amount of time in the world and sadly, that holds true in our FP&A departments too. If your EPM system is focused on collecting, consolidating, & reporting and your competition has their EPM focused on analyzing, modeling, & planning, who do you think will win in the long run?

What You Can Do

If you look at those seven top signs you’re lagging in your EPM functions and wonder how to improve, the first step is to stop building anything new. While this seems counterintuitive, if you take a tactical approach to solving any one area, you’re going to put in place a single point solution that will need to be thrown away or redone as you get closer to your overall vision for EPM. So what’s step 1? Have an EPM vision. Ask yourself where you want your company to be in three years. What do you want out of consolidation, reporting, analysis, modeling, and planning and how will all of those functions be integrated?

You are not alone. I have seen hundreds of FP&A departments in my time struggle with having a vision for just one area let alone a long-range vision. Even when leadership has a vision, it quite often focuses on system improvements (we’re not sure what to do, so let’s throw technology at it!) rather than try to improve processes too. Thankfully, there is hope and as my good friends at G.I. Joe always say, knowing is half the battle.

More Information

If you have any questions, ask them in the comments or tweet them to me @ERoske.

Competitors, Welcome to Our Webcasts

I was happy to be a part of Oracle's EPM Showcase yesterday in New York City.  It was a half-day event (plus a happy hour) that had Oracle giving a keynote followed by two 90-minute breakout session timeslots (with two sessions happening concurrently).  I was speaking during the first timeslot on Hyperion DRM (Data Relationship Management) along with Nikki from Verizon and Erin Lineberry from interRel.  In my talk, I described how companies need a single system of record for hierarchies and explained how DRM was a really good fit particularly with the new data governance module in 11.1.2.3.

There were partners in my session, and I had no problem at all with it.  After all, this was a conference open to anyone and I am a firm believer that when people learn more, the whole community benefits.  This is what motivates me to write all of my books, cause believe me, it's not for the money (Google "Starving Authors" before you ever think to make money writing).  I also speak at way too many events around the world each year from tiny user groups to massive conferences like Kscope, Collaborate, and OpenWorld with no concerns that my sessions are primarily filled with Oracle partners looking to improve.

After my session was over, there was one more timeslot for the day and since I didn't want to sit in the hall for 90 minutes, I went to Huron Consulting Group's (they're the company that bought Blue Stone) session on the future of Planning.  It sounded more interesting than Hackett's session which was my other possibility and I saw that one of the speakers was Mike Nader who is a great presenter.  If nothing else, I would get to hear Mike's engaging take on the world since he joined Blue Stone.  I sat in the room in the back row (there were plenty of extra seats, but I wanted to leave the good seats for potential customers).

Right as the session was about to start, Rick Schmitt from Huron (Blue Stone) came over to me and asked me to leave.  I was curious why since I was an official attendee at the event and he said that they were going to be talking over "some proprietary stuff."  I assumed he meant his slides at the beginning on the Blue Stone acquisition or "why Blue Stone is the best at XYZ," so I offered to leave for the first few slides.  I don't need nor want competitive info and I certainly didn't want to make him nervous during his sales pitch.  He said that no, they were going to share lots of proprietary info throughout the session and he didn't want competitors in the room during their session at all.

Rather embarrassed but more bemused, I smiled, gathered my things, and walked out of the room.  I sat in the hall for a while wondering what cool things I was missing and feeling jealous of the 50 clients that got to hear from Blue Stone.  (There's nothing like being excluded from something to make you want it more.)  As I sat there, I pondered my own stance on information sharing.  Personally, I believe that if the community as a whole gets better - if the community learns more - the quality of Hyperion implementations will rise.  Satisfaction with Oracle EPM will rise, and as the reputation of Hyperion gets better, the Hyperion market will grow which benefits the entire community: customers, Oracle, and partners.

And it made me ask what I could be doing better.

