Recent changes by Oracle in its support policy have been followed by significant feature and support changes in upcoming versions of applications in the PeopleSoft product line. In July 2009, Oracle announced the pre-release notes for PeopleTools 8.50, the foundation tool for all PeopleSoft development. The key areas and features emphasized by Oracle in PeopleTools 8.50 are:

• - Related content
• - Integration technology
• - End-user productivity
• - Supported platforms

The biggest change is in supported platforms. While earlier versions of PeopleTools had run on 32-bit machines, PeopleTools 8.50 will run only on 64-bit machines.

To give you a quick comparison of 32-bit vs. 64-bit processing:

• - 32-bit systems can reference 2 to the power of 32 addresses, or 4 GB of RAM
• - 64-bit systems can reference 2 to the power of 64 addresses, or approximately 17.2 billion GB, 16.8 million terabytes, or 16 exabytes of RAM

In essence, the 64-bit computers will be processing about ten billion times more information than their now nearly-insignificant 32-bit cousins.

What does this mean to a business? Several requirements go along with PeopleTools 8.50:

• - New 64-bit servers
• - New operating systems
• - New 64-bit support software
• - New installations or upgrades
• - Integration and support for the new equipment

Here are the answers to a couple of very obvious FAQs:

• - No, you cannot run a 64-bit emulation on a 32-bit machine.
• - Yes, you can run a 32-bit emulation on a 64-bit machine, but it’s like making an F-15 Eagle travel at the same speed as a tricycle, just to be in a tricycle race.

The majority of businesses run on 32-bit machines, and these have proven adequate, given the quantities of commercial data most organizations use (an exception would be statistical market analysis firms), and the PeopleSoft product suite does run on the 32-bit supported PeopleTools 8.49. The key for business owners considering an upgrade will be how much longer PeopleTools 8.49 will be supported.

During these tough economic times, few organizations will be willing to justify any significant additional cost without a serious look at all of the benefits – not just the speed.

In my last blog entry, I gave some suggestions of how the agile Business Analyst should lay the groundwork prior to gathering business requirements. In this entry, I will give some tips for the agile BA covering the next couple of main project stages.

• Gathering Business Requirements
     • During your first meeting with business users, gather the High-Level Requirements.
     • Always keep your discussions within scope of the project.
     • If any requirements are out of scope, document them for future enhancements.
     • Diligent users seeking to do their jobs right typically want everything. But remember not all the requirements are critical to business – some could be just ‘nice to have.’ Negotiate with business users and other stakeholders to identify the requirements that will add the most value to the business.
     • If you receive conflicting requirements from different business users, call a meeting to address the gaps. Get the users to justify and prioritize the requirements based on importance and criticality to business.
     • Never offer technical solutions for current issues on the spot, but rather document all issues and take them to your technical team for discussion. Then come up with solutions that can be shared with the business users.
     • Document all the points and send them to the business users after the meeting. This will ensure that the points are correctly conceived, and, if any are wrongly captured, that the business users will have the opportunity to correct them.

• Leading Joint Application Development (JAD) sessions
     • Realize that it will be next to impossible to get developers and other team members, as well as other stakeholders, together all at once to sit in a room and brainstorm about system design.
     • Be willing and able to play the lead role in administering, managing and facilitating JAD sessions.

• Documenting the Business Requirements
     • When you develop the business requirements document, spell out the details clearly, without any ambiguity or vague points. Use simple words to describe the requirements.
     • Present the requirements with diagrams, flow charts or pictures. Remember, “a picture is worth 1,000 words!”
     • For effectiveness, use Use Case or UML diagrams to present the details.
     • Use MS Visio to present the workflow models or business processes clearly.
     • Provide both ‘AS-IS’ and ‘TO-BE’ models, so that business users can compare and understand the differences.

In my next blog entry, I will wrap up this series with some tips for the agile Business Analyst during the stages that follow the documentation of business requirements.

This morning as I sat in front of my laptop to write this blog entry and share my thoughts with fellow bloggers, I remembered the very first time I was hired as a Systems Analyst, about ten years ago. For a minute, I indulged myself in a brief walk down memory lane. As a fresh grad with burning desires to take any challenges thrown my way, I had my share of ups and downs. The struggles to blend my student mindset with corporate professionalism are not easy to describe. However, they made me who I am now: a Senior Business Analyst, having a certain level of expertise in terms of both functional and technical knowledge, but still craving new knowledge and challenges on day-to-day basis.

