Oracle E-Business Suite
Oracle E-Business Suite is a comprehensive set of business applications that enables an enterprise to efficiently manage customer interactions, deliver services, manufacture products, ship orders, collect payments, and more—all from a system built on a unified architecture called Oracle Information Architecture . This unique architecture gives Oracle customers the opportunity to run their businesses on a single global instance. It allows a consistent definition of customers, suppliers, partners, employees, and all business entities across the enterprise.
Principal Consultant, System Performance and Architecture, Oracle Consulting
Location: Redwood City, California
Product: Oracle E-Business Suite
Q: Why is Oracle E-Business Suite innovative?
A: Oracle E-Business Suite enables businesses to think globally to make better decisions, work globally to be more competitive, and manage globally to lower costs and increase performance. The biggest expense in IT is integration. Oracle E-Business Suite is engineered to function as an integrated system. You can seamlessly pass information from one application to another without incurring incremental integration costs. Oracle's open architecture allows standards-based integration with your other business applications. Oracle E-Business Suite helps in reducing the total cost of ownership.
Q: How is it unique?
A: Traditional business applications are based on silos of departmental requirements, resulting in fragmented information and isolated—rather than integrated—business processes. Oracle E-Business Suite is the first and only complete set of enterprise applications integrated around a single, common data model. With Oracle E-Business Suite, you can consolidate and share information globally for the first time, while eliminating duplicate data centers, hardware, and IT costs for maintaining multiple databases and separate reporting infrastructures around the world. Only Oracle E -Business Suite has localization, or country-specific specializations such as local tax laws, for 30 countries. This localization covers 87 percent of the world's gross domestic product.
Q: Why do you feel you were nominated for the Oracle Innovation Showcase?
A: I have authored two books on Oracle Applications: Oracle Applications DBA Covers 11i and R12 [McGraw-Hill, 2008] and Cracking the Oracle Apps DBA Interview: 325 Frequently Asked Questions [McGraw-Hill, 2009]. There were a lot of books on Oracle DBAs, but there was not a single book on Oracle Applications DBAs that covered the newly released Oracle E-Business Suite 12. My books were the first ones published on Release 12. My first book also covered two important releases of Oracle Applications—Releases 11i and 12—making the book very unique. Also, as a principal consultant, I am responsible for designing the architecture for customers' Oracle E-Business Suite implementations. I have implemented Oracle applications for many large clients, and a lot of innovation was involved. I am also a regular speaker at Oracle events such as those held by OAUG [Oracle Applications Users Group], and Collaborate and Oracle OpenWorld, and I help Oracle University design the course content and review the questions for the Oracle Certification Program for Oracle Database and Oracle Applications tracks.
Q: How do you define innovation?
A: Innovation is doing things differently, in a way no one has yet thought about. To do things differently, one must learn to see things differently. Seeing differently means learning to question whether there is something that could have been done differently. It's about thinking outside of the box, and it's not like most other business functions and activities. There are no reliable templates, rules, processes, or even measures of innovation. In a sense, each act of innovation is a unique feat, a leap of the individual—or the collective—imagination that can be neither predicted nor replicated.
Q: Why do you think innovation is important?
A: Most organizations fail to sustain growth over the long term because they are not able to innovate on a systematic basis. Even when we talk about large, presumably successful companies, there is a clear pattern where they create radical innovations once or twice, and after that they rely on incrementalism. Companies focus on doing better or more of the same things, when they should focus instead on doing different things. Innovation is the ability to deliver new value to a customer. Innovation is a change that creates a new dimension of performance. Any product goes through its usual product lifecycle—introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. Innovation is the tool that keeps the product in the market for generations to come.
Q: What would you call the enemy of innovation?
A: The enemies of innovation would be close-mindedness and conservativeness. People who are inflexible, credit-hogging, unfocused, and sloppy do not make good innovators. The best innovators often have a generosity of spirit, openness to the ideas of others, and a sense of purpose.
Q: What's one of the most innovative teams you've worked with at Oracle?
A: The System Performance and Architecture team in Oracle Consulting is one of the most innovative teams I've worked with at Oracle. System Performance and Architecture is a specialized team at Oracle Consulting that focuses on the challenges of managing and deploying enterprise infrastructure for large clients worldwide. Our team helps customers get the most value from their Oracle investment. Customers achieve maximum competitive advantage when their organizational objectives, strategies, business processes, performance metrics, and the supporting application infrastructures are tightly aligned. Our team helps achieve that alignment. Every project we undertake is full of innovations, and these can be seen in all the projects we undertake.
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