EPM Conversations

Celvin and Yr. Obt. Svt. struggled over recording this podcast in two ways.  Firstly, talking about ourselves:  no matter what you might think about geeks with blogs, presentations, books, and yes, this podcast, talking about other things is pretty easy; talking about yourself is hard.  Secondly, deciding to do so and then recording the podcast wasn’t particularly easy, even the technical bits (your author used the old podcast software that buggered us up completely a while back and then dropped three times during the recording).  Ugh.

 So hard in fact that what you’re hearing in this episode is our second go round as we (mostly me) simply could not stand what we put together.  Ugh, it was bad.  Or we were self-conscious.  Why not both?

OneStream and OneStream
This podcast is about a conference (OneStream Wave) and a book (OneStream Planning:  The Why, How, and When).  Have a listen if you will and you'll get an overview of the former and an in-depth exploration of the latter.

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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 tools we use.

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Natalie Delemar and I – as with so many others in the performance management space – first met Elizabeth Ferrell at a conference, in this case ODTUG’s Kscope.

 Elizabeth’s path to her current job, focus, and professional interests evinces the typical path from school, to finance, not-at-all-usual hobby, and now to our beloved performance management community.

But to characterize Elizabeth as typical is to do her an injustice or perhaps just inaccuracy on Yr. Obt.  Svt.’s part.  As evidence of that (beyond of course this EPM Conversation episode) is to have a read of Elizabeth’s thoughtful article on the state of your – ours – work satisfaction and what we do with that.

 Her episode is just as thoughtful.

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One of my fondest recollections of Kscope (umm, one year or another, they all blend together after a while) is sitting in on Kumar’s introduction of Exalytics (remember that Wave Of The Future?).  As Kumar dived deeper and deeper into the hardware behind Essbase-on-Exalytics, he prefaced each increasingly (exponentially?) complex computer engineering concept and detail with, “As everyone knows…”.  If only.  I sure didn’t.

 Key to Kumar’s personality is this liberality of intellectual comradeship:  he thinks that surely whatever a given  insanely complex topic might be is easily understood by the average geek.   This (possibly insanely optimistic) generosity of intellectual spirit informs this podcast as Kumar takes us (and you, Gentle Listener) through his journey from theoretician to developer to advocate to Vice President of Engineering  while working at Informix, Oracle, and now Workday.

Beyond the interesting personal history (and you have to catch Kumar’s glory days in the NCAA and yes, really; we in the performance management space are polymaths), he gives one of the most passionate, cogent, and comprehensive arguments of the cube as the ideal for planning and budgeting.  I’ve worked with non-cube forecasting tools and while they certainly have their uses, calculations that are trivial in a cube can be hard graft otherwise.  Listen to Kumar and be convinced.

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OneStream’s rise has been meteoric:  from a startup in a very small office in the not-particularly-well-known-tech-incubator Rochester, Michigan, to international powerhouse in the performance management space in less than a decade.  

Peter Fugere has been there from almost the very beginning and has an insider’s perspective on what makes OneStream tick, the product’s genesis, current initiatives (Peter is involved in more than one), and its exciting future.  From consolidations to planning to relational to analytics to machine learning to the certification program to the recently announced OneCommunity to OneStream Press, it’s all there in just an hour.  Rocket ship as sobriquet is scarcely sufficient and this episode reflects that break neck speed and excitement.

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We live in patterns:  seasonal, political, historical, and even atomic.  Many live a life blithely unaware of them, which is to their disadvantage, for understanding those patterns is key to what makes us human, drives culture and society, and informs economics.  We happy few in the performance management world figuratively live and die by the patterns in data.  If careful observation of clients, customers, and conferences is an accurate guide, we are largely cut from the same professional and educational cloth.  This is not always true.  Those of us who come from outside that pattern have different perspectives, values, and insights.  Jodi Hill is one such outlier.