So starting effective immediately, all of the public webcasts interRel does (and we did over 100 webcasts last year) will be open to everyone.  That's right: competitors, please come join our webcasts and we'll share all the information that we spend months putting together with you.  You've always had access to our books, our sessions at user groups, our presentations at conferences, and now you have access to our webcasts too.  I hope that this starts a trend: I strongly encourage our competition to open up their sessions and webcasts to anyone who wants to attend.  Don't be afraid: if you're good at what you do, you shouldn't be afraid to help the competition get better too.  Information is meant to be free and to point out the obvious, if the Hyperion market gets bigger from happier clients telling everyone they know to buy Hyperion, your potential customer base gets bigger too.

Our next webcast is Thursday, October 31.  It's on how Smart View is finally an awesome replacement for the Essbase Excel Add-In and I hope to see a ton of our competition on the webcast.  Visit http://bit.ly/iRWebcasts to register.

Hyperion Solutions Roadshow to Denver

Hyperion Solutions Roadshow to Denver - Agenda

I just finished booking my travel to Denver for the big Hyperion event on the 24th at the Hyatt Regency (downtown by the convention center).  It's the closest Denver has come to a HUG (Hyperion User Group) meeting since Hyperion got acquired 5 years ago (wow, it's hard to believe Hyperion was acquired in 2007).  Oracle and interRel are putting on a 5+ hour event split across two educational tracks.


The first track is an introductory track that introduces some products and also covers what's new in Oracle EPM/BI 11.1.2:

• What’s New in Oracle EPM 11.1.2.1 and OBIEE 11g: A Customer Story with Catholic Health Initiatives
• Taking Control of Your Hierarchies with Data Relationship Management 
• Quick Start to Hyperion Financial Close Solutions

The second track is for people that have more intermediate to advanced experience with Hyperion:

• Hyperion Financial Reporting: Top 10 Tips & Tricks
• Thinking Outside the Cube: Non-Financial Applications of Oracle Essbase
• 10 Reasons Why You Don’t Have to ‘Code’ or ‘Customize’ Hyperion Planning

I will be giving some of the sessions, Essbase expert and fellow Oracle ACE Director, Glenn Schwartzberg, will be delivering some others, and Oracle and Catholic Health will be splitting the rest.  I'm most excited that Toufic Wakim (one of the greatest Product Development guys in the EPM/BI business unit at Oracle) will be delivering the keynote to start off the day.  He'll be talking about the future of Hyperion in an interactive discussion.  Among other things, Toufic is responsible for development of Smart View and the classic Essbase Excel Add-In, and you've seen how much those products have evolved recently under Toufic's tutelage.  For anyone that's had a chance to hear Toufic speak, his sessions are always hugely attended, hilarious, and full of information.  I will actually be attending his keynote and taking notes (and hopefully, blogging whatever we're allowed to publicly restate).  

Throughout the day, we'll be having networking time and at the end of the day we're going to have a group dinner and then go to the Colorado Avalanche game after.  I think the Avs play hockey (it's a Canadian ice sport played with sticks, I think), but I'm primarily going to the game to meet the local rocky mountain Hyperion users.  It's time that the users get back together and form a community.  If you're an Oracle client and can fly in on January 24th, send an e-mail to Danielle White and she'll send you more information on registering.  Flights in and out of Denver are cheap and the event is free, so I hope to see you there.

Oracle EPM 11.1.2.1 - Releasing No Sooner Than April 10

In a posting back in February, I relayed that development was virtually promising that Oracle EPM 11.1.2.1 would be out sometime in March. I then padded that to be sometime by March 31. Here's what I was told from multiple sources (not one of which is Glenn Schwartzberg): apparently, development discovered two bugs during testing just this week. They are being immediately corrected and then the patch should release to manufacturing (meaning it can be bundled up and posted on edelivery.oracle.com).

This jibes with a public announcement that Oracle made during a Customer Advisory Board meeting in Copenhagen this week. A customer that was there told me that Oracle announced they were releasing 11.1.1.2 to edelivery on April 10. This is the first time I've ever heard of an exact date spoken in a semi-public forum.

