By Oracle Corporation
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Join NetSuite experts Chris Hering, Director of Global Channels, Suite Life, and Aaron Rosenberg, CEO, NetSuite Partner Oasis Solutions, for a fireside chat moderated by Oracle Academy North America Senior Director Denise Hobbs. In this chat, Denise talks with Chris and Aaron about some of the technology trends that are impacting ERP systems today and what students should learn of those key aspects as they prepare for professional career roles. In addition, they discuss best practice tactics on how Oracle NetSuite Partners can leverage their expertise and knowledge and get involved in helping the next generation learn the latest technology.
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Episode Transcript:
00;00;09;03 - 00;00;34;08 Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders. Of the Future. Let's get started. Welcome to Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy helps prepare our next generation's workforce. 00;00;34;18 - 00;01;04;25 I'm your host, Tyra Crockett Peirce. In the second part of our special two part episode, Oracle Academy, North America senior director Denise Hobbs continues her conversation with Chris Herring, director of Global Channel SuiteLife, and Aaron Rosenberg, CEO of NetSuite partner Oasis Solutions. Denise continues the conversation about some of the technology trends that are impacting ERP systems today and what students should learn of these key aspects as they prepare for their professional careers. 00;01;05;17 - 00;01;35;16 I want to zero in on a little bit on the human interaction piece. Aaron, earlier you talked about Oasis and how Oasis Solutions is considered a corporate partner. Can you help me understand and help the audience understand the role that a net suite partner can potentially play with academic faculty as they then prepare students to step, you know, for careers as ERP implementers or users? 00;01;36;08 - 00;02;10;17 Absolutely. Yeah. So I'm very lucky to have met you about a year and a half ago, I think. Right. And we had this initial conversation around what Oracle Academy had and could provide help to the academic ecosystem, and the partners want to be a piece of that. We're hiring talented people, ambitious people that want to work in and around these systems because this is the way that you can interact with a ton of different types of businesses and get exposure to how these operational functions work and that really assist and get creative and innovatively solve problems with customers. 00;02;10;29 - 00;02;32;23 When Oasis looks at our clients, most of them again are in this small and mid-sized market. Our sweet spots probably around 100, 150 employees, 20 to $30 million in revenue, of which there are tens of thousands of businesses out there in the United States around that size. And a lot of them don't have dedicated net suite or system admin staff. 00;02;33;03 - 00;03;01;00 We're not working with one person whose sole responsibility it is to make this application run that business. Usually it's a controller or CFO, an accounting team or two and a half to three people that we're supporting on the initial implementation that they can go out to sales and operations and other functions to sell. As far as us trying to supplement our role with client, that is what we're intending to do and it is soup to nuts. 00;03;01;00 - 00;03;31;02 You want to get in there, help solve the business problem, show how the application provides value, so the licensing alongside our Oracle sales team and then help with everything from client management to additional integrated solutions that will enhance our experience. We facilitate user groups. So all of that is a part of the experience that Oasis provides. So do you have an example of how you might be able to share those experiences with the academic classroom? 00;03;31;10 - 00;04;09;13 Yeah, absolutely. The University of Louisville here in my hometown is where I also graduated from. I do not like to say I got to be a and NBS Communications major did not know about these systems, maybe could have taken a different career track. And I'm glad the one that I did take work out. But the Oracle curriculum and that's connected to the faculty that I was introduced to, was bring together the syllabus for their semester, and I was able to sit down with that professor and her team and our team and discussed what would we expect and how would we train a new hire? 00;04;09;23 - 00;04;35;05 What type of system exposure would help them get a leg up on an internship or a career? Paths with Oasis, which would translate to other partners like myself for next week? Direct's team as well. And we talked about how you could leverage test scenarios as well. So perhaps building this kind of seek and find for students to figure out a way of how one transaction on the ledger can tie back correctly. 00;04;35;13 - 00;05;01;24 And this goes back to kind of that trust but verify like so what what happened was in that transactional flow, where was the mistake made? Talked about this workflow engine and the power there that is actually called suite flow and net sweep. And that's a tool that is a no code tool, but it's a way to alter different types of workflows within the application by adding those different kinds of purchasing limits to the example that I already mentioned. 00;05;01;27 - 00;05;31;23 So how would you alter those business processes and help them kind of come out of there understanding not only how the application works, but trying to translate that to a real world scenario that happens a lot of times. Yeah. Yeah. I love the opportunity to kind of bring in literally the, real-world use case scenarios into the classroom for, you know, faculty to position within the right point of the curriculum and let students really dig in and roll up their sleeves and dig in to that. 00;05;32;04 - 00;05;55;04 Chris, do you have anything to add? . I think Aaron covered it so well. I mean, one of the things that I see coming from Oracle is just how exciting it is to see a company that's mid-sized come into the classroom where someone like Aaron, who's the CEO of the company, has to deal with a large vendor like that suite has to deal with customers as employees. 