EPM Conversations Episode 16 — A Culture Clash Conversation or 50 Million Frenchmen Can’t be Wrong with Ludovic De Paz and Pascal De Schryver

Culture Clash Series

The performance management world is broad. Those who practice within it are wide in skills, dispersed in geography, deep in talent, and – in general – all jumbled together.

Your hosts are all North Americans (Canadians and Mexicans rejoice for this American has finally figured out how not to use “America” as shorthand for that quarter-or-so of the globe above the equator and a bit west of the

Greenwich meridian

) but hail from three different continents. Beyond the differences in our personalities, it’s easy to see your hosts’ cultural influences in this podcast: British diffidence, Indian thoughtfulness, American brashness. Stereotypes and certainly wide brushed, but where your hosts’ formative years were spent marked us. With luck, it makes for an in interesting podcast.

In that vein, we thought it would be interesting to talk to our fellow North American performance management practitioners who work and live here today but come from elsewhere. Our audience is primarily from that quarter of the globe mentioned above; we are not perhaps the most introspective people and might be improved if we were so. An outsider sees the quirks and foibles that a native cannot. This episode begins a series

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EPM Conversations — Episode 13, A Conversation with Elizabeth Ferrell, Accountant (ex), Advocate (of so many things), and Aviatrix

Natalie Delemar and I – as with so many others in the performance management space – first met Elizabeth Ferrell at a conference, in this case ODTUG’s Kscope.

Elizabeth’s path to her current job, focus, and professional interests evinces the typical path from school, to finance, not-at-all-usual hobby, and now to our beloved performance management community.

But to characterize Elizabeth as typical is to do her an injustice or perhaps just inaccuracy on Yr. Obt. Svt.’s part. As evidence of that (beyond of course this EPM Conversation episode) is to have a read of Elizabeth’s thoughtful article on the state of your – ours – work satisfaction and what we do with that.

Her episode is just as thoughtful.

Join us, won’t you?

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EPM Conversations — Episode 12, A Conversation With Kumar Ramaiyer, Workday Adaptive Planning Business Unit Vice President

As Everyone Knows, But Hardly Anyone Actually Does

One of my fondest recollections of Kscope (umm, one year or another, they all blend together after a while) is sitting in on Kumar’s introduction of Exalytics (remember that Wave Of The Future?). As Kumar dived deeper and deeper into the hardware behind Essbase-on-Exalytics, he prefaced each increasingly (exponentially?) complex computer engineering concept and detail with, “As everyone knows…”. If only. I sure didn’t.

Key to Kumar’s personality is this liberality of intellectual comradeship: he thinks that surely whatever a given insanely complex topic might be is easily understood by the average geek. This (possibly insanely optimistic) generosity of intellectual spirit informs this podcast as Kumar takes us (and you, Gentle Listener) through his journey from theoretician to developer to advocate to Vice President of Engineering while working at Informix, Oracle, and now Workday.

Cubes, Cubes, Cubes

Beyond the interesting personal history (and you have to catch Kumar’s glory days in the NCAA and yes, really; we in the performance management space are polymaths), he gives one of the most passionate, cogent, and comprehensive arguments of the cube as the ideal for planning and budgeting. I’ve worked with non-cube forecasting tools and

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EPM Conversations — Episode 10, A Conversation with Jodi Hill, Pattern Recognizer and Outlier

We’re all wired to see patterns

We live in patterns: seasonal, political, historical, and even atomic. Many live a life blithely unaware of them, which is to their disadvantage, for understanding those patterns is key to what makes us human, drives culture and society, and informs economics. We happy few in the performance management world figuratively live and die by the patterns in data. If careful observation of clients, customers, and conferences is an accurate guide, we are largely cut from the same professional and educational cloth. This is not always true. Those of us who come from outside that pattern have different perspectives, values, and insights. Jodi Hill is one such outlier.

Her path to a job in business strategy is atypical and is driven by its unconventionality: from Army translator to accountant to consultant to strategist is surely out of our norm. So too is an educational journey from the Defense Language Institute to a BS in accounting to multiple Masters in predictive analytics, public policy, and health economics. No matter how diverse this may seem at first glance, it is held together by the thread of transforming data into information by seeing, interpreting, and understanding patterns. I’ve

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EPM Conversations — Episode 9, A Conversation with Matthias Heilos, CEO of Finance Technology Innovations

Data, data everywhere, and none of it in the right place or in the right format

Performance cannot be managed (see what I did there?) without data. And yet data –because it is in the wrong format, because it is in the wrong place, because it is poorly defined, because we don’t have the ability or the resources or the time to transform it into what our systems need – is ever a challenge. Data is, quite simply put, hard. FinTech Innovations aims to alleviate that challenge and make data easy.

See a problem, fix a problem

The performance management world is small (which suggests that alas this podcast’s audience will necessarily follow suit unless we figure out how to break out – we’re working on it): I’ve known Matthias for at least a decade although when I first met him he was (I think – it was a while ago) an independent consultant.

How did Matthias go from that most independent (and arguably isolated) place to software entrepreneur? What made him leave HFM and FDMEE (apologies to all of you bass players out there – just listen and you’ll understand) behind and focus solely on the manifold

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EPM Conversations – Episode No. 2, Part 1 & 2, a conversation with Essbase Lady, Natalie Delemar

Two (actually four) for the price of one (which incidentally happens to be free)

Our freewheeling conversation with Natalie Delemar continues apace. The conversation was so chock full o’ content (or, arguably, nuts) that we simply couldn’t make it just the one episode.