No I think that the more likely date is April 11 (which is a Monday and as such, a lot more likely than Sunday). That said, the earliest I would expect it is April 11 since, well how do I put it gently, Oracle has been working this for around a year now and has lost pretty much all credibility with estimating patch release dates.

To add to the bad news, it looks like support for other application servers (like WebSphere) will NOT be in this patch. Looks like it will be delayed until to 11.1.2.2 (and who really believes that will really release by year-end?).

Keep watching here and I'll let you know when 11.1.2.1 gets posted for downloading.

Kscope - Sessions All Finalized

Despite all rumors (and some fond desires from my competition), I'm not actually dead. I have not been in a Platonic cave nor was I abducted by aliens (this time).  The best excuse I can plausibly provide (unless I could convince you that a massive snowstorm hit Dallas the week leading up to the Super Bowl, cause ya, like that's believable) is that I and the rest of the conference team have been hard at work putting together the agenda for ODTUG Kscope11 to be held June 26-30, 2011 in Long Beach, California.

There are five tracks at the conference:

• BI & EPM
• Fusion Middleware
• Application Express
• Oracle Database Development
• MySQL

Big Picture
The one that's the dearest to my skillset is, of course, the BI, EPM, and Hyperion track.  This year's track has around 100 BI/EPM sessions, several half-day hands-on labs, and two day-long deep-dive symposiums on Sunday.  In the BI/EPM world, there are 7 major areas we'll be focusing on:

• Financial Management Solutions (HFM, FDM, Disclosure Management, Financial Close Management)
• Planning Solutions (Planning, Strategic Finance, EPMA, Operational Planning, Crystal Ball)
• Essbase Solutions (Essbase, ASO, Studio, HPCM, Java API, all the rest)
• BI Solutions (OBIEE, Warehouse Builder)
• Reporting Solutions (Smart View, Financial Reporting, Interactive Reporting, Answers+, Dashboards, Publisher, Visual Explorer)
• Keeping It All Running (Utilities, Tips & Tricks, Tuning & Optimization, ODI, MDX, MaxL, Scripting, etc.)
• Third Party Tools (Dodeca, Star Analytics, Cloud Computing, etc.)

All those are detailed on the Kscope11 landing page for BI & EPM at Kscope11.com/BIEPM.

I'm a technical user/admin/developer

If you're a technical user, administrator, of developer of Essbase, Hyperion Planning, HFM, OBIEE or any of the other Oracle BI and EPM products, then by all means, this is the place to go.  Kscope 2010 had more Hyperion and Oracle EPM attendees than any other conference in the world (yes, that includes Oracle OpenWorld and Collaborate).  Attendance was also 50% greater from 2009 to 2010, so obviously it's where people in the former Hyperion community are gravitating.

I'm advanced

Congratulations on rising up to the upper levels of Hyperion, Essbase, and/or OBIEE knowledge.  Your mother must be very proud.  If you're an intermediate, advanced, or guru-level user of Oracle BI/EPM, then you'll find lots of like-minded people at Kscope.  I'm personally giving, for instance, 2 hours of sessions on how to hack Oracle Essbase and an entire presentation on the fine art of writing ASO calc scripts.  You won't find that level of content at any other conference, so if you want good training you can't get anywhere else for less than $300 per day, join us in June.

