EPM Conversations Episode 24 — A Portrait in Leadership: Women in EPM with Sharon Wang

This one is different

EPM Conversations has been lucky to have a variety of Performance Management guests:  vendors, people from other places and tongues, fantastic players in our little technological space, and of course the Women in EPM series.  All of them are great (even the ones where Yr. Obt. Svt. is a guest), insightful, interesting, and often quite funny.  In short, they are the stuff that technology podcasts dream of.

What we have not had is a consultant who does not primarily have a technical bent.  By that I mean, EPM Conversations is a technical podcast, it is presented by four consultants (although our participation switches round as our guests’ background dictates) who (mostly, although as you’ll hear in this episode that isn’t 100% true) are techies first and foremost.  This episode’s guest, Sharon Wang, has an element of a technologist’s perspective, but at her core she is a management consultant focused on organizational change within the context of technology.  Without – hopefully – sounding like a hick from the sticks, I find that utterly fascinating.  It also opened my eyes about yet another professional path not taken in my so-called career because of the breadth that this dual focus brings to work, but such are the fortunes of war and of life.

Empathy.  Consultants with a sense of empathy, said hardly no one ever.

Oh dear, that makes consultants sound like monsters who care not a whit for their poor clients.  Of course that cannot be true lest said consultant wants a very short time in the workforce, but regardless putting oneself in someone else’s shoes can be difficult, particularly if you haven’t walked a mile in someone else’s shoes.  Yes, two idioms referencing shoes in one sentence but they work.

Sharon has that experience in industry and so understands the needs and goals of both sides of the project table.  Consultants work with clients during project implementation but then, if the Good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise, they leave at project end.  The customer then owns the application.  What happens then?  Unbridled joy?  A casual insouciance?  Unrelenting terror and despair?  Deep and abiding satisfaction?  All of the above?  A good consultant, a consultant who understands the customer’s world – in other words, an emphatic consultant – understands these potential outcomes and their likelihood.  In my (gasp) 28 years of consulting I’ve sometimes been witness (surely never party) to a distinct lack of empathy; pain ensues.  A consultant that understands the other side of the conference table never lets that happen.

Organizational change through Performance Management, or is that Performance Management through organizational change?

We technologists often view technology as the lever to move the organizational world and we are often successful in that approach.  However, in my (gasp, yeah, again) 28 years of consulting, I have seen (alas, this time sometimes as party to, but always against my better judgement and will) projects that only focus on the system and not the people.  Sometimes clients need only a better mousetrap, other times they need a wholesale change in the way they think and work.  Sharon (and I might note Natalie does as well) sees that gap and how to fill that.

There’s more, much more

I could go on (please, Cameron, don’t I imagine you’re thinking), but I think I’ve spilt enough digital ink without covering the nature of Performance Management over time, mentoring, the role of AI, and the role of the humanities in technology.

Join us, won’t you?

EPM Conversations Episode 23 — A Portrait in Leadership: Women in EPM with Oracle Barbie aka Kate Helmer

A doll by any other name

Kata Helmer, aka Oracle Barbie formerly known as Hyperion Barbie, Oracle Ace Director, and oh yes ODTUG board member is just one person, but oh my, what an accomplished one. 

I’ve always been intrigued by Kate’s alias:  she’s quite obviously a professional of some import and yet names herself after a child’s doll.  Why?

Subversion vs. celebration

Barbie (the doll, not the guest of this episode in the Women in EPM series) – or at least I thought so before recording this episode – sort of has a not totally awesome reputation.  How wrong I was (again, Cameron, again?) and, having been the host (and listened to the episode eleventy times during the edit), how sure I am there can be real difference between a man’s and a woman’s perspective.  Or I was just wrong.  Or why not both?

Kate views Barbie as an exemplar of a woman that can do anything.  Beyond the popularity of Barbie as a doll and the success of the recent Barbie movie, there are any number of academic posts on the subject.

So is “Oracle Barbie” a sly flip of an incorrect impression or an overt embrace of a powerful woman?  Listen and find out.

NB – I was strictly a 12 inch GI Joe (surely the only real one – those Wee Willie Winkie ones are sort of an action figure abomination) fan and they taught me that camping is fun, which although a nice leisure activity, was not a transformative life effect.

The path to master data management

Kate’s journey from the defense industry to Hallmark to consulting with an ever-increasing emphasis on managing the data that defines data is interesting.

What I also find interesting that Kate was introduced to Essbase in a manner similar to mine:  her manager asked her to take a look at Hyperion System 9 and the rest is history.  Performance Management has many branches but its roots are the same.