Her path to a job in business strategy is atypical and is driven by its unconventionality:  from Army translator to accountant to consultant to strategist is surely out of our norm.  So too is an educational journey from the Defense Language Institute to a BS in accounting to multiple Masters in predictive analytics, public policy, and health economics.  No matter how diverse this may seem at first glance, it is held together by the thread of transforming data into information by seeing, interpreting, and understanding patterns.  I’ve met a fair few people in our field and have never come across anyone with quite Jodi’s background.  It is refreshing and makes her episode a memorable one.

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Performance cannot be managed (see what I did there?) without data.  And yet data –because it is in the wrong format, because it is in the wrong place, because it is poorly defined, because we don’t have the ability or the resources or the time to transform it into what our systems need – is ever a challenge.  Data is, quite simply put, hard.  FinTech Innovations aims to alleviate that challenge and make data easy.

The performance management world is small (which suggests that alas this podcast’s audience will necessarily follow suit unless we figure out how to break out – we’re working on it):  I’ve known Matthias for at least a decade although when I first met him he was (I think – it was a while ago) an independent consultant.

How did Matthias go from that most independent (and arguably isolated) place to software entrepreneur?  What made him leave HFM and FDMEE (apologies to all of you bass players out there – just listen and you’ll understand) behind and focus solely on the manifold problems that are data?  Why would someone leave the relatively stable world of consulting for risky entrepreneurship?  You, Loyal Listener, have but to listen to know.

Before/after/during the podcast, have a look at ICE Cloud.  Whether you’re a customer of Oracle, OneStream, AnaPlan, Blackline, Workivia, or one of the other players in the performance management space or if your firm uses Oracle, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, or NetSuite, ICE Cloud can talk to all of them and in the cloud.  ICE Cloud is a complete end-to-end data integration tool, almost completely graphical.  It’s pretty astounding and lets functional (aka normal not supergeeks although they too can profit from the tool) people own data.

Schedule a demo, learn more about the product, understand the platform, and even get a free PoC.  It’s all but a click away.  I encourage you to explore ICE Cloud.    

I continue to be fascinated by the music/math/logic connection.  Think of the people you know in this field that practice music.  It’s everywhere and Matthias is no exception although most of us haven’t made to a show like Das Supertalent.  You’ll have to listen till the end of the show to hear him in action.  He is quite good.

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. 

Join us, won’t you?

We at EPM (or should that be CPM?) Conversations are – unsurprisingly – pleased beyond belief to have OneStream Software CEO Tom Shea as our very special guest.  We think you'll be pleased as well.

OneStream is in the moment and of the future. How did that happen? Who made that happen? What is its genesis? Where is OneStream right now and where will it be in the future? Why is it such a success? This podcast answers all and throws in more than a few surprises.

Certainly its rise has been meteoric. What has enabled OneStream to evolve so quickly from an industry insurgent to a market visionary? I could opine (those of you who have had the misfortune to cross Yr. Obt. Svt.’s path have long known that I have many opinions, performance management and otherwise, some of which are even correct) on why that is but ultimately that’s just a geek’s take on a force somewhat larger than him.

Better instead to listen to the man himself as he takes us all on a journey from CPA to CEO in a frank and forthright manner. You’ve not likely heard a CEO speak like this before – this conversation is essential if you want to understand what makes OneStream tick.

• 00:00 - 02:00 Introductions
• 02:00 - 15:05 Tom’s Career Path to OneStream
• 15:05 - 19:35 The “One Platform” Concept
• 19:35 - 23:00 What Is OneStream?
• 23:00 - 25:30 New Features for Planning Processes
• 25:30 - 28:45 OneStream Customer Community and Growth
• 28:45 - 33:30 Changing from Being a Bootstrapped Company to a Large Company
• 33:30 - 35:40 Development of a Community
• 35:40 - 40:40 Analytics, Consolidation vs Aggregation and Architecture in OneStream
• 40:40 - 42:25 Working with Public Sector Clients
• 42:25 - 47:30 Roadmap for Machine Learning
• 47:30 - 52:10 Roadmap for Analytics
• 52:10 - 53:20 UpStream, OneStream, and The Fish
• 53:20 - 61:50 Set-Based Languages and OneStream Block Language
• 61:50 - End Outroductions

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.

Join us, won’t you?