I'm a beginner

Don't feel bad.  We all started there.  One of the comments we got from last year is that with the Hyperion Solutions long in the rearview mirror, there's no longer a place for new users of the Oracle BI, EPM, Essbase, and Hyperion products to get started.  I know I began my Essbase career back when by looking at what other companies were doing with Essbase, so we've expanded the beginner content this year.  We now have implementation stories and sessions from ~40 companies for you to choose from.  Here's an entire track of suggested beginning sessions:

Kscope11 Beginner Track

But I'm not a techie

The number one area we wanted to improve on this year was to add an entire track for business users, end users, and decision makers.  We've added around 20 sessions focused on the non-technical side of Hyperion.  If you want to learn how Oracle EPM can be better used at your organization, if you want case studies of other successful firms, or you want to know how to better use the investment you've made in Oracle BI, EPM, and Hyperion, we now have an entire track devoted to you:

Kscope11 Functional and Decision Maker Track

I need to register right now

I have to admit: I love Kscope.  It's the best of the old Hyperion Solutions and Hyperion Top Gun conferences rolled into one (with all the marketing stripped out).  It's the only conference each year that I look forward to (which is why I volunteered to help chair the conference this year).  If you want to sign up, visit Kscope11.com/registration.  Early bird deadline is March 25, but I wouldn't wait, because seats in the hands-on labs will be assigned based on the order people sign up for the conference.  Oh, and as a reward for reading this entire blog entry, use promo code IRC at checkout for $100 off.  That's a limited time code and don't share it with anyone.  It's a secret for the 7 people who actually still read my blog after my 4 month blog sabbatical.

Mea Culpa

Sorry for the massive break between posts.  Expect a flurry in the near future.  You have been warned.

Kaleidoscope 2010 - Wrap Up

I'd like to dedicate this Labor Day blog post to Glenn Schwartzberg. He's been pining for a posting for 3 months now and after his Chinese-water-torture-esque never-ending requests to see something other than John Heffron's face at the top of my blog, Glenn buddy, this one's for you.

Yes, I know it's a bit weird to see some highlights 2 months after conference end, but it's been a busy two months.

Attendance

Attendance was amazing. They improved the paid attendance more than 50% from the year before. Considering Kaleidoscope 2009 was one of only two Oracle conferences I know of that grew from 2008 already, 50+% growth in 2010 was pleasantly shocking. The largest growth seemed to be in the EPM/Hyperion and Application Express areas. Those two areas alone accounted for easily over half the conference.

No question about it, this was definitely the largest gathering of Oracle EPM, Hyperion, and Essbase folks I saw at any national conference this year. Hyperion attendance easily surpassed Collaborate and it beat OpenWorld too. As for the regional EPM Connection Point conferences, there were around 3 times as many Hyperion types at Kaleidoscope as at the last NJ Connection Point conference. It's clear that this is the place to be if you live and breathe Hyperion (and I'm saying that from an unbiased standpoint though I am going to be biased in the future which you'll see a little later in this post).

Education

They expanded all the content this year (around 200 presentations total) and the EPM/BI content was over 75 sessions plus hands-on labs and a day-long symposium on the future of Hyperion by the developers at Oracle. There was even a new track devoted to MySQL now that Oracle owns them too.

Overall, I think the breadth of content increased, but there were some definitely areas for improvement in 2011. On the EPM side of the house, there was a need for more sessions geared to financial users. Now that finance users have given up on Collaborate as a possible source of Hyperion content, they're gravitating to Kscope. As such, Kscope has to expand to give more educational presentations to those users.

To that end, next year's conference is retooling around specific product focuses such as Financial Solutions and Budgeting & Planning. There will still be the sessions that the intermediate and advanced Essbase and Hyperion users want to see, but they'll be adding tracks to continue to fill the needs of the non-technical users. Go here for a complete listing of the tracks and type of content they're looking for at Kscope11:

http://www.odtugkaleidoscope.com/Abstractpage.html

On that note, submissions are already being accepted to present at Kscope11. Deadline is October 26, and I have it on really good authority that they won't extend the deadline for papers like all the other conferences do. If you want a free pass to the conference so you can be part of over 250 sessions, click on that abstract link above and submit something (or multiple somethings) now. Seriously, do it while you're thinking about before you forget that really good idea. They don't come around that often.

Location

Washington, DC has a number of good things going for it: it's easy to get to from anywhere on the East Coast by train or commuter flight, anywhere else in the USA from a jet through Reagan National, and anywhere else in the world from a jumbojet through Dulles. There's a wealth of things to do there when the conference gets boring and they're all easy to get to due to the cleanest subway system in the USA (that I've seen, at least).