Just who is your favorite serial killer?

EPM Conversation episodes have a “rule of 3” where the guests tell us what their favorite three books, movies, and people in history are.  Nowhere in that list is the subject of serial killers although I suppose opening it up to “people in history” could include them.  Don’t believe me?  Go to about 52:25 to hear the immortal words. “You’re not a true crime junkie until you have a favorite serial killer”.  All I can think of is this song.

The rest of the story

There’s more, much more than the above précis.  The only way for you to know is for you to listen to Kate’s episode.

Join us, won’t you?

EPM Conversations Episode 22 – A Conversation With Shankar Viswanathan, The Man Who Owns The Product That Bought Me My House

Let’s not forget that it also sent Natalie’s kids to college

We (your EPM Conversations hosts) owe a lot – a financial kind of debt as well as a professional one – to Shankar and Hyperion/Oracle on premises /PBCS/EPBCS/EPM Cloud Planning. Seriously, I first set eyes on what was then Hyperion Planning Desktop (which alas I cannot find a screenshot of but know it’s out there somewhere), I thought, “Cameron, you idiot, this is the future” and so it has been through (gulp) decades of work. Never, our Performance Management audience, look askance at a sure thing.

Part of that product’s success has been Shankar Viswanathan’s careful stewardship of a product that grew from an application wrapper around Essbase (and a horrific and quickly abandoned Win32 app that was supposed to be the workspace of users of All Things Hyperion and yes, Shankar, I really do hope you didn’t create that) to a complete EPM cloud platform. At its core, planning and budgeting hasn’t at it’s core really changed all that much (ZBB came and went, driver based planning is still here, and yes AI/ML now has its turn in the Wheel of Planning Fortune) but what we still call Planning certainly has. Of course Shankar didn’t write each line of code nor did he define and design every bit and bob of UI, but it’s easy to see his steady hand in Planning’s evolution through the lens of customer success.

Introspection

Each and every one of EPM Conversations’ guests is a joy for they are enthusiastic, open, thoughtful, visionary, and just about everything one might hope for in a colleague and a friend. Shankar is all of things and yet he is different.

By that I mean Shankar is quiet in the physical sense. We struggled with Shankar’s voice until we (we = Celvin) realized that is simply how Shankar talks; he is well worth listening to and the volume button on your phone isn’t that hard to use. Sometimes how we think is reflected in how we speak: introspection, consideration, reasoning, and sensitivity don’t need to be shouted to be understood. Shankar is well worth a listen.

Maybe the most interesting part

All of what I wrote about Shankar’s professional interests hold true for his personal ones.

There’s a wide range in all three areas of historical men, literature, and movies: E.O. Wilson, , Gandhi, and Steve Jobs for the historical figures, in reading, Ayn Rand as a teenager, to E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Anatomy of Power, and Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, and finally a varied palette of movies in Shawshank Redemption, The Bang Bang Club, and Heat.

This is, in case you’ve not been able to tell, one of my favorite episodes.

Join us, won’t you?

A Portrait in Leadership: Women in EPM with Minie Parikh

Yr. Obt. Svt. finds broad cultural movements to be interesting both conceptually (what are they, why do they exist, how did they start, and the rest of the who, when, and where list) and in practice because of their broad outcomes and impact on individuals.

My inveterate curiosity aside, women in STEM (STEAM) has been a current in social and professional change for roughly the past decade. Various organizations and companies, e.g., ODTUG, PwC, OneStream, Oracle, and many others, have been active advocates of this program

In many (most, really) respects, EPM Conversations is a series of, um, conversations with the leading lights in our Performance Management (and others) community and we have been blessed with a truly eclectic and interesting set of guests.

EPM Conversations has a started a new series in that vein – Portraits in Leadership: Women in EPM. Our first guest is Minie Parikh.

She is a true renaissance woman: driven, smart, far sighted, artistic, perceptive, altruistic, warm, positive, and more and oh yeah, right in the thick of EPM with her firm, EPMI.

Minie’s story is inspiring: a first generation American who rejected her expected professional path and instead became a Big4 consultant, cofounded a boutique consultancy (EPMI), is a guest on this podcast (ahem, that’s only kind of a joke, one that is quite firmly tongue in cheek, but it is quite hard to pique our collective interest and oh by the way, she too has a podcast), while leading through active participation and by example in WIT. If that isn’t leadership, I don’t know what is.

And lest you become overwhelmed by all of this, there is of course that human story, and it’s kind of out there.