00;05;55;04 - 00;06;19;18 And it's a a mid-sized company culture where, I mean, I think back to my beginnings in my own career, where I jumped in and I was taking up the helpdesk phone and also helping on client deployments and also doing a little selling and that sort of multifaceted approach. I think it helped me sort of figure out what I enjoyed within the business and also where my comparative advantage was. 00;06;20;00 - 00;06;37;27 I think one of the things I've heard is that, you know, you can go charging passion, but you can also go towards what you're just naturally good at or naturally kind of cling to. And some folks find, you know, consulting more comfortable and more powerful. Some people like sales presales and people like management. Sometimes that evolves during your career. 00;06;38;12 - 00;07;14;03 So I think one of the things that I think is so exciting about the partner community is that there are many different flavors of partners. Some that are focused on particular industries like manufacturing and others that are focused on sectors like nonprofit, others that are focused on specific geographies. So across all of them, you have entrepreneurs, others that have either started the firm or joined the firm and have a lot of bags of tricks that they have to pull out to to deal with multiple vendors, you know, customers along their full lifecycle and have that personal relationship. 00;07;14;28 - 00;07;52;24 So having that brought into the classroom is extremely valuable. And one thing I've found is that while Aaron and you got coordinated to meet with University of Louisville, you know, that's not the only time that we've had this happen. We've had a number of partners that I know reached out to their either local university or university that they happened to have attended and had a relationship with that finance professional and were able to do a half hour guest lecturer as to what it is to be a finance professional in the world and how to solve problems in the in the field. 00;07;53;07 - 00;08;35;16 I tend to think that the fact that our partners are out there and ecosystem have that multifaceted aspect of their business and then are able to kind of have a close relationship with someone local is extremely powerful. I think just from a from a recruiting perspective, often universities have recruiting days and we've had a number of partners go ahead and on the request, or the suggestion of the finance professor, go ahead and attend the career day to maybe get a summer internship with a local partner where they can shadow the business and learn a lot more or get a full-time job for it for next week. 00;08;35;17 - 00;08;58;02 I mean, we look very fondly on individuals that have taken that internship and worked with or right out of the gate. I agree. I think the opportunity for students to meet face to face and, you know, kind of start the conversation about here's where I think my interest is. Here's what I think I'm good at. Have that collaborative conversation. 00;08;58;03 - 00;09;25;21 Maybe even have the opportunity to show, not just tell. I think those experiences are hugely you know, it's a great opportunity for students to have that. Again, if I pull on that thread a little bit more and Erin, I'm going to go to you on this question first. What do you think are the important skills that a recent graduate or a rising senior should think about to highlight to a future employer and why? 00;09;26;04 - 00;09;47;17 Yeah, So there's a lot of skills that are important and I think that go across horizontally all the different types of types of roles that Chris mentioned. Right. So we're focusing a lot of our conversation in a lot of the curriculum discussions around our professional services folks, the people that you saw, the customers, once they purchase the application. 00;09;47;17 - 00;10;10;08 But you know, we hire salespeople, we've got people working on client success. There's a technical aspect and whole different domain and track that somebody could get involved with, which be the outside of maybe the business school and work with computer science side. So there's so many different types of functional roles that you can play almost cross disciplinary. 00;10;10;18 - 00;10;45;23 Yeah, absolutely. But important skills are going to be across all of those is communication being problem solvers, humility, having high emotional intelligence is something that we look for across all of those different disciplines. So that can bring a stronger work ethic that will keep on plugging away right until they come to the right solution for their client. They're also like humble enough for us to ask for help drive down a rabbit hole that takes them the whole day to figure out something that they could have just knocked on their more experienced neighbor store to find out in the consulting professional services role. 00;10;45;26 - 00;11;18;15 Accounting knowledge is key though, so just having that basic understanding of accounting is something that is almost a nonstarter for somebody to come in to do a consulting role because that's really where these ERP systems begin and they can work out in so many different functions. Chris mentioned a really cool acquisition that we've made for a field service app, but that's still those transactions, those invoices that are happening in the field of fixing, in fact system in your or my house that has to tie back into a ledger somehow. 00;11;18;15 - 00;11;39;26 And understanding how that ties back into accounting is really important. Chris, I have anything to add on that. Well, I love I have love what Aaron described. I had some of the same notes for my own description of folks. I mean, I love the humility. I love the ability to continue to listen and have that empathy, that it is huge. 00;11;40;16 - 00;12;06;19 I tend to think like one of the things that I have noticed about successful folks is this notion of continuing to be a student of your job and not being too overconfident. One thing that sometimes I've seen is that because students today work so hard and they've learned so much, they can sometimes of sometimes get a little ahead of their skis and sort of be overconfident or come across overconfident. 00;12;07;21 - 00;12;28;15 And that can that can hurt them, honestly. You need to balance that a little. And as I like to say to some of the people that I mentor, it's better to be interested and then to be interesting. You should be interested in others and interested in how their business works and be a good listener and the foundational accounting. 00;12;28;15 - 00;12;57;02 I was talking to a colleague the other day. We're talking through one candidate and they didn't understand revenue recognition either, the billings versus revenue recognition as the obligations performed. And you can really lose a lot of credibility with a customer if you don't understand some of those foundational concepts. Yeah, I agree. I have to tell both of you my favorite part, I think, of what you both have described is really good listening. 