Therein lies a problem, though. Because there's so much to do and it's only a subway ride away, people kept disappearing to the National Mall as soon as the sessions were over each night. This led to a busy conference during the day but a feeling of being in a partially full hotel at night. For example, attendance at the Hyperion Monday Madness event was flat from last year even with 50% more people at the conference.

Speaking of Monday Madness, we did an EPM Jeopardy game this year. Glenn Schwartzberg played the role of Don Pardo and Cameron Lackpour helped out as a judge. We did multiple rounds and while we had many great champions along the way, the final Jeopardy winner by a long shot was Australian Hyperion Savant, Ben White. He was impressive with his neverending stream of mostly useless Hyperion trivia that he could recall at the press of a buzzer.

Entertainment

We started the week off with Rock Band during an opening reception in the exhibit hall. We had non-stop participation from the opening band (made up of some ODTUG Board members) through to the end when they finally kicked us out of the room. Eduardo Quiroz and I hosted the Battle of the Rock Bands and everyone seemed to be having a great time either playing instruments or mocking the people playing instruments.

As the evening went on and people had lots of tasty beverages in them, more and more participants started braving harder and harder songs to wildly varying levels of success. On an interesting note, the evaluations of the event were all over the place as it relates to the volume of the music. A large number said that the music wasn't loud enough while many said it was too loud for conversing. I guess it depends on if you were looking for a rock concert or a wine&cheese reception.

Werewolf was on the schedule every single night. There were some nights where so many people wanted to play that they ended up running simultaneous games. We'll definitely be playing Werewolf again next year. There's just something about offing your fellow conference-goers at 3AM that makes for a rollicking good time. On the last night, John Heffron (comedian extraordinaire) came and joined in for some Werewolf and even gave a couple of his new DVD's to the winners of a couple of games.

Speaking of John Heffron, the Wednesday night event was amazing. For the 600+ people who didn't leave for the monuments around town, they laughed constantly through his entire set. I've seen him before on Last Comic Standing, but he's even funnier in person as his jokes build on themselves throughout his act. It was definitely money well spent. Danielle White was the one who really insisted on John for the comedy portion of the night, and I while I normally try to disagree with her on just about everything, I have to grudgingly admit she was 110% correct in this case.

After John Heffron finished up, there was a major rush for the exits. Considering that the 80-90's cover band was tone deaf, this was the smart strategy. I'm not quite sure what went wrong with the band that night. I had actually gone out to Right Food Red's website ahead of time to listen to them, and they're much better in studio. It wasn't so much the fault of the guys playing the instruments as it was the vocalist. He truly was horrendous, and my advice to him in the future is to sing with the auto-tune turned on or the reverb turned way, way up. Next year, we'll make sure we screen the people in-person before booking them.

Next Year: June 26-30, 2011

In case anyone didn't read the note on any other blogs out there, the conference chair for Kaleidoscope is me, Edward Roske. I'm extremely honored to be selected and I'm going to focus next year on improving and growing the conference to make it not only the home for Hyperion but the other Oracle Developer products as well. My content chair is former ODTUG Volunteer Award Winner, Monty Latiolais, and my co-chair is the eternally awesome Danielle White.

The first thing I changed was to shorten the conference name to Kscope11 simply because no one could never remember how to spell Kaleidoscope and people also kept confusing it with Collaborate. So if you're looking for information on next year's conference, just visit Kscope11.com.

When I was announced as conference chair, I jokingly threw out some proposed conference slogans for Kscope11 and asked the attendees at the General Session to vote on them via text message. My personal favorite not-very-serious suggestion was "Where all the cool kids would be if they understood what the hell we were talking about" but it turned out to be too long to print on all the marketing material so it was shortened to "Where the cool kids are." Much easier to fit on a business card, that's for sure.