The objective of this article is to share my working experience through some tips for the agile Business Analyst. Like those in some other IT roles, Business Analysts play a significant role in ensuring a smooth project implementation. If you consider the multiple phases of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) or Project Life Cycle (PLC), the business requirement gathering phase is the very first phase in the project pipeline. A precise and concise set of business requirements are the strength, backbone and foundation of the project implementation activities. Business Analysts are the people who face the firing squad of Business Users, Developers, Quality Assurance Analysts and other project team members, as well as other Stakeholders. They get involved in the early stages of the project, remain with the project as it evolves from one phase to another, work as a liaison between business users and developers, are fully accountable for the accuracy of requirements, produce documentation, and the list goes on.

First up, I will cover the preliminary stage, in which we do all of our groundwork prior to gathering the business requirements, along with some general hints and tips for the agile BA.

• Do your homework 
      • Take time to research the company history, business background and stakeholders.  This knowledge will increase your confidence when addressing the company’s business users or other stakeholders.
• Be prepared 
      • Develop questionnaires related to business processes, business user expectations, etc.
      • Prior to a meeting, send the agenda to business users so that they can be properly prepared.
• Be creative
      • Open yourself up to unconventional solutions.
• Communicate well
      • You are an ambassador representing the IT group. You must be able to communicate well not only with your teammates but also with business users, managers and everyone with a stake in the project.
• Break the rules 
      • Don’t take this to mean that you should literally break any of the company rules or policies. What I’m trying to say is that you should break the traditional way of capturing business requirements by incorporating new techniques, tools and methodologies in your requirement-gathering activities.
      • Explore options to present requirements in a strategic way that others will understand.
• Control the interview sessions
      • Always stick to your agenda and questionnaire topics.

In my next entry, I will continue through the project stages of gathering and documenting business requirements.

Most of us have heard Oracle speak of the need to develop a roadmap for our PeopleSoft products. Oracle recommends laying out a timeline or schedule that guides the transition from a PeopleTools-based product to a Fusion-based product. While I’m sure most agree this is a beneficial activity for budgeting and planning purposes, it can prove to be difficult, given that there are no guarantees with the “what, when, where and how” of the future Fusion product suite.

This past September, Oracle presented useful PeopleSoft subject matter at the OpenWorld 2008 conference in San Francisco. Much of this information could impact, or result in further refinement to, existing roadmap documents. The focus of my next few blog entries is to highlight some of the topics relevant to PeopleSoft strategic planning activities.

At the top of my list is PeopleTools 8.50, an update that could impact your 2009 IT plans. With the hype (and some confusion) surrounding the future Fusion product, it was refreshing to see a live demonstration of an enhanced PeopleTools product that brings the user interface more in line with today’s Web 2.0 standards. Oracle expects this release sometime in 2009, and given the fairly extensive demo at OpenWorld, the GA estimate appears accurate. I would recommend reviewing the presentation (and bookmarking the Oracle PeopleTools blog if you haven’t already) to better understand some of the updated capabilities with Tools 8.50.

Some features outlined in the presentation to keep in mind:

• Backward compatible: The 8.5 Tools release is backward compatible to any application running at least 8.4x. If you’re running Financials 8.9 on Tools 8.47 you can upgrade directly to 8.5. Some shops may see a better ROI by upgrading the Tools and leaving the application at the current level.

• Enriched navigation enhancements available with just the Tools upgrade:
    • Partial Page Refresh
    • Modal Lookup Prompts & Error Messages
    • New Menu, Favorites, Recent Visits
    • Homepage Pagelet Drag/Drop
    • Independent Pagelet Refresh
    • Type Ahead/Auto-Complete
    • Modal Zoom Grid for existing grids

• Connected Query – allows the developer to join PS Queries into parent-child relationships to further increase the tool’s ability as a reporting source. There will also be additional enhancements with Web services to run PS Query data to XML publisher or a third-party application.

The presentation does include new features that are dependent on additional product licensing. For example, the presentation shows a new feature that can pull business intelligence (BI) content directly into a page, based on the page’s current context. While the feature looks both sharp and useful, it requires a separate BI tool to generate the required data. Additionally, some of the features are dependent on an upgrade to 9.1 (GA estimate 2010). When reviewing these updated capabilities, make sure you differentiate what is delivered with the Tools upgrade by itself, as well as what’s available with the 9.1 application upgrade included. Regardless, the PeopleTools 8.5 release, scheduled for release in 2009, does offer compelling updates that should be analyzed against existing roadmap strategies.

