Technology Blueprints & Strategy with Gary Crisci

As a Director on the ODTUG Board, I have the privilege of serving as the organization's Treasurer.  Some of my duties include overseeing the organization's financial reporting as well as budgeting and forecasts.  When I took over the role two years ago I did an assessment of our reporting capabilities and I was unhappy about our dependency on Excel as our primary reporting and analysis tool.  Our controller did a fantastic job of pulling the data each month for our close and finance review, but we were limited to the reports that were created and any follow up questions or curiosities that required digging deeper posed a challenge and required someone to go off and manually work on it. As an EPM professional, I knew there were better tools out there and my colleagues on the board agreed.  Of course this wasn't news, previous boards had also thought about this, but they were impaired by infrastructure requirements.  As a not-for-profit organization ODTUG runs o...

Well - it has been a while since I have posted to my blog and figured it was time I get something new out there. I've been pretty busy lately, which puts me in the paradox of having lots to share on my blog, but not enough time to write blog posts. Ironically when I have time to blog, that usually means I don't have anything to talk about. But this is an exception and I am motivated to publish some information given a number of things going on, particularly on the heels of my recent trip to San Antonio Texas to check out the site of this year's ODTUG KScope12 conference. But before I get into that, first I would like to share some news that will also explain my hiatus from blogging. Over the past year I have been working on a book project with a number of well known and highly respected Oracle Essbase professionals. If I am to be judged by the company I keep, then I have managed to work my way into something special. This project is headed up by friend, colleague, and...