Tomorrow we, along with Oracle and some keystone clients and partners, will present a webinar on mobile workforce solutions for PeopleSoft Maintenance Management.  You’ll hear from East Kentucky Power Cooperative – a pioneer customer as it relates to to mobile solutions for PeopleSoft MM – and Blue Dot Solutions, the standout leader in enterprise mobility.  If our server logs are credible, this is a hugely popular topic right now.

This webinar will teach you how to:

• Increase productivity for remote workforce.
• Enforce quality work habits by automating best practices.
• Enable field service technicians to synchronize information directly.
• Facilitate visibility of materials and parts across the organization.
• Transition from a reactive to a true asset care mindset.

When? Thursday, August 26, 8 AM PST/11 AM EST.

Where? Webinar – see details below.

Why? Hear from the superpowers of the PeopleSoft Maintenance Management and mobility spaces.

Anything to do to pre-register? There is no pre-registration on WebEx; just use the link below and dial in.

Here are the full details.

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PeopleSoft Maintenance Management is one of the hottest solutions in the Oracle PeopleSoft portfolio, and East Kentucky Power will explain in real-world terms how mobile technology helps them on a daily basis.  Combine that with our nationally-recognized implementation expertise, Blue Dot’s enterprise mobility leadership, and there’s a lot to learn in this hour-long webinar.  Hope you see you there.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management) and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More PeopleSoft posts.

Oracle’s PeopleSoft Technology Blog:

There has been some confusion about maintenance and single sign-on between the PeopleSoft Portal and PeopleSoft applications. Here is the general guideline one should follow:

For Single Signon, PeopleSoft supports having Enterprise Portal on a PeopleTools minor release which is equal to or greater than any content providers (e.g. both Enterprise Portal and Financials are on PeopleTools 8.50). In addition, the preferred configuration also has Enterprise Portal on the same or a higher patch as any content provider (e.g. Enterprise Portal on 8.50.09 and Financials on 8.50.03). However, as long as both systems are on the same minor release, SSO is supported, so the content provider could have a higher patch release (e.g. Enterprise Portal on 8.50.03 and Financials on 8.50.09). PeopleSoft does not support the Enterprise Portal on a lower minor release than the content providers (e.g. Enterprise Portal on PeopleTools 8.49 and Financials on PeopleTools 8.50).

Good info.  I suggest reading the whole thing for more detail.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More PeopleSoft posts.

Then he gave me some advice about teaching that’s stuck with me for more than three decades: “Just pretend you’re teaching you. How would you do that? What would you want to know? What did you dislike when you were taught? What stories would you tell to make it understandable? What would keep you interested and engaged?”

—Steve Blank in Teach Like You’re the Student

As a boutique/specialist consulting firm, one of the nice things about breaking the mold of big-box companies is that we have an opportunity to create our own culture.  A lot of that affects how our employees experience working for us (something we’re proud to say we’ve done pretty well), but also how our clients experience working with us.

One of the precepts we hold dear is candid conversation.  We’ve turned down available work because we’ve told a client what he needed to hear instead of what he wanted to hear (in this case, that he didn’t need our services for another application he was considering).  We’re not afraid of the difficult conversation in the name of championing a client’s best interest.  And we’re dramatically opposed to the opaque, buzzword-filled communications that infect so much of business, especially in the enterprise IT space.  Don’t believe us?  Check out our Twitter feed, Facebook page and this very blog to get a feel how we engage our clients.  (We even try to humanize our datasheets.)

A lot of what drives us to this idea is that we don’t like being talked at in a jargon-heavy style any more than most of our clients do.  We find the best way to help clients understand our value as a specialist firm is to speak openly and naturally with them. When we help clients with knowledge transfer, we teach them like we would want to be taught ourselves, because it’s stickier that way.  People remember not only what you’re helping them with, but also you as a company.

It’s not always easy to explain how a consulting firm can be different above and beyond the standard R&R: resumes and rates.  But in 2005 we founded our company on ideas that ran a bit counter to the norm, and our clients have noticed.  And that’s the most we can ask for.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More business posts.