Love and marriage, love and marriage, go together like an SmartView query

With the most profuse apologies possible to Old Blue Eyes and Sammy Khan, love and marriage and Excel and Smartview and Essbase rarely, and I do mean just about never except maybe this one and only time, come together and yet in Minie’s case, it most absolutely did because she met her husband, Nihar Parikh in a bar where they bonded over their mutual love of SmartView. It is totally geeky cool and very sweet. Never say there’s nothing new under the Sun.

The first of many

Fingers crossed, our new series finds favor with you, Gentle Listener. One of the great things about this podcast is the ability to quickly jump from one theme to another. As this section header notes, Minie is not the last.

Join us, won’t you?

EPM Conversations Episode 19 – A Culture Clash Conversation Or Our Kith and Kin Across The Sea Explicit

It’s a Book, It’s a Podcast Episode, It’s Kismet

A bunch of geeks (native born, immigrants; Americans all) interviewing an Australian and a New Zealander/Australian/American (it’s complicated) set Yr. Obt. Svt. to immediately think of the title of this podcast (eh, I need to get more than one hobby), who then looked up the phrase and found that…it’s a travelogue of a New Zealander’s view of the USA, circa 1888.  Seriously, what are the chances that the Mind of Cameron (often non compos mentis, invariably kind of wacky) and reality and a not half bad title smack up against each other?  This podcast episode was destiny realized.

The point behind this (I have finally managed to get round to that) is that the ties between the Antipodes and the Americas are long standing.  This may make our Cousins wince in recognition, but in my travels to their lands, I’ve been markedly struck by the similarities.  Yes, of course different origins (although related), and different emphasis in politics and society, but not unrecognizably; culturally in outlook and aspirations, we are awfully alike.  Okay,  I think so, but do they?


What then is the value of a Culture Clash episode where people-who-are-practically-Americans (ahem) are interviewed by-people-who-are-practically-Aussies-and-Kiwis?  I have noted that those who are closest and yet different are often the best observers, for they are alike enough to understand nuance but separate enough to not be blinded by a common mindset.

Richard (the man of a million or so legitimate passports) and Pete (just the one country, but Godzone)  have lived/worked in the States.  Just what are their perceptions?  What are two very different (from the US-of-A) EPM markets like?

I should note that Pete got me the 2017 Best Kscope Essbase co-speaker award that I have always, always, always wanted.  My oh my, did I want that, did I ever think I deserved it – yes, cruel ego as it was always unfulfilled – and I never did get it till Pete and I did a presentation on Hybrid Essbase.  I will note that Pete has won multiple best speaker awards at Kscope, so I have a sneaking suspicion our joint award is 20% Cameron, 80% Pete but no matter, a win is a win.  I should also note that Kscope 2017 was my last Oracle conference as a speaker, so it made the reward all the sweeter.

Richard graciously was my host at Flinders Uni way back in (I think) 2012 as part of an ODTUG conference tour of the Antipodes and facilitated (orchestrated?) an ODI/Essbase presentation at NZOUG.  My primary memory of that trip (I was in a constant state of jet lag) was dinner with Richard and a bunch of attendees and being stared at as a Real Life American geek, not commonly seen in the wild, sitting there eating his plate of spag bol, feeling more self-conscious than usual were that possible.  Oh well, I like to provide entertainment to all, no matter the cost. 

Having the two of them on the show was and is a special treat.

Not For The Faint of Heart

For those of delicate disposition, easily offended by adult words, mortally insulted by honest, open, and frank conversation, I fear you must put on your big boy/girl pants and buckle up.  We Americans, cultural descendants of the Puritans, beseeched our guests to tone down the language lest you, Gentle Listener, get a case of the vapors.  They mostly complied, but You Have Been Warned.  That takes care of the North Americans; the rest of the world won’t care.

Sensitivities aside, as always our guests are witty, insightful, and extremely interesting.

EPM Conversations — Episode 14, A Conversation with Sree Menon, The Calc Man

Sree Menon, The Calc Man

Many years ago (just over 10!), Yr. Obt. Svt. wrote a blog post on why he Hated and Loved Calculation Manager. I even did it twice. I am – oft times, still, it continues unabated – a complete smartass who pays little heed to what he says and writes and this was most definitely one of those times. These posts were a continuation of not altogether terrifically awesome judgement as they were an expansion of a similarly-snarky two parter on Hyperion Business Rules. 2009? 2012? My, but the time does fly.