00;12;57;18 - 00;13;22;10 I mean, I think that is so key and asking really good questions. I think that is also really, really significant. I think both of you touched on that. Absolutely. Good listening. Right. That's important at the accounting piece, too. It's important that most of our successful consultants, they didn't want to be accountants. There's a there's a role for an accountant that's critical to a company. 00;13;22;10 - 00;13;49;14 But a lot of those like month closed, month, close quarter closed, month closed. Much of those write those repetitive kind of situational things that they like about that job would be potentially mind numbing. Right. And then person ask for somebody that want to do consulting because they want to get involved in all these different types of customers and different problems, job support to get into a training, right? 00;13;49;15 - 00;14;11;06 So that's really an important distinction that we use some personnel to assessments to help to define how much of a stretch that's going to be for someone to kind of guide those students that either are self aware or faculty or trying to advise them on if that's the right kind of path or if a more traditional accounting tax audit type of path is good for them. 00;14;11;07 - 00;14;34;04 Yeah, that's great guidance. Thank you for that. One of the things that we always like to ask everybody who comes on to our fireside chat is if you had one piece of advice that you want to give to faculty and students, what would it be? And Erin, I'd like to go to you on this one first. So for students, I am a huge proponent of internships before graduation and getting a mix of experience. 00;14;34;15 - 00;14;52;13 Right. So small company, large company, different roles. If you can stretch yourself to try a sales role, make sure like a Christmas and Early are some of the best things you do in your career. Early, hopefully, is to learn what you don't want to do, which propels you to what you do want to do and where you can focus your energies later in life. 00;14;52;21 - 00;15;20;05 And then for faculty, I would reach out to whoever locally provides partnership and services like Oasis in your community. I guarantee you there's somebody that's probably not more than an hour away that does something similar to what we do right and try to build a relationship there that will help you enhance, hopefully, the information and ability for your students to then propel them into future endeavors. 00;15;20;14 - 00;15;42;06 Chris, what are your thoughts on the I'm a student side. I think presentation and ability to explain a problem in different ways is something that I think a lot of students struggle with. And what I mean by that is there's so many different ways that people learn today, whether it be visual listening, people come to different problems or different perspectives. 00;15;43;03 - 00;16;10;23 So if students can practice the notion of how to convey a business idea, how to convey a risk and how to have a confidence, but also a an openness to being criticized for openness to being questioned, that isn't isn't off putting. So you can go ahead and present an idea, show that you're confident in the idea, but also be open to discussion and open to constructive criticism. 00;16;10;23 - 00;16;31;21 I tend to think that that's such a huge skill to be able to articulate a problem. I completely agree with Erin on the internship as well, but I've just noticed on the communication side that it really separates a student in my view, as to how they can contribute to the business, that they're able to articulate their ideas clearly succinctly. 00;16;32;14 - 00;17;00;17 Now I'm on the faculty side. I mean, I tend to think and again, it's been a while since I've been in the students shoes, but I just always loved having practitioners in the classroom telling me how an academic concept can be applied to the real world and sometimes have those ideas, you know, succeed or fail in terms of a small entrepreneur, you know, blowing the doors off the businesses and growing, I just find that very exciting. 00;17;00;24 - 00;17;30;20 And as a as a student, I would think that the students would be really interested in seeing how those businesses react and perform. And that's what is really trying to, you know, grease the skids to allow those introductions and facilitate those introductions so that faculty can be supported from a technology perspective. Obviously we have a lot of training and learning, but also from a relationship perspective, just bringing that content alive in use cases. 00;17;30;20 - 00;17;49;29 Case studies is super interesting. We've got great customers, you know, working with Spotify with super, super fun. That's one that I'm sure all of you're familiar with. So those are some thoughts. All right, guys, are you ready for our Q&A section of this? So this is going to go to but I'm going to give this one to both of you. 00;17;51;05 - 00;18;24;09 In what ways do you see users ability to write high quality command prompts influencing the efficacy of ERP? So I think this is going to go back to our initial technology is changing at a rapid pace. Aaron, you want to start us off? Yeah, I think it's going to be very important and critical if you think that again, the inputs are going to be as valuable as the outputs, they're correlated to be able to communicate effectively and quickly will give that person an edge. 00;18;24;21 - 00;18;49;07 But I do think that a lot of the business analyst type of roles that we're seeing will move in to some kind of technology translation opportunity. Do either of you have any concerns about user over reliance on assistive technology to operate within an ERP? And if so, what are they? I think, you know, I can jump in here. 00;18;49;13 - 00;19;16;25 I think this is a mix of policy mixed with technology. I mean, expense reporting is a great example in my view. When I was a consultant, we would have business roles that could auto expense, approve certain amounts below a certain levels. But then you had behavior adjusting issues. So, for example, if all of the consultants knew that everything below $50 was going to be automatically approved, we had a influx of 49.5 cent expenses. 00;19;16;25 - 00;19;40;22 So I think, you know, you have these assistive technologies that could potentially create overreliance if the current construction of the business roles is overly simplistic. So a lot of what goes into AI so far as I understand it, and I'm no expert on this, is is the content that feeds the AI engine to make those intelligent recommendations has a lot of different signals. 