Stephen Jannise over at Manufacturing Software Advice has an interesting take on where Oracle might go next with its M&A activity.  Some of these (RIM, for instance) are pie-in-the-sky plays, but they do make some sense in the larger enterprise space when you consider the most emergent trends.

As for me, I can see Informatica and Infor as reasonable plays (with varying degrees of messiness).  I don’t see much of a network play, nor do I see mobile being top-of-mind.  I can see EMC and Salesforce.com as massive targets, but both very pricey and, perhaps, out-of-reach today.

Regardless, some interesting thoughts by Jannise and a fun thought exercise to boot.  Give it a read.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More Oracle posts.

Being relatively new on MIPRO’s Workday scene, I had my first opportunity to present to a prospective Workday/MIPRO client.  This particular deal had a very quick sales cycle, so the client had not been fully immersed in Workday and the participants in the meeting had never worked with a SaaS solution before.  As is sometimes the case, the competition was two ERP vendors — both of which the HR representatives had experience with at former employers.

After the meeting, I was feeling less-than-great about the implementation discussion. 

What bothered me was that both sides – us and the prospect — were using the same words as we always had, but were speaking different languages.  The approach to implementing Workday is very different from implementing an ERP, but we continually used the same words to describe the approach and methodology.  What we were saying wasn’t adequately describing the considerable benefits and differences of the SaaS implementation method.

Frankly, I felt as though we were not successful (in our limited time allotment) as we could have been to get across how different the Workday  implementation approach is.  Why?

Because we were using the same words as an ERP implementation.  I could tell the attendees were excited about Workday and the technology model it represented, but they were still in an ERP state of mind.  The leopards were having a hard time changing their spots.

Everyone in the room was using the same words that they’d been using, but were speaking different languages.  There was perceptible communications muddiness – call it a language gap – and nobody in the room was uneducated.

Maybe it’s me, but maybe we need to find new words that better differentiate and define the Workday/SaaS deployment experience.

It’s the old right tools for the job metaphor.  And you can’t rely on some old ERP standbys when talking about something progressive and new and different.

Have you encountered this?  What have you done to explain SaaS to traditionally-minded clients?

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog.  If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website.  If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More Workday posts here.

You’ve seen this before: when a concept or a term finds commercial traction, it’s everywhere as companies try to cash in on the recognition momentum the term has.  I’ve seen it with ‘no hydrogenated oils,’ and ‘no high fructose corn syrup,’ even when the products didn’t need to have these on the label.

They had these labels because they catch people’s eye; that’s what customers are interested in and find valuable.  So much so that not much thought is given to whether or not the claims are valid or even make sense.

I’ve been noticing the same thing with SaaS and cloud computing.  For the sake of this post, let’s focus on SaaS and some of the market confusion surrounding it.

SaaS is one of the biggest terms going in the enterprise space.  It’s a concept that is coming out of its technological infancy, and everyone from CTOs to Nicholas Carr will tell you that SaaS is going to be the disruptor for the enterprise space for the foreseeable future.  In-house IT asset ownership is going to decrease as enterprises move their assets to the cloud.  (See me in 2013 or so to see how that prediction plays out.)

Do we agree so far?

Recently, Workday’s Stan Swete discussed the phenomenon that SaaS – as a term and concept – is having on the market and prospect perception.  This struck me as astute by Swete, because everywhere you look has SaaS emblazoned across anywhere it will fit.

Problem is,  not everything that’s being pushed as SaaS is really SaaS in the pure definition of the term.

In a nutshell, Swete lays out his definition of what ‘real’ SaaS is:

• Hosted
• Pay-as-you-go pricing (no perpetual license)
• All customers are on the same code line
• Customers share data center resources (also known as multi-tenancy)
• Updates are included with the service

Without delving into tenancy discussions and application architecture minutiae, I agree with Swete.

However, the open market has its slush room.  In order to ride some of the SaaS buzz and rank reasonably well with SaaS search queries and have serviceable sales playbooks, companies who do not do native SaaS must create their own definition of it.  In many cases, these versions of SaaS aren’t really SaaS.  Swete says:

Legacy vendors don’t go all the way to real SaaS. They will host the software for an additional fee (above and beyond the software license fee) and will help update an individual customer’s implementation–when that customer is ready to pay them extra to do it. There should be some kind of label for this type of hosting, but it isn’t SaaS.