Adrian Sannier, Arizona State’s university technology officer believes, to the depth of his being, that it is.  And he expressed his powerful thought leadership position regarding what the shift is all about and what to do about it in his presentation at Campus Technology’s July 2008 conference.  In an incredibly informative and colorful keynote speech, he laid out six components of the new paradigm that he believes must be elucidated, embraced and executed.  Component #1 is the most controversial but, perhaps, most essential because it enables the other five.  Component #1 “liberates the resources” as Adrian says, to do the rest.

You just have to hear it to appreciate the intensity of his conviction regarding the need for change in how information technology is managed in higher education!  Here is the link to listen to Adrian’s presentation – 73 minutes of transformative and energizing thinking about what the future can hold for institutions that embrace change!  Adrian paints a clear vision of the path that can lead to enhanced learning and educational value through a restructuring of the technology environment – in keeping with a strategy that separates “the core” from “the context.” 

Much more cost effective strategies exist today for maintaining “the context,” – meaning the software applications that have become mere commodities that are essential but not differentiating – than are currently being utilized by the majority of universities.  When they are employed, budgets can be reallocated to take advantage of the host of “core” technologies that facilitate collaboration, informed decision-making for stakeholders, and learning…with the agility to embrace the new and upgraded technologies as they continue to emerge onto the scene.

In this new era of modern technology, Higher Education is in the midst of rapid change in response to environmental, social, economic, technological and political transformations occurring worldwide. As a result, institutions of Higher Education are facing ever more numerous operational challenges. In order to survive these challenges, Higher Education needs new institutional strategies and decision-making processes. For a Higher Education institution to prosper and perform efficiently, all levels of campus staff and administration must collaborate to create a wave of change by implementing Business Intelligence to manage and monitor campus performance. Going one step higher, a digital dashboard provides a view of campus performance that can be directly mapped to campus vision and mission.

So to all Higher Education institutions out there, please take this opportunity to re-strategize your campus performance management in order to gain or maintain a competitive edge!

In my last entry, I discussed the data warehouse’s role in the digital dashboard for Higher Education. In parallel to the data warehousing technology, Business Intelligence (BI) is a system of reports, metrics and dashboards designed to drive decisions that optimize an organization’s performance. Reports, scorecards and digital dashboards are some BI applications that could be designed using data warehousing technology. Business Intelligence components reside on the data warehousing platform to enable end users to access them more efficiently.

BI performance management software for Higher Education enables you to:
• Calculate curriculum costs
• Identify good fundraising programs and sources (e.g., Alumni)
• Monitor student headcount and performance, program outcomes, school reputation, national agendas and other KPIs
• Share secure Web-based information with all stakeholders
• Manage endowments and recruitment through driver-based planning
• Spot high- and low-performance schools or programs
• Map enrollment to attendance and attendance to performance
• Speed compliance reporting

I’ll wrap up with my conclusions regarding the digital dashboard for Higher Education in my next entry.

The City University of New York (CUNY) is a GREEN leader of huge proportions! CUNY presented a very energizing Webinar yesterday that consisted of a discussion – moderated by a representative of the Center for Digital Education – with Ron Spalter, Executive Director for the CUNY Task Force on Sustainability, and Tria Case, CUNY University Director of Sustainability.

CUNY enrolls 400,000 students and, with all of its 10,000 faculty members and employees included, has about 500,000 people moving through the campuses of its 23 colleges in New York City every day. CUNY occupies 29 million square feet of real estate and consumes 1% of the city’s entire energy load. The system is huge and, right now, it is embarking on changes that will make a huge impact on the environment. The goal is to reduce the institution’s carbon footprint by 30% by 2017.

From an IT perspective, CUNY is changing out all legacy systems and deploying Oracle/PeopleSoft as its base for gaining efficiencies and reducing energy usage. But that is only a small part of the plan. It’s comprehensive, with high participation across all campuses. From the sound of it, the initiative is extremely well orchestrated and no stone has been left unturned.

Check out the CUNY Web site to learn more. You may also be interested in checking out their October 30, 2008, Sustainability Conference. CUNY is committed to minimizing its ecological impact and investing the resources to “construct, retrofit and maintain more sustainable facilities,” and they want to share ideas to ensure success. In addition to the October 30 conference, CUNY is forming an advisory board consisting of a broad spectrum of industry leaders from financial services and utility companies, as well as the “new green industry.”