00;19;40;22 - 00;19;58;26 And if the signals aren't as complete as they need to be, there could be blind spots to it. So I do think that you can't overly reliant on that, especially as you adopt it. I think it's got to get training wheels for a little while and then as it becomes smarter and learns from it, that's that's where it's going to be more reliable. 00;19;58;27 - 00;20;19;21 I agree. I mean, there's a reason why you learn how to do long division on paper before you use a calculator so you can get those concepts in place. And I have this picture of Chris and his colleagues making waitresses this frustrated, asking, don't they put $49 on my tab and split it up six different ways so they can get the margaritas paid for? 00;20;20;02 - 00;20;58;10 Yes. Okay. So this next questionnaire and this kind of goes back to a moment ago. You talked about data and data out. Right. So in terms of reporting, how important is it to clean your data to make sure that you're have accurate reporting? And what are some of the pitfalls that you see and absolutely critical to have the data be accurate if you want the reports to be accurate, Probably the most pervasive, inaccurate or semi accurate for different types of data is what we see in going into a CRM system. 00;20;58;10 - 00;21;28;27 So it's a client relationship management system by salespeople, right? So that is the one of the easiest concepts to kind of comprehend, but one of the hardest to organize and then lead effectively a consistent data input for the sales organization so that you can see and evaluate as forecast accurately is very important for organizations that we work with to have those inputs be accurate in order to see what's coming down the pipeline. 00;21;28;27 - 00;21;47;06 So I know how to make business decisions, projects. I'm going to have so much more raw materials I need to buy, right? All of those how many engineers I need to staff regardless of what industry vertical it is. Chris Anything to add on that? No, no, I think that that covers it. One last question and then I promise we can wrap this up. 00;21;47;09 - 00;22;12;27 And this is really for both of you. I'm very interested to know what are some of the job roles or PACs, you know, so if a student studies or gets exposure to builds that foundational knowledge of net suite during their academic tenure and they are they step into talent pipeline, but they've got that foundational level knowledge. So what do you think some of the job roles or paths are for them? 00;22;13;09 - 00;22;51;10 I tend to think from a selling perspective, people often talk about solutions selling, which is a concept to sort of selling an outcome to a given business leader and in order to have credibility as to pointing out a future state for a circumstance like you're buying a convertible, you want to experience what the wind feels like in your hair, and the sun feels like as you drive down the road, you need to effectively have driven a convertible and understand what that feels like to be able to have that communication and be authentic about it. 00;22;52;17 - 00;23;21;00 You need to have that that track record. And so where I'm going with this is that I tend to find consulting where you're sitting across a boardroom table talking about sort of the dirty laundry of how a business does things well and does things poorly, and how a given individual may run a series of papers over to this person or to that person to have them manually sign it off. 00;23;21;08 - 00;23;55;26 Or you just see sort of that process where people get comfortable with what happens in a given company, because that's the way it's been. And then you, you as a consultant are able to see, oh, I can see how these two different lines can be short circuited by a different process or I can see how this creates inefficiencies, having that ability to go down to that level of detail and then also sit back and listen to some of the senior consultants and the sales people talk about these things not in the minutia, but talk about them in broader concepts, I think is very helpful. 00;23;55;26 - 00;24;16;19 So quickly from this is that if you start with a consulting role where you're able to do some of the groundwork, foundational elements and then move into a pre sales role, are you able to demonstrate how things could happen and then move into a sales role if you want or move into other roles? Maybe you're more comfortable in the technology side of programing, maybe give it that way. 00;24;16;20 - 00;24;49;26 But I tend to think some of those journeys, so to speak, are very typical within the technology world. I think there's also I'll just add on, there's opportunities just out there in business that are investing in these applications, right. That have invested in that suite that if someone has on their resume next suite exposure and that suite experience, even do a reverse search for organizations will post out on indeed and job boards like or someone that has experience with this type of application. 00;24;50;00 - 00;25;22;25 This would be very attractive. As NetSuite continues to really increase market presence, it's going to be more ubiquitous for those types of just if you are someone that's going to be a great accountant and wants to rise from a staff accountant to a senior accountant to a controller to potentially like a CFO type of role, having that exposure is going to give you a leg up over the other folks that are applying for that job, even people that might be more experienced accountants but don't have that exposure to the system that the company uses your ability to plug and play, there is going to be so much faster. 00;25;23;16 - 00;25;49;19 All right. Well, this is going to bring us to a close of our fireside chat. I'd really like to thank both of you for speaking with me today about how changing technology is affecting ERP systems and that the impact that faculty and students can expose themselves and to really engage with a couple of calls to action. 00;25;50;05 - 00;26;13;23 If you are interested in learning more about that suite and this is for our audience, please, if you're interested in learning more about NetSuite Cloud Solution, please visit Newsweek.com. If you are a post-secondary faculty and you are interested in adding NetSuite cloud solution to your daily teaching via Oracle Academy, don't hesitate to visit us at Academy.oracle.com to learn more. 00;26;14;06 - 00;26;39;13 And then if you are interested in partnering with Oracle Academy or providing your expertise to classrooms, contact us at Oracle Academy. North America. Underscore us at Oracle dot com. Thanks, Cassandra, and I truly appreciate your time and your energy today. That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.
