Oracle Magazine - September/October 2008

“What will make you successful in life? . . . You have to be excellent in what you do, and
if you’re not, you want to learn from people who are and find out how to get there.”

—Rich Niemiec, Former IOUG President

about how their role is changing with the integration of all the other companies that Oracle has acquired and the fact that now we need to know more about other spaces. We need to know more about storage, operating systems, and applications. The middleware space is huge, and a lot of DBAs are taking on that role.

Another key concern is business processes. IOUG members are asking how their colleagues are managing the business processes of handing off different pieces and taking in different pieces across teams, and what communication is needed between the business folks, the IT folks, and all the different teams within IT, because now all these pieces are coming together. For example, what does Oracle Fusion Middleware mean to me? Certainly the IOUG has taken a lead role in bringing that knowledge and those people together so that members can understand the future and where they need to go and what they still need to do and learn to get there. Members are looking for education and contacts, building relationships with other people to help figure out what other companies are doing.

Oracle Magazine: What brings IOUG members to COLLABORATE every year? Kaplan: The two big things are the educational content and networking. There are more than a thousand sessions, plus hands-on opportunities, panels, and keynotes. Although people have the option of Webcasts, they prefer to attend so they can interact with the presenter and ask questions. And meeting your peers in social settings or roundtable discussions—even hallway chatter—is valuable. Floss: I sat on three discussion panels and spoke at one session in the professional development track. The panels are very interactive, and people are asking a lot of questions. What can I do? What are other people doing? How are people handling the changes in companies relative to budgets? How do you justify a tool? The panels are important to helping people weather change—and of course building

relationships—because you always want to have a wide network of people that you can ask for help of any kind. The broader the network that you have, the better chance you have that you’ll get assistance. Kaplan: With the networking here at COLLABORATE, you have an opportunity to talk with someone and find out how they architected something or did the implementation. Just having a real customer go through a 10-step procedure is different and valuable. Floss: In training classes, you learn all the ways you can do something, which is wonderful, and you have to learn that. You have to go to training. But when you hear the 10 steps of how somebody implemented XYZ, they’ll also tell you what they did that didn’t work. And if they had to do it all over again, what exactly are the things that they would do differently? Those are key components that you can’t get anywhere else. Kaplan: Not even necessarily that they made something work. Maybe technically it worked, but then they changed this parameter or bought fibre channel disk and now it works five times as fast. The process was the same, but you tweaked one thing and you get a monumental change in the end result. Floss: And that’s key information. One of the customers did a presentation on their implementation of SAP on Oracle Real Application Clusters, and he had pictures of the different data centers, how they were doing this. He listed the things that they tested that didn’t go right. Here’s what we did. Here’s what we expected. Here’s what we got, and here’s why we got that. Here’s where we went wrong in our setup, or here’s where we found a bug and here’s what we did to fix it, and then we tested it again, and it worked as designed. That kind of discussion is huge; you can’t get that anywhere else. Kaplan: Oracle also sent really key executives to COLLABORATE, which pleased our members. They’re looking for insights on what they can do today that’s new or

that will make their operations better, but they’re also looking for Oracle’s strategic direction, especially around Oracle Fusion Middleware and applications. That’s really where having [Oracle President] Charles Phillips give a keynote is an extra benefit. Niemiec: Even if you didn’t know anything about Oracle, you could go to this conference and you’d benefit, because you’d learn why these people are leaders. And if you are in Oracle technology, you’re gaining the knowledge of hundreds of thousands of years of experience. You won’t get that density of brainpower in one spot elsewhere. If you learn just one thing here—five minutes of time can save you hundreds of thousands of dollars.

You get intangible benefits too. The IOUG has made a concerted effort to build a professional development track. I think if you look at what CEOs, CFOs, and CIOs say is missing from college graduates that go into technology, it’s that they don’t have the soft skills. They don’t have leadership skills.

What will make you successful in life? Two things. First, you have to be excellent in what you do, and if you’re not, you want to learn from people who are and find out how to get there. And then you need the character attributes— the things you learn from leadership books and professional development sessions. By giving attendees those two pieces, COLLABORATE has really expanded beyond technology. O