The conference next year will be June 26-30, 2011 in Long Beach, California. There are two advantages to these dates versus some conferences in the past: it's the week after Father's Day in the USA so no families get upset by daddy being gone and it's over before month end close so no companies get upset by finance being gone. It will start bright and early Sunday morning, so I'd advise everyone to fly in Saturday night and not plan to fly out until later in the afternoon on Thursday.

The presentations will be held at the Long Beach Convention Center. The host hotels will be the Hyatt Regency and the Renaissance. The Hyperion Midnight Madness event (and many sessions of Werewolf) is most likely going to be held at the Renaissance, so I'm guessing that will turn the Renaissance into the default host hotel for the Hyperion attendees (Kscope rate is the same at both).

Both hotels are less than 2 minutes walk from the Convention Center. Attendees can also easily stay at the Westin or the Courtyard, but they're more like a 5 minute walk, and if you're like me, exercise is something best left to those already in shape. My advice would be to book the Renaissance (especially if you're a Hyperion attendee) and the Hyatt soon before they fill up, but I've seen the Westin and Courtyard and they're both very nice hotels too. I'm also excited to announce that if you're staying under the Kscope code, internet is included in the room rate. Hurray for free high-speed downloading of totally not inappropriate things at 3AM!

The Wednesday night closing event will be held on the Queen Mary. What we'll be doing on the boat is a surprise, but I'll definitely let you know as we get closer to the conference. I'm particularly excited about having our event on the Queen Mary, since it fulfills my life-long dream of having a party on a big boat for more than 1,200 of my closest friends. As this will take one more item off my bucket list, Kscope11 will mean I'm one step closer to dying (and a cheer goes up from the crowd).

Submit a Paper Now

So the cheapest way to join us at Kscope11 is by submitting a presentation since speakers get in for the low, low price of free. As I mentioned above, the deadline to submit an abstract is October 26, and speaking as conference chair, it will not be extended. If you want the possibility of a free pass, start by visiting the abstract page to get an idea of what we're looking for and then go the submission page to put in your title, abstract, and so forth. With budgets ever tighter these days, it makes a much more convincing conference pitch to your boss when you point out that the biggest cost, the conference admission, is already paid for.

Even if you don't want to speak at Kscope11, make sure you put money into your 2011 budget now for attending the conference. I look forward to seeing every one of you and several (both?) of your friends at Kscope11. It'll be the most fun and educational thing you do in 2011 while remaining completely clothed. You can quote me on that (although it's not legally binding, of course, since I actually know very little about your personal life and what you consider to be both fun and educational).

Oracle EPM 11.1.2 - New Financial Close Applications

Part of the awesomeness that is EPM 11.1.2 includes the release of some new stand-alone applications particularly Hyperion Financial Close Management (HFCM) and Hyperion Disclosure Management (HDM). These products are designed to improve financial close and reporting capabilities. Note that unlike Hyperion Public Sector Budgeting (which is really just a new module for Hyperion Planning), these new applications are exactly that: new applications. They don't require any existing applications to run them.

That last sentence may surprise some people who thought that these two new applications would end up being modules inside of HFM (Hyperion Financial Management). On the contrary, Disclosure and Financial Close Management do not need HFM at all (though they do integrate with HFM). This means you'll see, say, Oracle PeopleSoft clients with Disclosure Management that don't even own any other Hyperion products.

Frankly, I'm thrilled to see the Hyperion name in these two brand-new products. It shows that not only is Oracle not killing the Hyperion name, they're realizing its brand recognition in the financial community.

HDM = Disclosure Management

Quite simply, Hyperion Disclose Management makes it far simpler to generate XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) files which are basically XML files with some business-specific information in them. As standards and organizations like IFRS (International Financial Reporting Standards) and our very own American SEC start requiring more and more information in XBRL format, we're going to need help generating all those XBRL-tagged files.