Join NetSuite experts Chris Hering, Director of Global Channels, Suite Life, and Aaron Rosenberg, CEO, NetSuite Partner Oasis Solutions, for a fireside chat moderated by Oracle Academy North America Senior Director Denise Hobbs. In this chat, Denise talks with Chris and Aaron about some of the technology trends that are impacting ERP systems today and what students should learn of those key aspects as they prepare for professional career roles. In addition, they discuss best practice tactics on how Oracle NetSuite Partners can leverage their expertise and knowledge and get involved in helping the next generation learn the latest technology.
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Episode Transcript:
00;00;09;03 - 00;00;34;20 Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders. Of the Future. Let's get started. Welcome to Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy helps prepare our next generation's workforce. 00;00;35;01 - 00;01;04;06 I'm your host, Tyra Crockett Peirce In the first part of our special two part episode, Oracle Academy, North America senior director Denise Hobbs speaks with Chris Herring, director of Global Channel's SuiteLife, and Aaron Rosenberg, CEO of NetSuite partner Oasis Solutions. Denise talks with Chris and Aaron about some of the technology trends that are impacting ERP systems today and what students should learn of those key aspects as they prepare for their professional careers. 00;01;04;15 - 00;01;29;12 I am with Oracle next week, director of Channel Suite Life Chris Herring and NetSuite partner Oasis Solutions CEO Aaron Rosenberg. I'm Denise Hobbs, your host, Oracle Academy senior director for North America. Chris, Aaron and I are going to focus our discussion on three major themes. First, we're going to discuss the technology trends that are impacting ERP systems today. 00;01;29;29 - 00;01;56;22 Second, we're going to discuss what should students learn of those key impacts as they prepare for professional career roles. And then third, what are the best strategies on how NetSuite partners like Oasis Solutions can leverage their expertise and knowledge to help the next generation prepare to step into talent pipeline? And with that, I'd like to offer a very warm welcome to Chris and Aaron. 00;01;56;25 - 00;02;17;25 Thanks for joining me, guys. Thanks Chris, Thanks Aaron. To start off, I want each of you to give me a brief synopsis of your background and your current business position. Now, Chris, I want I'd like for you to start on this one of questions. So, first of all, really happy to be here today. I looked after our global partner SuiteLife ecosystem. 00;02;18;07 - 00;02;47;17 So what that means is I am responsible for NetSuite, education and engagement with our partners. So everything from how we onboard partners, how we train them and how they experience that suite as a partner previous to working in this role. I was also in that NetSuite, but in a go to market and a sales management role. So that was looking after new, larger companies that were joining that NetSuite on the enterprise side. 00;02;48;07 - 00;03;21;18 And I really started my career on the professional services consulting side. So working in coffee rooms and in boardrooms, deploying software in the early knots. So really happy to join us today and share my experiences with the audience. Great. Thanks, Chris. Now, Aaron, before you start, I'm going to add a little bit more on to you. So in addition to your background and your current business position, I'd like for you to also provide a very high-level explanation of a NetSuite corporate partner. 00;03;21;29 - 00;03;54;29 Sure. I'll be happy to. Let me start with a little bit about Oasis. Oasis has been in business since 1991. So very early on in that kind of software application space, we became a NetSuite partner in 2012, so we've been working with that suite as a solution provider partner for a little over a dozen years. So our relationship as a solution provider partner is to help clients typically in the small to mid-market, select, implement and then support their core business management system. 00;03;55;03 - 00;04;17;01 In this case, that suite, which really runs in and business operations for hundreds of our clients and tens of thousands of net suites clients globally. So my role as CEO is to really lead the charge and oversee strategy and direction of our company. We are a small business as well, so I have about 40 team members spread out across the United States. 00;04;17;22 - 00;04;47;26 I'm headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, which is where I'm from. And where Oasis was founded, but we do have customers that we support across the country, and we have disparate team members across the country as well. So when we're thinking about ERP, I think we all know that technology changes at a very rapid pace. I'd like for each of you to share your thoughts on the latest technology trends that affect enterprise resource planning ERP systems today. 00;04;48;07 - 00;05;18;20 So we're seeing a ton of improvements in artificial intelligence. Everybody's seeing that across how they work and how they operate, right? I'm sure our faculty are seeing it in the way that their students and they themselves operate within their day to day. And so a lot of the biggest enhancements that I see for end users, people that are in the systems that we deployed, are areas that they're using kind of as a copilot of sorts for the needs for requests of the business. 00;05;18;22 - 00;05;47;15 Alongside of that interest are so these large language models are being incorporated into ERP systems pretty rapidly. And we're seeing that as net suite upgrades and releases new versions and updates their software every six months. I don't think we're going to see a lot more of that coming out in each version. UPDATE But that helps to change business process flows for automation in areas like purchasing, receiving and shipping. 00;05;48;03 - 00;06;15;15 And then I think it'll extend into providing more reports and information on demand and supply trends forecast based on historical data. An example, maybe a little deeper would be in that purchasing workflow. We see this a lot, so customers will ask us now that they have a system like NetSuite one where customers are coming from small business accounting systems to click QuickBooks and spreadsheets got a lot of controls in their automation of workflows. 00;06;15;27 - 00;06;43;20 So they want to now put a control. So if somebody in my organization is going to buy something over $5,000, I want a notification as the CEO to approve that or eliminate fraud actions there. There's more control in place. Maybe it helps people spend a little bit more judiciously. So if that's something that we can have in the system, I'm seeing a lot of those workflows and automation points being enhanced by companies like myself. 