It was quite the free ranging conversation with really no holds barred. If you were looking for a wee bit of controversy (nicely put and argued – we are an antidote to negativity), here are your episodes. Our podcast hosting service has this option for each episode:

I was tempted. <grin> Seriously, no bad words, nothing NSFW, just opinion with compelling arguments for and against with a fantastic guest.

As always, there are a plethora of ways of hearing us: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, Buzzsprout (our provider), Stitcher, iHeart Radio, TuneIn, Deezer, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Castro, and Castbox. Celvin adds these and he is a podcasting madman – there are probably others that I’m not aware of.

And of course you can listen directly on www.epmconversations.com.

As noted, there are two episodes. Here’s the first, EPM Conversation – Episode No.

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EPM Conversations – TWTWTW

That Was The Week That Was, it’s over let it go, 52 times a year the week is done and over with before you know

Launched on the 30^th of September, as of the 8^th of October (there is your week) EPM Conversations had 155 downloads across lo our many podcast aggregators:

Let me note that, totes obvs, none of this could have ever happened without an audience – that’s you. If you haven’t listened to us, please do so – it’ll be worth your while. If you have, thank you for a podcast is nothing without listeners. EPM Conversations can be a valuable part of our professional EPM world, but only with your participation.

Our first week’s global audience seems to be shaping up nicely with a not-everyone-in-the-world-is-a-North-American cast:

While there is understandable disappointment that neither McMurdo Station nor Dakshin Gangotri nor Halley Research Station are yet among our audience, we are patient. We may need to be.

South America? I actually lived in there as a child although I have to confess there was no internet or (gasp) Celvin or (gasp, again) Tim for that matter when I lived there. There wasn’t even any

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A Free Form Planning aka Essbase SaaS Journey — part 7, I didn’t know what (DTS) time it was

I didn’t know what (DTS) time it was, Then I met you

What is Dynamic Time Series (DTS)? I am ever so glad you asked ‘cos if you didn’t, there wouldn’t be much to this post, would there? To quote (and illustrate) from the Essbase Database Administrator’s Guide (oooooh, the very latest 19c one out in the cloud). Note that it is not entirely accurate.

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Just what is DTS? Again, per the DBAG:

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What this means is that you can calculate all sorts of period-to-date members in BSO without having to write code or do math in Excel or a standard report. Lovely.

Oh, what a (non)lovely time it was, How (un)sublime it was too

I’m here to tell you a (small) secret. This functionality wasn’t always there in Essbase SaaS. In the very early days of this supercalifragilisticexpialidocious product, It Wasn’t There. Ugh. But that is the past.

I didn’t know what day it was, You held my hand, Warm like the month of May it was, And I’ll say it was grand

The present is rather different – DTS is fully supported and it’s super easy to set up just as it is in the on-premises Essbase

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The ODTUG Learn From Home Series, Free Form Planning aka Essbase SaaS, The Changing Landscape of EPM, and Yr. Obt. Svt.

A plague is upon us. Shall we make a virtue out of necessity?

Snark is, next to laziness and general incompetence, my stock in trade, cf. this blog (and the previous one) in post after post after post. But there’s not really all that much to mock or deprecate or even gently poke fun at in the face of a global pandemic and the unknown economic cost to come.

Better then to celebrate grit and determination and optimism in the face of adversity, which is exactly what ODTUG has done with a brilliant concept: the ODTUG Learn From Home Series. If the world+dog cannot come to Kscope20, then Kscope20 will come to you. For free. Really.

Click on the below graphic that I shamelessly stole from ODTUG’s website to begin your registration:

A screenshot of a cell phone

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I can’t write this better than ODTUG (cf. laziness).

We are excited to announce the Free ODTUG Learn from Home Series taking place May 19 – May 22. Get ready for four days packed with over 90 sessions plus mini Oracle symposiums—all covering a range of Oracle-related topics to keep you on the cutting edge of the latest technology.

The ODTUG Learn from Home Series

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A Free Form Planning aka Essbase SaaS Journey — part 6, the Mac Smart View Revolution

A point fully stretched to the breaking point

Essbase on Macintosh has always been a poor relation. But it was not always thus. There was a time when ~~Apple~~ Power Computing really was Thinking Different and that difference was revolutionary. I was a (small) part of it. The emotions invoked were strong, to wit:

This is (I think) Bill Gates being tortured by Mean Girls; you can substitute Essbase on Mac for Mr. Bill. Ouch. Was Yr. Obt., Lyl., Fthfyl., & Hmbl. Svt. ever treated thus at a birthday party? If so, he cannot remember, but probably.

The last time I used Essbase and a Macintosh that wasn’t also running a VM, was in – gasp! – something like 1994, just about when I started with Essbase. Yes, there really was an Essbase add-in for Mac and I used it on my Macintosh IIfx.

Given that Macs now run Intel, this poster isn’t totally accurate but is too cool to not include:

Supposedly there’s a version around with Sluggo Smith punching Mr. I-used-to-be-the-richest-man-in-the-world-but-I’m-not-doing-too-badly-thanks-for-asking in the face but I’ve never actually seen it. This is good enough.

Evangelizing Macintosh aka being a Mac fanboi

Why, when Windows

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