Enter, Hyperion Disclosure Management. Using Microsoft Word (interesting idea, by the way), it helps apply XBRL tags/taxonomies to financial reports. Further, the tagging can be done at the report-level (which is to be expected) but it can also be done at the application level. For instance, let's say you tagged an account with a certain type. Then any report accessing that account automatically picks up that taxonomy. The product also does a nice job of validating your XBRL taxonomy before you finalize it.

While there's an Oracle webpage on Disclosure Management, there's a lot more detail in an Oracle whitepaper if you're looking for greater information. For instance, this whitepaper mentions the direct integration of HDM with Hyperion Financial Reporting and Smart View (which I didn't see mentioned elsewhere).

HFCM = Financial Close Management

The point of Hyperion Financial Close Management is to convert all those lists of tasks that have to be done every month to close the books into dashboards where we can monitor the close process throughout the close cycle. It lets you track (and manage) activities such as:

• entity-level close of ledgers and subledgers
• data transformation
• data collection and loading
• consolidating the books
• reconcilations
• creating and publishing reports
• just about any other financial close-related activity you can imagine

And while the dashboards & calendars are nice for letting you see what's going on, the nicest part of HFCM is that you can automate and track many activities that used to be manual. If you want more information, go to Oracle.com for a nice HFCM whitepaper.

Oracle EPM 11.1.2 Is Available - But You Can't Get There From Here

Well, this is interesting. I've been critical in the past of Oracle releasing a version of EPM, Hyperion, or Essbase (like 11.1.1.3 for instance) to edelivery.oracle.com and then not letting anyone know. It was weeks after 11.1.1.3 was released before Oracle finally acknowledged it's existence.

Fast forward to Oracle EPM 11.1.2 (AKA the most significant release feature-wise to the former Hyperion products since the Oracle acquisition back in 2007). In this case, Oracle was kind enough to issue press releases, webcasts, and briefings about the wonderousness of 11.1.2 back at the start of April... and then didn't post the programs for download until the 21st of April. A couple of people (Mark Rittman and Tim Tow, among others) have already mentioned the release, but I'd like to take some time to deep-dive into the new features (and concerns) with 11.1.2.

I've also complained in the past about Oracle releasing a version for Windows before releasing the versions for other operating systems. Not so in 11.1.2: there are versions out there for Windows (32-bit and 64-bit), HP-UX, AIX, Linux (32-bit and 64-bit), and Solaris. This is also an international version (that is, it's not an "English Only" release) that can be used in over 15 languages (depending on the product because some aren't quite as international as others).

Installation

To be clear, don't install this release for production. It's been out for less than a week. While this version was in beta for around a year (at interRel, we first started testing it in the summer of 2009), you need to wait for the first service pack to work some of the known issues out of the system. Based on what the Oracle speakers at last week's Collaborate conference were saying, EPM 11.1.2sp1 will be out in either Summer or Fall. I have heard in the past June or July, but the "could be fall timeframe" wording for the patch is new. It might be delayed because of the need to add migration functionality to the service pack (more on that in a bit).

Note that one the only supported Web Application Server supported in this release is Oracle WebLogic Server (10.3.2, specifically). Sorry, Tomcat and WebSphere users, for the moment you're out of luck. That said, Oracle is being kind enough to give out a limited use copy of WebLogic for use with all the EPM products that need an application server.

If you're going to try to install all the Oracle EPM 11.1.2 products, be aware that three products have their own installer (rather than using the common installer):

• Smart View
• Essbase Excel Add-in (yes, there is a version 11.1.2 of the add-in)
• Disclosure Management (one of the new applications)

Can't Upgrade to 11.1.2

Now for the really bad news. This release (for the moment) is not supported as a migration from an existing release. That's any release (11.1.1.3, System 9, anything). If you are an existing customer of Oracle's EPM products, then 11.1.2 can be installed on a development server, but you can't move your existing release to 11.1.2 in development. In case you don't believe me (I was shocked when I first heard, frankly), here's the exact quote from the 11.1.2 EPM System Installation Read Me (epm_1112000_readme.pdf):

This release is intended for new deployments only. Upgrading or migrating from previous EPM System releases is not supported. In addition, products from this release are not compatible with products and applications from previous releases.