00;06;44;02 - 00;07;05;14 But I think A.I. is going to really assist us in the end users and making those changes on the fly even like through spoken language to the computer. So kind of a starship Enterprise type of functionality where like, Hey computer, please update my purchase workflow to increase the limit of spend from 5000 to $7000, and then it'll just happen. 00;07;05;14 - 00;07;32;19 They'll test it and they'll roll it out. Amazing. Almost like a customization, if you will, be a voice. Yeah, I think a lot of that is going to be I was actually had a thought the other the other day like will my grandchildren even need to type or are we moving into a situation where right they can just speak to the machine and it will update and provide information back to us? 00;07;32;20 - 00;07;49;20 And you can kind of do that now with Cortana. And, you know, actually, as I was preparing the script, I use a lot of like voice attacks, but you got to go in and it's not perfect. And we all know Siri for call, you know, somebody. They end up calling your plumber on accident stuff. So we're still working on that, right? 00;07;49;21 - 00;08;14;14 But yeah, it's it's just the improvements and the generational updates just are happening so rapidly now. Now, Chris, I want you to kind of layer on top of what Aaron saying, but I want you to answer the same questions, but I want you to shift the lens a little bit. So I want you to focus on answering this question better with an education partner ecosystem perspective, if you will. 00;08;15;09 - 00;08;41;24 Sure. Happy to. And I think Aaron took the gorilla AI into the mix. I mean, that's just changed everything in the last 12 months and I can certainly see that changing the way we look at things in the next 12 months. It's kind of incredible how things are moving so quickly. So I had three points to raise on this area in terms of how we're seeing technology change and how that's impacting our partner landscape. 00;08;42;16 - 00;09;20;02 The first one building on Aaron's point of sort of unified applications is this idea of a best of breed versus unified suite. So we often talk for those students in the audience, you might be familiar with how you bundle your TV, Internet and telephone at home and they're sort of bundles and we do the same thing within applications where instead of buying a separate expense management tool or ERP or CRM, customer relationship management, you have a single provider that provides all of that at the same time, reducing contracts, reducing integrations, which can be quite complex and cumbersome. 00;09;20;03 - 00;09;50;17 And so CPQ is one example deal services management, which is one that we just acquired, where if you have a HVAC company out in the field where you have trucks and they need to be moved to different customer sites and have different equipment on them and have different maintenance schedules or different fire trucks that have different maintenance schedules on them all can be integrated into this wide network of assets that then can be deployed on a just in time basis. 00;09;50;17 - 00;10;23;27 It's traditionally those specialized systems and set separately and required a lot of, let's call it local expertise and integration expertise. So what that means for our ecosystem is that instead of having to spend a lot of time on integration, they're able to spend a lot more time on business consulting and advise the customer as to how to best leverage the tools and the tool sets, which allows them to be a higher level management consulting function, which of course can drive higher revenues. 00;10;24;18 - 00;10;54;21 So that's a really exciting point from a technology perspective. So having that consultative voice from a technology perspective is really key is what you're saying here, that it really provides that opportunity for that? I think it does. And you know, Oasis is such a fantastic example of a partner for next week in that they focus so much on a specific sector in a specific region, and that means they can be across the table from these individuals and these customers and have those difficult and sometimes positives. 00;10;54;21 - 00;11;19;23 And then celebratory conversations about how the business can change and evolve with technology instead of having to send a person off to work on integration, mitigation. And they're finding they can spend more time with a unified solution focused on like what's the next given company? The second point I'll make is I think across the applications, the focus on the UI has continued to accelerate. 00;11;19;29 - 00;11;44;01 People are not going to tolerate a commercial application that isn't intuitive. So a lot of the applications today are becoming much more consumer eyes, that they're looking like Amazon, they're looking like eBay, and they're just it doesn't take you three clicks to get to something you rarely lost. So that consumerist aspect of the piece of the technology is huge. 00;11;44;01 - 00;12;07;24 And one thing that we brought into play there is this idea of Oracle Guided Learning, which is effectively in-app support. So if I'm on a screen too long and I'm sure you guys have seen this, if you're shopping for something, it might say up, up, like, can you find the color jeans that you'd like? We're doing the same sort of thing right in the application to say, Oh, you're having a hard time submitting this sales order. 00;12;08;03 - 00;12;25;27 We'd recommend you checking out this article. And so that sort of consumer focus is something that's really exciting in the technology. And I think it just means that instead of having to hunt and tack for different elements, you're actually able to focus on what the most important thing is. Can I stop you there and ask a quick question? 00;12;25;28 - 00;12;54;23 So are you saying that, okay, first off, it's less cumbersome, less clicks, things like that. I love those. I love that. But even if I'm using it and I'm in a place where I'm stuck, you're saying that there's opportunity for learning for myself right there on the fly? There is. I mean, I think what we try and this is one of the most exciting things about my role is, you know, one of the things I like to think about is I just I hate wasted time and just wasted effort. 00;12;54;23 - 00;13;15;25 And I think all of us can relate to that. Know, you spend a lot of time and you realize there a shortcut there by having that sort of just in time support. What we're looking to do is, is prevent people from getting down those rabbit holes that are frustrating. And I mean that. But the third point that I'll raise, getting insights out of the businesses is huge. 00;13;15;25 - 00;13;40;21 So if the application can go ahead and say the last three times you entered this order, it was the same amount at the same date. Maybe you want to set up a recurring transaction. And so that intelligence and that insight and that recommendation is something that can save a tremendous amount of time. So it's not so much knowing where things are, but interpreting how those things are repeating and patterns. 