Swete’s right: this is a conceptual no-man’s-land.  You’re not SaaS – especially when compared to what companies like Workday have built – and you’re not ERP.  Are you hosted?  Are you a  managed service?  What are you, really?

In analyst speak, you’re neither fish nor fowl.  You’re beating the SaaS drum.  But you’re not real SaaS.

And therein lies the confusion.  I applaud companies who have made the investment in a real SaaS architecture to stand up and explain why their technology is superior to those who have bent the definition to suit their technology assets and strategy models.  But even still, there’s a ton of confusion out there; we hear it every day.

We need more folks like Swete to stand up and discuss this in plain English.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog.  If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website.  If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More SaaS posts you should read.

Attending OHUG in Las Vegas last month was educational and full of smart folks, as it always is. In particular, I noticed talent management and its HCM-related integrations generated a lot of buzz.  People are looking for a low-cost, quick time-to-value way to do this without having to go whole hog on wholesale system upgrades.

To that point, did you know that Oracle provides easily-configurable integrations from Enterprise ePerformance 9.1 to Human Resources 9.0 applications? The same is true for Enterprise Learning Management 9.1.

Most folks we talk to are unaware of this.

In fact, by the end of this year it is expected that integrations to both HCM 9.0 and 8.9 will be available for the following 9.1 applications:

• PeopleSoft Enterprise ePerformance
• PeopleSoft Enterprise Learning Management
• PeopleSoft Enterprise Career and Succession Planning
• PeopleSoft Enterprise eCompensation Management Desktop
• PeopleSoft Enterprise Recruiting Solutions

You might not be in a position to upgrade your entire HCM suite immediately, but have a need for the enhanced functionality offered by one of these 9.1 applications. That’s what makes these integration capabilities so cool.

Incidentally — yes, consultants have been doing this kind of customization for years! But now it’s delivered.  And that’s a huge plus for many companies.

Check out the PeopleSoft Talent Management 9.1 to PeopleSoft HCM Integration Statement of Direction. It likely provides all the detail you need – and many ways to engage Oracle if you’re interested in exploring this further.

Naturally, given that I’m a consultant who lives and breathes this stuff, if you have any other questions about this or anything PeopleSoft — whether you’re looking at a project big or small — please email me and I’ll be glad to help.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More PeopleSoft posts.

MIPRO is a nationally-recognized leader when it comes to the successful implementation of the PeopleSoft Maintenance Management (MM)/ALM suite. We have performed more implementations of this product than any other services firm out there. This is a bit of a bragging right, of course, but also an important fact to support our knowledge and expertise in the MM space. We have blogged about both ERP and Business Intelligence and the takeaways from those post is simply that ERP allows your organization to run your business and BI allows you to manage it. In this post we bring the world of BI to the world of PeopleSoft MM/ERP together in complete harmony.

At a high level, MM enables service requests, work orders, crews to be assigned to work, work to be executed and equipment maintained.  Put simply, MM allows organizations to ensure their assets are kept functional and operational with as limited down time as possible.

As you might expect, there are some key operational reports required in order to ensure that all of the standard work activities are completed as efficiently and as effectively as possible. In addition, there are many management and true BI reports which can help answer those key questions around work orders, service requests, crews and assets.

Utilizing our BI requirements gathering process with our MM experience, we have put together effective BI for PeopleSoft MM. How?  We look at the key business questions which must be answered and understand the different dimensions to the business question being asked in order to establish a clear picture of MM BI. It is important to understand that MM BI also has interdependencies with HR, finance and supply chain.

That said, let’s go graphical!  A sample of our MM BI is outlined below. This example illustrates one sample BI question per subject area which may be turned into one or multiple reports or dashboards across functional business areas:

(Legend follows the chart.)

(Click to enlarge)

LEGEND: Maintenance Management Business Intelligence Chart

Business Process? This is the specific area of maintenance management impacted.

Business Question? This is the specific business question being posed which requires an BI answer. Remember, without answering a specific question, it is just a report.

Who is asking? Who are the resources who need to know the answer to this question?

What is the importance? What is the business value of having an answer to this question?