We’re impressed with this undertaking and wish CUNY the highest degree of success. The road to sustainability will certainly require a sustained effort, and it sounds like they have put the foundation in place to move their enormous and highly complex institution successfully along the path toward their vision. GO CUNY!

Data warehouse and Business Intelligence go hand-in-hand with the design requirements of a digital dashboard for Higher Education. The data warehouse provides a platform to store campus-wide information from multiple operational datamarts. In this entry, I’ll discuss the role of the data warehouse in developing the digital dashboard for Higher Education. In my next entry, I’ll cover how to improve performance using Business Intelligence.

Executives at Higher Education institutions are increasingly in need of timely and accurate information to make critical business decisions, assess risks against benchmarks and respond quickly to market changes. Like growing commercial industries, Higher Education is in need of accurate, timely and relevant information on which to base decisions, not only for long-term planning, but also to address day-to-day developments. In order to store vast amounts of historical data electronically and to facilitate reporting and analysis work, Higher Education needs to develop the proper data warehousing architecture.

Business Intelligence applications rely on Data Warehouses, as they function as database repositories designed to support a company’s decision-making process. Information populated on digital dashboards are extracted and transformed from Data Warehouses. For bloggers, a digital dashboard is an aggregation of different types of information accessible from a single Web page.

Data warehouses are assuming a more strategic role in making these business decisions, addressing these three challenges:
1.        Delivering near real-time data
2.        Integrating the applications that make the best use of the data
3.        Providing transparent access to systems that contain business-critical data

Solving these challenges typically requires retrieving and analyzing data; extracting, transforming and loading data; and managing the elements of the data dictionary. Data warehouses are optimized for speed of data retrieval, so even for the largest databases, retrieval speed is not a major concern. Multi-dimensional modeling and denormalized data are key factors that contribute to the fast and efficient performance of a data warehouse that directly expedites the data population on a digital dashboard.

Again, I’ll cover the Business Intelligence end of the Data Warehouse/Business Intelligence equation in my next blog entry.

When we ask executives at Higher Education institutions how they assess campus performance, they may share 10 or more key metrics that they track on a regular basis. These key metrics, known as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), are sets of measures that track the effectiveness of a college or university in meeting its mission, goals and fiduciary responsibilities. KPIs represent the “vital signs” of the college’s performance against a predefined benchmark. They form a balanced scorecard that should give a strong indication of the institution’s health and progress. KPIs are always associated with a list of measures that scales the school’s performance. Thus, KPIs are directly derived from key focus areas that align with the institution’s vision and mission, and they aid it in achieving its goals.

Accordingly, development of a set of Key Performance Indicators should follow these guidelines:
• Do not confuse the number of indicators with their usefulness in decision-making. A greater number of indicators does not necessarily result in more or better information.
• Address issues of validity and reliability when creating indicators. Do they actually measure what you intend them to? Should you compare the results to those of other institutions and systems? If so, can you qualify your comparisons by identifying institutions and systems that are comparable in vision, mission and experience with assessment?
• Be sure to clarify how the indicators will be used. Recognize the different purposes inherent in public accountability and institutional improvement agendas.
• Develop performance indicators that represent all aspects of the institution.
• Use a variety of methods, both qualitative and quantitative, to capture, analyze and report your findings.
• Link performance indicators to institutional processes to improve performance and inform decision-making.
• Communicate clearly with all relevant constituencies – internal and external – concerning the goals, development, and reporting of data related to performance indicators.
• Ensure that all stakeholders are included in and participate in the development process

In my next entry, I’ll explain a little about the data warehouse’s role in the digital dashboard for Higher Education.

Here are some of the major benefits a digital dashboard for Higher Education provides:
• Enables administrators and campus executives to better support the education process by accurately compiling, analyzing and reporting information across systems to both internal and external decision-makers
• Empowers faculty with the information they need to create the best learning environment for all students
• Provides the right information at the right time to the right user group
• Maximizes the availability of information to all levels of the organization: the Executive level receives performance data, the Management level receives trend and summary data, and the Staff level receives detailed data
• Facilitates seamless processes supporting the full life cycle of student administration
• Enables campus executives and administrators to track and monitor campus key performance indicators in order to establish, improve and align them with the mission

I have mentioned Key Performance Indicators in a couple of my blog entries. I will discuss these further in my next entry.