00;13;41;03 - 00;14;13;19 And then suggesting changes that can save time. That's truly amazing to me that that level of intelligence, to see those trends, to then make those suggestions. And I'm like you, Chris, you know, the efficiency, I think and perhaps it is better said as less expended effort is really insightful and progressive. When we talked a second ago, when I asked you this general question and I said the rapid pace, that technology is changing today. 00;14;13;19 - 00;14;45;07 So I think rapid, based on what the two of you have just said, I think rapid is spot on. And I think it's just absolutely so moving so quick. So if I'm going to follow this train of thought, what are some of the key aspects about these trends, about these rapidly changing trends that faculty should be aware of and should consider thinking about or integrating into the classroom, into their daily teaching when they are teaching ERP concepts. 00;14;45;26 - 00;15;07;23 Chris, I'm going to go back to you on this one first. So I think back to I got my graduate degree in New York in MBA. I got an MBA at Stern in New York, and one of the most interesting classes that I took was entrepreneurial development, and it was taught by one of these professors that was both a practitioner as well as a board member. 00;15;08;01 - 00;15;38;15 And what he often focused on was kind of the collision of data and how those collisions of data can either present opportunities or or prevent signals or flags for issues looking ahead. And so when I think about Europe, the real risk of our historical ERP system is that you have a lot of silos of data that never intersect, and you can have trends in one silo of data that could impact another one. 00;15;38;15 - 00;16;07;22 And you have that you have that, you know, crystal ball thing where, you know, things are getting produced too fast but not getting consumed and you have waste. Whereas if you're able to take those silos of data and bring them together and provide an insight, you're able to make a corrective preemptive change in the way the business is operating, to avoid waste, to take advantage of a new trend and really change the way that business is operating. 00;16;07;22 - 00;16;40;27 So what that means for the classroom of the future, in my view, is that the focus should be talking about how the different data streams intersect and how those surface insights so and then how to communicate those insights effectively. I happen to be a very visual learner. One of my favorite sites is this site called Visual Capitalist, which demonstrates lots of visuals on trends in the ecosystem and trends in the world that just traditionally aren't visualized. 00;16;41;02 - 00;17;14;05 So when I think about the opportunity in the future, it's not so much looking at how the database schema is constructed. It's looking at opportunities for seeing how those different segments of data, whether it be order management, inventory payments, all of those things are intersecting such that you have a working capital requirement that may. Case in point, what I mean by working capital is for the students in the room, if you have to pay your vendors, if you have to pay your employees, you have to have money in the bank to do it. 00;17;14;19 - 00;17;45;13 But you may or may not be collecting invoices from your customers to get the cash in the bank to pay your employees and so the visualizations on how your cash will add and flow depending on your payments and receipts will help you determine whether you need to borrow more money from the bank or even if it's possible. So when I think about teaching concepts, so much of those difficult situations can happen because people aren't aware of what the data shows you. 00;17;45;26 - 00;18;13;27 And so the students can focus on, okay, how can I create opportunities to surface that data and reports and visuals so I can clearly explain to my management what risks we have in the business and what opportunities we have in the business. I think that's the real opportunity because when I see it in business today, it's hard to find folks that can take data and then translate it into messages and insights. 00;18;14;06 - 00;18;43;20 That's helpful. Aaron So when I think about our audience and a lot of faculty and students here, you know, when integrating ERP curriculum, there's still for us this mantra of people and process like this or that too, is as or more important than the technology. But the technology is just a tool that's a first that is informing, give to make people and processes more productive. 00;18;43;29 - 00;19;12;12 And so the end users and what really happens a lot in the situations where we're implementing are still between the chair and the keyboard, right? So that's where the inputs happen, that's where the mistakes can happen and that's where the information needs to flow too. So when I'm thinking about talking about the enhancements that I mentioned and really focusing on like the block blocking and tackling, I call it a business which is a series of transactions. 00;19;12;20 - 00;19;32;25 Technology just helps to automate those processes, put controls in those processes, in those transactions, and then provide data and insights on how to be more efficient with your cash. For example, as Chris mentioned, do you need to borrow more or do you need to delay maybe paying some people or duty to get cash as some of the folks that are out there that owe you money? 00;19;33;13 - 00;19;56;08 And how do you automate letters to out to them or emails to remind them other areas that I've seen that are really important? A few years ago, like business intelligence forecasting, reporting, I do think we're seeing more trends in automation there that largely with this are visual intelligence in their future. They will there will be a need for human interaction verification. 00;19;56;08 - 00;20;17;05 So a trust but verify type of element in place. So you're going to have to check the math, so to speak, be a skill that's going to be very important and also communication as well. Right? So think about how you communicate with that to get the right output, you have to put it in the right input because it's just using whatever information you put in to get the information out. 00;20;17;05 - 00;20;34;09 So there's still this if you put garbage in, you get garbage out, right? So all of that, I think, hopefully coalesces with what this messaging was to, too. That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.