So that’s four snide technical blog posts on two closely related Oracle products. As is typical and as has been noted, I performed zero thought on any potential consequences that might arise from click-bait (was that even a term in 2009?) titles: Oracle could have gotten annoyed and come down on my head with a bag of hammers or they could have ignored it and hoped that no one read my posts or they could have read it, realized that (somehow) there was a little value in it and reached out to me so that in future my posts on this subject weren’t complete and unmitigated garbage were improved in their content, focus, and quality.. The latter is exactly what happened and it did so in the person of Sree Menon, the EPM Calculation Manager Development Manager, aka Calc Man.

No one at Oracle had ever spoken to me outside of Kscope; certainly no one on the development side of the house (I believe that at the time Sree was both Product and Development Manager of Calculation Manager although my memory is fuzzy on this) had ever interacted with me in any form. Sree was helpful, open, and friendly. He wanted Oracle’s tools to be better used, he wanted me to better understand it, and he surely wanted me to write better blog posts. All three occurred, and they occurred because of Sree’s thoughtful approach, despite my artless approach to all things Calculation Manager. Yes, I am a huge fan.

And I think you will be as well as you listen to Sree’s episode. His professional journey has taken a few twists and turns that you may be familiar with (Have you ever wondered who wrote Essbase Application Manager? Wonder no more.) and you’ll get a true developer’s perspective on what it takes to make the Performance Management tools we use.

Hear the conversation

We hope you like the episode as much as we do. If you do enjoy it, please give us a good rating on the provider of your choice as it both bathes our ever-needy egos and also – and rather more importantly – allows listeners just like you to more easily find EPM Conversations.

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EPM Conversation – A Conversation With Abhi Nerurkar, Co-Founder of EPMware

One out of three ain’t bad

We were lucky enough to land Abhi Nerurkar, one of the three co-founders of EPMware, a software company specializing in Master Data Management (MDM) and Workflow, for our very first vendor conversation.

A note: we didn’t speak with Abhi’s partners, Tony Kiratsous and Deven Shah, as we’re simply not set up/not experienced enough to manage a six way conversation. We have to work on that but I hope that Deven and Tony understand/are deeply appreciative of not being bored to death/annoyed beyond endurance by the chaos I fear such a large group would produce.

Just what don’t you know about software development? Well, if you’re like us: everything.

We – you, me, Tim, Celvin, The Man in the Moon (probably not) == we all use software as part of our job, else why listen to this podcast? But do we know anything about writing, managing, and selling-software on a commercial basis? Unless you work for a vendor and are at the coal face at that, I can answer this one for you: no, not at all. It’s fascinating. Listen for the term “wireframe” and be as astonished as Abhi was when he first came across the term. It isn’t what you think.

More than just software: people

A market opportunity, a gamble, and a result: empty words without the human context behind it. I don’t think any of us (Celvin, Tim, or Yr. Obt. Svt.) have the guts (well, at least I don’t) to make that leap. Abhi and his partners did. It’s a fascinating and informative conversation.

Join us, won’t you?

EPM Conversation – Episode No. 2, Part 1, A Conversation With Essbase Lady, Natalie Delemar

Intro and outro

For once your author aka Yr. Obt. Svt. is keeping it short and sweet. Enjoy it, as its brevity may be akin to Halley’s Comet and happen again in 2061.

Natalie Delemar, Essbase Lady, Madame President (emerita) of ODTUG, dynamic personality, and friend to all of us in the EPM space (but especially to me), is our guest. There was so much history, so much interest, so much conversation that we simply couldn’t do it all in one episode. Also, one wonders if a two hour podcast would actually be listened to.

There’s a lot of good content, hence the splitting of into two episodes. Natalie has strong opinions and a forthright way of putting them in the best of all possible ways. Would you want a simpering milquetoast of a guest? Why? Natalie is funny, warm, and kind – all of that comes through in the podcast. Please join us in welcoming her.

Here’s the agenda:

0:00 – 5:20 – preamble, how we all met
5:20 – 8:25 – drive and why Natalie Does What She Does
8:25 – 14:40 – WIT and advice to women in tech, being an African American woman in tech, mentorship, and the importance of a professional network
14:40 – 16:30 – Advice on career progression
16:30 – 22:10 – Working for Big Four firms
22:10 – 26:50 – Advice for people who want to get involved in community without employer incentives
26:50 – 28:55 – Relationships between boutique firms and the Big Four and where technical work actually gets done
28:55 – 36:10 – Changes in the consulting market recently: layoffs, mergers, and new software vendors
36:10 – 39:25 – Selling the value of EPM, especially on “insight”
39:25 – End – Predictive analytics and adoption in different areas of business and reluctance in Finance/FP&A

Join us, won’t you?

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