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. 7, A Conversation With Kevin Lawrence, Marketing Analytics, Corporate to Guerilla

Not EPM, not CPM, but analytics of a marketing kind

This podcast is dipping its collective and metaphorical toe outside of the warm and cozy confines of performance management with a conversation with a guest whose job, passion, and personal interest is understanding the relationship of human behavior with business through the lens of marketing analytics. Join us, won’t you, on this fascinating conversation with Kevin Lawrence that is most definitely not within the scope of traditional EPM but most definitely within the scope of your interest.

$D:\Dropbox\Podcast\Kevin Lawrence Digital Portrait.jpg$

The journey to marketing and analytics

Kevin’s had an interesting path, one that isn’t really the norm in our ~~profoundly boring and all too predictable~~ fascinating EPM world: from the arts to nonprofits to the Fortune 100 to Find The Loose Brick.

Numbers without an understanding of the nexus of business and people are meaningless. Kevin’s professional life has deeply informed how he and his clients understand how you and I interact with corporations and their products, services, and oh yeah: each other.

The past actually is prologue

For you wee lads and lassies who weren’t around to hear this song when it first came out to witness the change in tools

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EPM Conversations — Episode 6, A Conversation With Mike Nader, EPM’s Very Own Data Analytics Polymath

Hah! EPM doesn’t get a lot of polymaths, does it. Yet Mike is exactly one of those.

A polymath is, “a person of great and varied learning” although Mike is too modest to agree with that description. If you but listen to this conversation, you (and he) will see that it is a fair characterization.

NB – The above graphic isn’t for n00bs but instead for veteran EPM practitioners who recognize the graphical genius of the long-gone and much-lamented Arbor Software’s training decks. Mike has several ties to this as you’ll hear.

But wait, there’s more

In addition to Yr. Obt. Svt., this conversation also has Natalie Delemar as our guest host and regular John Booth. This varying cast of characters is what I hope is the (or at least a) future of EPM Conversations. Tim, Celvin, John, and I are wonderful (ahem) hosts but there’s much, much, much more to EPM than us, cf. our guests and Natalie.

I’ve known (at least I was at the same conference although as I really and truly worked 100 hours that week in addition to presenting and working a booth so if I did meet Mike I have no recollection

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Stupid Programming Tricks No. 31 — Have you ever created a Unicode Planning application?

Don’t. Don’t do it.

Or at least don’t if you work in a Latin character country like the Good Ol’ U-S-of-A. And it ain’t Unicode, not really, but instead it’s UTF-8. Yr. Obt. Svt. is not going to try to even attempt to explain what UTF-8 is and instead suggests that you enjoy Joel On Software’s explanation. I encourage you to Read The Whole Thing.™ as any blog post that goes into high- and low-endian byte orders has to be good. At least I think so but perhaps I need to get a life. Don’t be intimidated (or bored beyond description) – he really did write an excellent article and I think I almost understand it. Almost.

A note: Planning cloud applications are all Unicode but this is an on-premises tale, even in 2020.

Safely ensconced in the on-premises world (which isn’t going away any time soon I might note), why shouldn’t you create a (not-really) Unicode application? Because this when one tries to import Essbase data (this is on-premises) from a not-really Unicode application to a plain old “normal” one. Bugger. But why?

Test was created in Unicode, Development and Production were not. Of course. So when it

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A Free Form Planning aka Essbase SaaS Journey — part 2, loading from LCM

Whoopsie

In my last exciting post, I stated:

Whoopsie, that’s not right. Bugger. Why? ‘Cos my Younger Taller Smarter and Definitely Better Looking Brother From Totally Different Parents noted:

Whoopsie. That’s usage of that word three times (so far). Surely some kind of record in a technical blog?

It’s up to you decide which is the bigger whoopsie: me getting it wrong or Celvin reading LinkedIn on vacation. Celvin, buddy, if you’re commenting on my many technical (and otherwise, frankly) mistakes, errors, and own goals, surely that can wait for your return to the grindstone?

My mea culpas aside, let’s see what happens when I load Sample.Basic from an LCM file. I’m not going to do this step by step as you’ve already hopefully read that bit.