Who/What benefits from the answer? Are there others who may benefit from knowing this information? These may not be directly involved but can benefit from the information such as HR and crew information.

What is the metric/measure? Is there a specific tolerance or target? Top 10, bottom 10, etc.

Does this measure drive/answer additional questions? Other areas not directly involved in this business question may also find value. The answer may also lead to additional investigation and answers to other related questions.

Of course, this chart represents samples.  In the real world, there will be much more detail behind each subject area.

If you would like to learn more about our maintenance management, BI or BI for MM capabilities, please contact us.  We take questions from this blog all the time, and we’re happy to have even the quickest conversation with you.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More Business Intelligence posts.

“In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” (Yogi Berra)

I want to follow-up on my previous post about the mindset of SaaS’s role in the future and how it is juxtaposed against ERP.

I  recently sat through a half-day seminar targeted at SaaS consultants.  The presenter was a well-seasoned veteran in ERP implementations. His presentation was spot-on for basic consulting skills for an on-premise consulting engagement, but totally missed the new challenges and skills necessary for the SaaS consulting model.  All of the obligatory inserts of the latest industry jargon were there, but not the analysis of what those teams mean in how we have change how and what we do.  There was no reference to working in a virtual work environment, making sure you develop a morning routine so you are dressed for the “office,” (which is likely your kitchen table) and understanding the discipline needed for working in a virtual environment — not to mention the the social networking and communication skills necessary to be successful working in this type of model.

Which leads me to another observation…

“It was impossible to get a conversation going, everybody was talking too much.” (Yogi Berra)

It’s time to take a breather and look at those few SaaS vendors who got it right and broke the mold on how they deployed their solution and methodology, how they chose the right skills and competencies in their consulting teams to ensure quality deployments, and how they chose a speaker at their events who was not from the on-premise ERP consulting world who could relate to the new  challenges in the cloud.  The old template doesn’t fit anymore, and people are noticing. — especially those, like me, who are responsible for bringing clients a successful and business value-rich SaaS deployment.

As someone who interacts with Workday every week, I can tell you that they’re one company who got it right across the spectrum.  Who are the others?  Love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog.  If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website.  If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More SaaS posts you should read.

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, IT was an operational differentiator for many organizations.  It wasn’t every company who had a sophisticated application portfolio to enable and support business functions, much less the expertise to keep things moving in the right direction.  Because of this, IT held a certain degree of celebrity and had fluid budgets (and headcount) to accompany it.  Spending into strength rarely hurts in a competitive environment.  ERP made its foothold here.

Then came the beginning of the commoditization curve.  The mantras every IT vendor repeated was ‘IT-business alignment’, which meant that IT’s unbridled Vegas bender was over, CIOs were onto various shenanigans, and IT needed to start justifying its spend and strategic direction.  But it was still terribly important: IT was a key stakeholder in ever vendor negotiation, every RFP decision, every board meeting.

Now, in quasi-post-recession 2010, when we’re learning that executive spending/signature powers have been dramatically reduced and companies are sitting on mountains of cash but still afraid to spend, I have to wonder.  Budgets are still tight – a poltergeist from from 2009’s recession mindset? – and it appears that even the ‘IT-business alignment’ affirmation from six years ago is fading.  Instead, we see IT taking a clearly subservient role to business drivers; it seems that IT, unto itself, no longer has the power to drive its own direction unless in tow with a powerful business leader.  And increasingly companies are asking paradigm questions – SaaS v. on-premise, for starters – as they contemplate what will happen next.  IT has never been more full of framework-level, worldview-defining decisions.

Now, whether IT’s changed role is a wholesale mindset bump or just the ultimate maturation of ‘IT-business alignment’ is up for debate.  At the very least, IT’s role in the organization has undergone considerable change and commoditization.  At the worst, its role has been firmly supplanted by more business-facing drivers.  It’s hard to say which based on our conversations with clients, but there seems to be a trend.

I’m not trying to provide a brief history of IT in American business as I see it; rather, this is an open question as far as I’m concerned.

In your eyes, how powerful is IT these days, especially as it relates to the bygone days of IT glory?  I’m genuinely interested in your perspective.

Answer in the comments, if you will.  Thanks.

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MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.

More opinion posts, if you’re so inclined.