This week, I wanted to talk about the management of Oracle E-Business (OEB) applications, as it’s something we’re getting asked about a lot at the moment.
What we’ve noticed in the past is that a lot of OEB applications administrators come from a database background, so their expertise can be heavy on Oracle The Database and not so heavy on Oracle The Application. So we see a big disconnect between the Oracle database view (locks, buffers, SQL) and the business view (Workflows, application user activity, financial information). The result is that nearly every OEB shop we talk to wants a way to better connect the IT teams (in this case, the service delivery teams and the OEB administrators) with the business teams (Finance, HR/HCM etc). This feeling is constant across both the business (who want the best service they can have) and the IT teams (who want to provide the best value they can).
So we decided to release a brand-new Foglight capability for OEB, which is there both to serve the business owners of the application (Finance, HR etc) but also to enable the OEB administrators and service delivery teams to improve the performance of the application, manage the users (and their expectations!) and improve compliance with any legal directives that apply (lots of those for the people running OEB Financials). We whittled the list down to some areas we thought were particularly important, so we’re focusing on:
- Workflows: how long they’re taking (and if it’s too long), stuff that’s hanging around, is stuck or is otherwise not right.
- Users: who’s doing what when, who’s accessing the application and who’s not (do you need licenses for people who’ve never used it?).
- Performance of the application: from concurrent managers to users issuing duplicate requests … and much more.
What we’re seeing so far is that our new capability is saving time and money, improving application performance (especially over month end) and improving compliance of the OEB application. We’re also seeing that our customers are using the capability to improve their business processes and to smooth the interaction between the business and the technical teams.
The new Foglight for OEB capability is already fully available (GA) and we’ll soon be releasing short videos of Foglight running against an OEB environment so you can get a taste of it.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you about all things OEB. I can be contacted direct on hugh.mcevoy@quest.com.