Let’s look at that LCM file again

Data

A screenshot of a computer

Description automatically generated

Ooooh, in addition the outline file, there’s something called Data. Let’s open that up:

A screenshot of a cell phone

Description automatically generated

Oooh, again. That’s all of the data. See the fourth row from the bottom and the “100”? That’s a product total. LCM doesn’t export the PAG/IND files (apparently at one time it did per Celvin and I sort of remember that) but instead text, I believe because it can be

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A n00b’s OneStream Journey No. 8 — Why Two Is Not Better Than One

Apologies and yet without apology

Apologies up front as the subject of this blog post is both n00bie-ish as well as somewhat advanced and awfully, awfully, awfully important. It’s super-duper important that you understand what follows because a common design requirement and an equally common design solution won’t and doesn’t take into account OneStream’s core storage model. I’ll be making references to Data Management jobs, Finance business rules, as well as Data Buffer processing which is all rather a lot for a n00b post. But all of that is exposition – the key thing for we n00bs is to understand that a design approach we all take for granted in other tools is a Bad Idea in OneStream. Happily, the solution is straightforward.

The 42 people who regularly read this blog probably know a fair bit – although logic demands that I ask why you lucky 42 read it if you already know it. Perhaps you enjoy irrelevant links to popular culture from a year that predates your time on this planet by at least 50 years. Ask your parents or better yet your grandparents to help with that sort of confusion; hopefully the balance of the post will make

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A n00b’s OneStream Journey No.7 — I’ve Got Your Number

Stunning and maybe in a good way. Or not.

It’s all about numbers and – quite honestly, 98% of the reason I write this blog – I have the best, best, best (or perhaps the worst, worst, worst) antediluvian not-at-all-relevant-to-anyone-but-your-grandparents pop culture reference. Please, click on it and pinky promise you’ll watch the whole thing– it’s that good. And yes, it is actually germane to this post.

All done?

Do you ever think you’ll be the same? No. Will you ever click on one of those links? No. Again. Until next time at least. But really, there’s a point other than the searing of your eyes and a reminder that not everything from before-you-were-born is…like that.

How will you feel when you use the Excel add-in to retrieve a number from your super-duper OneStream application and get the wrong number? How is that possible? OneStream doesn’t do bad data. But it can happen. And then it’s bad, right? And you’re frustrated, gobsmacked, fearful, , and even blue? Fired is more like it. Mr. Twimble has the right idea although the mail room might not be the ultimate expression of your ambition.

I’ve Not Got Your Number

Good-Bye

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A n00b’s OneStream Journey No.6 — Instant Gratification

Instant

Everyone likes fast except when it comes to slow cooking or taking a nap or when pursuing a hobby or simply enjoying oneself. Of course, instant is even better than fast. No, not instant coffee (I can only drink it while camping – I think I somehow enjoy straining out bits of dirt from the tin mug), nor instant pot noodles (a staple of my university life, never to be repeated), but instead instant aggregations. I’m a busy geek; you are too. And I want it all. Now. Instantly.

Generally, in OneStream that’s not an issue as most dimensions are dynamically aggregated with the exception – till now – of Entity. By that I mean: input data at an Account, Time, Custom Dimension (and the other required dimensions – see my previous post for an overview of them in all of their glory) intersection and a single Entity and the numbers at an aggregate level are instantly available across all of those dimensions. That’s lovely in the non-ironic sense. However, that Entity dimension, the spine of every OneStream app, is a stored dimension, i.e. the upper level members must have materialized aggregate views. To get those aggregated –

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A n00b’s OneStream Journey No. 3 — OneStream XF Relational Blending 101, part 1

Introduction

This post is proof that my quite meager salesmanship skills are sometimes successful in convincing others to do my work. This time round, that means that my colleague Mike Gialanella agreed to write a guest post on XF’s relational blending. Thanks, Mike, for giving me the week off. And oh yeah, Gentle Reader, you too should thank Mike for writing about a really exciting and unique tool bit of functionality.

And with that, heeeeeerrrreeee’s Mike.

XF Relational Blending 101

When Cameron Lackpour asks you to write a guest blog post, the answer is yes. It is one of those things that you just can’t say no to. If Santa Claus asked you to deliver Christmas presents to kids-in-need, you would need an incredibly good reason to decline such a request.

XF networking event Nov 2017. Me on the right, Santa on the left.

So, for all you technical and finance experts that are attracted to ~~Cameron’s wit and wisdom~~ this blog, here’s my best-most-humble effort to deliver, by request of ~~the man~~ Cameron himself…. here you go:

OneStream XF is a unified SmartCPM^TM platform solution, it is not a siloed set of solutions that are fused together.

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