This podcast is dipping its collective and metaphorical toe outside of the warm and cozy confines of performance management with a conversation with a guest whose job, passion, and personal interest is understanding the relationship of human behavior with business through the lens of marketing analytics. Join us, won’t you, on this fascinating conversation with Kevin Lawrence that is most definitely not within the scope of traditional EPM but most definitely within the scope of your interest.

Kevin’s had an interesting path, one that isn’t really the norm in our fascinating (ahem) EPM world: from the arts to nonprofits to the Fortune 100 to Find The Loose Brick.

Numbers without an understanding of the nexus of business and people are meaningless. Kevin’s professional life has deeply informed how he and his clients understand how you and I interact with corporations and their products, services, and oh yeah: each other.

For you wee lads and lassies who weren’t around to witness the change in tools and corporate culture and customers (us) and of course analytic tools and how they are used has changed the introduction to this podcast will be informing.  You’ve never had it so good.

For those of us who were, the evolution analytics path mirrors our own beloved performance management products.

Regardless of our experience, the need to understand how companies and their customers interact has remained exactly the same.

The present and the future of marketing analytics are in Kevin's professional purview and should be for you as well.

Fascinating stuff and well worth the listen (I encourage you to enjoy both the video and the podcast but not at the same time) if you want to expand your horizons beyond the finance side of a business.

• Start – 6:40 Intros and start of Kevin’s career
• 6:40 – 18:40 Development of 1990s analytic tools
• 18:40 – 28:20 Moving from non-profit to large corporate and then to independent
• 28:20 – 31:30 Selling the value “analytics” before the industry really existed
• 31:30 – 34:00 Today’s tools, Google suite
• 34:00 – 40:20 Connection to EPM
• 40:20 – 44:00 Is there a Finance and Marketing divide?
• 44:00 – 46:00 Demonstrating dollar value of marketing
• 46:00 – 52:05 Does marketing analytics always require big, expensive tools?
• 52:05 – 60:50 Why are there FOSS or low-cost tools in Analytics but not EPM?
• 60:50 – 64:30 Do low-cost tools support large corporate data requirements?
• 64:30 – 76:30 Will EPM move as fast as Analytics?
• 76:30 – 84:45 What’s in the next 5-10 years for Marketing Analytics?
• 84:45 – End Outro

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 to more easily find us.

Join us, won’t you?

A polymath is, “a person of great and varied learning” although Mike is too modest to agree with that description.  If you but listen to this conversation, you (and he) will see that it is a fair characterization.

In addition to Yr. Obt. Svt., this conversation also has Natalie Delemar as our guest host and regular John Booth.  This varying cast of characters is what I hope is the (or at least a) future of EPM Conversations.  Tim, Celvin, John, and I are wonderful (ahem) hosts but there’s much, much, much more to EPM than us, cf. our guests and Natalie.

 I’ve known (at least I was at the same conference although as I really and truly worked 100 hours that week in addition to presenting and working a booth so if I did meet Mike I have no recollection of it) Mike since Kscope 2009 in Carmel.

What I didn’t know was how much Mike has done:  Atari 600xl owner, COMPUTE! magazine subscriber,   English school teacher, roofing product computer operator/developer, operations management, Hyperion course writer, Essbase consultant, Planning consultant, Essbase PM, Big 4 consultant, startup analytics evangelist, Big 4 (but a different one) leader, and I’m sure a few more roles I’ve missed.  What is crucial to understand and what is central to what Mike does and cares about is making sense of data, i.e. analytics.  

• Start - 2:55 Introduction 
• 02:55 - 14:56 How Mike Started with Analytics and EPM
• 14:56 - 25:41 EPM vs Analytics
• 25:41 - 28:05 Adoption of Tools in Different Organizational Functions
• 28:05 - 36:04 Tools That Can Merge Financial and Operational Datasets
• 36:04 - 43:44 What EPM Technologists Should Know About Analytics
• 43:44 - 53:30 The Medium Term Future of Analytics
• 53:30 - End Outroduction

 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 to more easily find us.

Join us, won’t you?