Do You Want to Streamline Your Applications?

Oracle has acquired a lot of technology recently - some of the biggest acquisitions have been within the Applications space. In addition to the Oracle eBusiness Suite, we own PeopleSoft, Siebel and JD Edwards and our acquisition of the Stellent technology in November 2006 puts us into a great position to underpin these applications with real-value content solutions.

Let's take a financials package for example, Oracle eBusiness Suite (EBS). Many organisations have successfully deployed this application to streamline their business processes but have neglected to solve an issue that causes headaches within the business teams. The handling of paper-based information within a financials process occurs on a daily basis and at certain periods (end of month, end of year predominately) the volume of paper being handled rises dramatically. Handling paper through a review and approvals process generates risk for an organisation. Believe it or not, the risk of spilling a cup of coffee on the paper is pretty high in most organisations as is simply mis-placing or losing the paper itself. Internal envelopes are notorious for getting lost for months-on-end - I've heard so many horror stories around this in my past. In addition to the risk of damaging or losing the paper, the process itself becomes long and cumbersome. Manual review and approval of paper - including the necessary cross-checks required can take anything from a week to a month to complete which in today's electronic age should be unacceptable to most organisations - particularly those that supply you with their goods!

There are solutions that help streamline the process through image-capture and electronic workflow processing. These solutions are easy to implement, highly-configurable as required and on the grand-scheme of things - relatively cheap to procure and own.

Now, of course, Oracle doesn't only look after it's own applications. SAP is out there being used by many organisations to run their businesses - we know a fair bit about this as most of the large deployments run Oracle's database at the back-end. SAP has a relatively good content management solution within its environment - but it is not considered by many to be enterprise-class as it doesn't really support the majority of ECM capabilities outside of its own ecosystem. Within SAP we provide an important and crucial solution that helps streamline the application itself ensuring ongoing performance without the need to consistently invest in new hardware. This solution is called SAP Archiving and is based upon the principal that only a relatively small percentage of data within SAP is actually being used. Once a financial transaction is complete, for example, the details (including any unstructured information) can be shipped out of the live environment into an archive - as long as it remains accessible if required. The Oracle Universal Online Archive solution fits this requirement nicely.

We are running a series of informative events in Sydney and Melbourne in the next few months to educate our customers and partners around these solutions. If you would like to be a part of these events, please let use know otherwise watch this space for registration details.

Paul

Can your HR system be your central source of truth

If you have had any involvement managing employee's within IT, either in a File System, Database or a Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS) then no doubt the issue creating and deleting users has raised its head.

I have seen organisations that have such complex and manually intensive processes to bring on new employee's and grant access that it can take 6 weeks before that employee has access to all the relevant systems to simply be productive. Now you have the scenario of a new employee, eager to make his or her mark on the world. Wanting to show they mean business, only to be hamstrung by inefficient process's that stop them simply working. Let alone being productive.

The inverse of this is much worse, what happens if you fail to remove access to employee's when they leave an organisation. Could they still get access to critical systems, receive email, check the current accounts or download the latest marketing plan. If you think this is urban myth its not, in my career working for IT vendors i have personally experienced this. Of course i wont name the vendors but both are very established and have security credentials. Vendor A failed to remove me from a system of employee's that received Qantas Club Membership and kindly continued to pay for this membership after i left the vendor. Vendor B actually started paying me again after leaving the company for nearly a year, the outcome here was that my details didn't get removed from all systems involved with payroll. An upgrade on these systems resulted in Vendor B generously adding me to the payroll again. If only all past employee's had such generosity. These accounts that are not cleaned up when an employee leaves are often referred to as orphan accounts.

I am amazed time and time again when going into organisations how this problem isn't addressed. It is either deemed not an issue, to expensive to fix or more than likely they don't event know the problem exists. From experience i find that if an organisation has X employee's and that is in the several thousand. More than likely the number of orphan accounts is in the realm of 3 times X.

So what can you do to fix this ?, several options include

• Review your manual process's
• Implement a provisioning system - often referred also as Identity Management
• Install an audit tool that will periodically review the accounts and identify the suspect accounts

One of the most elegant ways to rectify this is within HR. After all what department has a better grasp of who is employed and who isn't. HR employee's however don't have the admin skills to manage users within all the various systems. But it is possible to make HR the single source of truth. Then point your Provisioning system to the HR employee table. Once someone leaves an organisation and is deleted from the HRMS system then a automated workflow can be commenced that will trigger the provisioning system to start deleting all instances of this user.

The inverse of this can occur with employee's commencing, once they are identified within the HRMS system as commencing employment. The automated workflow can be kicked off, the provisioning system can identify what type of role the employee has and create the basic set of accounts so that person can be fully productive from day one.

Let me know your horror stories, or indeed if you have tried to set the HRMS system up as lead for provisioning and de provisioning.

Cheers - its 5pm on a Friday and "beer oh clock"