In other words, new customers, have a ball. Existing customers, wait for fall when they get the migration patch out there. I do have my infrastructure consulting team seeing if they can do manual export and imports to get around this, but even if they do, it won't be officially supported.

Watch This Blog

Over the next few days, I'll be posting additional entries around specific products rather than try to mention them all in one entry. There are over 25 product-specific Read Me files I have to make it through and that's before I ever try installing everything and playing with it live. It'll be fun!

#2. Hyperion Creates BPM Out of Thin Air

In 2002, Hyperion realized that though they had the best budgeting, scorecarding, and financial consolidation products in the industry, their competitors were still lumping them in the BI (Business Intelligence) category. So Hyperion simply decided they would create their own category: BPM (Business Performance Management). BPM was created to include BI but also add in applications that sat on top of BI. Gartner picked up the ball and ran with it creating their CPM (Corporate Performance Management) magic quadrant and placing Hyperion firmly in the leadership quadrant.

Cognos, Business Objects, Oracle, IBM, SAP, and the rest were left playing catch up as they stuck with BI a little too long giving Hyperion a 2-year head start. When Oracle acquired Hyperion, they renamed CPM to EPM (Enterprise Performance Management) but the entire xPM acronym can be traced back to the excellent work of Hyperion’s product marketing group.

Oracle - Best Ability to Execute Among EPM Suites

Gartner has released their annual "Magic Quadrant" report on CPM (Corporate Performance Management also known as EPM) suites. To the shock of almost no one, there are only three vendors in the "Leaders" quadrant which means they have high ability to execute and completeness of vision. Those three are IBM (with the Cognos products), SAP (with the Business Objects and OutlookSoft products), and of course, Oracle (with the Hyperion products).

Oracle EPM scored higher in "ability to execute" than any other vendor although SAP did rank higher in terms of "completeness of vision." The "ability to execute" category is determined largely by a customer survey, and it's interesting to note that Oracle had the largest improvement in execution of any vendor Gartner surveyed.

One might wonder why Oracle didn't fare above IBM and SAP in terms of vision, considering those vendors seem unsure as to what they're doing with their long-term EPM strategies. A clue can be found in the comments at the end of the article where Gartner mentions that no major increases in functionality were released in 2009. Further:

...There has not been any major advancement in product vision during the same time frame, and Oracle needs to show evidence of thought leadership in CPM to maintain its position relative to other megavendors and some of the CPM specialists. Its IP functionality and planned financial-close functionality partly address this.

In other words, Oracle had better keep advancing (rather than focusing on just integrating Oracle EPM with the existing Oracle products) or risk falling significantly behind on the vision front. The release of 11.1.2 (Talleyrand) and hopefully, OBIEE 11g will surely help.

#10. Release of Version 11

First in the Series

This is the first in the "Top 10 Hyperion Events of the Decade" series. Remember to check back every Monday as we countdown the Top 10. Feel free to comment, discuss, or debate these items in the comments. Hurray for free speech and all that jazz.

#10. Release of Version 11

Oracle wanted their first major post-acquisition release of the Hyperion product line to be more enterprise friendly while adding features across all the products. In the summer of 2008, almost exactly one year after Hyperion ceased its independence, Oracle released "EPM System, Fusion Edition" and the world was impressed.

Oracle EPM 11x was the most revolutionary version of Hyperion in many years. While all the products were extremely enhanced, Essbase in particular was substantially improved to include text & dates inside the cube, attributes that change over time, and the new Essbase Studio product. Oracle even introduced a new application: Hyperion Profitability and Cost Management application.

While all was not perfect with the release (it was definitely not bug-free and the first version of EPM 11 was English- and Windows-only), it showed that Oracle would be investing a great deal of research and development into the former Hyperion products.