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Episode Transcript:
00;00;09;03 - 00;00;27;26 Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. 00;00;27;28 - 00;00;55;09 Welcome to Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy helps prepare our next generation's workforce. I'm your host, Tara Crockett Pierce. Today I am joined by Richard Oram from the Oracle Hospitality Team. Richard studied tourism management at Birmingham University and worked in hotel operations and management for IAG and Forte before starting with MICROS in 1999, which was acquired by Oracle in 2014. 00;00;55;11 - 00;01;06;18 He worked his way up from a trainer to a product manager to a regional director and now in strategy. Welcome, Richard. So to start off, can you give me a bit about your background in your role at Oracle? 00;01;06;22 - 00;01;26;06 Yeah, So I really started in hospitality by mistake. I was at university and just wanted some extra cash to pay for going out and other bits and pieces. So I took a job at a Holiday Inn in Birmingham City Center, setting up conference rooms in the evenings to easy money. But I ended up then starting work on the bar, and then I started. 00;01;26;06 - 00;01;46;00 Then I thought, this is quite fun. I'm still at university studying for a degree. And then I started working on in the night staff, doing light auditing on research, on reception, finished my degree. So I just found a job then near my parents house until I got a proper job and end up working this hotel for four years. 00;01;46;03 - 00;02;02;10 And during that four years I would be in a new computer system and the guys from Microsoft were really great and I showed some interest and they said, Why don't you come and work for us? And that happened in 1999. What we are trained to for I'm still here. 00;02;02;13 - 00;02;18;15 I get it. I actually started Oracle in 2002, and I'm still here as well. And it's been a really wonderful, a great place to work for. So what different roles exist within hospitality and is there a clear career path? 00;02;18;17 - 00;02;39;14 Yes, definitely. There's so many different roles in hospitality, and some of them people would never even think of. So you've got your traditional roles of a receptionist, reception manager, reservation staff who work in the back office. You've got the groups, teams, sales teams, and so on, the housekeeping, food and beverage at work in the restaurant and bars and all the conference and banqueting staff. 00;02;39;17 - 00;03;03;16 But there's also all these people that work in the background that you never see. Like there's engineers that deal with all the maintenance. There's decorators that deal with all the paint work. There's people that buy all the leisure, at least so spas, spa and leisure centers at the properties. So there's a whole variety of different areas right through to sort of head office functions like financing and h.r. 00;03;03;19 - 00;03;26;15 So it's not all about the person sitting at the reception desk checking people in. There's a whole group of people doing different roles which exist in many different industries. But they all sort of focus on hospitality here. So dealing with the guest is the main criteria for hospitality and for career planning. Well, yeah, you can start as like I did working as a conference and banqueting porter. 00;03;26;17 - 00;03;51;16 You can work your way up to a manager and so on. And most traditional route is people who start, say, working as a receptionist then become a reception supervisor, then then they become the front office team manager, then they become the rooms division manager and eventually they come to general manager. And from a general manager you can then go up to sort of a regional manager and then up to head office as the director or the overall CEO of the hotel group. 00;03;51;18 - 00;03;59;09 There's many different ways to stay in this industry in growing your career, and it's not always when you've got hospitality in your mindset from the start. 00;03;59;11 - 00;04;03;06 Do you have to know hospitality to work in hospitality? 00;04;03;08 - 00;04;25;21 Not at all. And a lot like my own and many of my colleagues, we didn't know hospitality. We stepped into it because it was. There's always jobs in hospitality. That's the one good thing about hospitality. There's always recruitment and the training and on the job, a lot of it is common sense. So what can reception you want to deliver? 00;04;25;21 - 00;04;50;18 Good customer service and as a customer, you expect good customer service for the people you're dealing with. So it's very easy to learn on the job of how to deliver that customer service. And also with technology nowadays, how to pick up the systems you're using really quickly. And like I was saying before, to things like people who work in the finance for a hotel, they could have worked in a finance or an open asset management company. 00;04;50;18 - 00;04;59;13 They could have a banking industry. You don't have to know hospitality to work in the hospitality industry. Suddenly cross-overs with those different functions. 00;04;59;15 - 00;05;08;04 So given that we actually work for one of the world's largest technology companies, where does technology fit into hospitality? 00;05;08;06 - 00;05;29;15 It's a surprise in many places nowadays. So in the old days, hands. Let's talk it out, I say 20 years ago, which makes you feel very old. Really, the only people that used a computer system was technology. Whether people making reservations and the people checking people in. Everything else was done on paper or spreadsheets. Whereas nowadays everybody has an app for something. 00;05;29;17 - 00;05;54;02 So if you've got housekeeping, they're now walking around the app. They know that room. What I once just checked out, they know they're going to do service that room. So they're doing all that through an app. And it's the same with people like engineering. And when know there's a maintenance issue, it gets flagged in the system or their smart sensors in the bedroom telling them there's an issue with the heating, the air conditioning all fills back to those people sitting in the back office flagging up on their system. 00;05;54;09 - 00;06;19;24 But something needs to be done. And again, years back, this is all manual pieces of paper all over the place. So technology has really revolutionized what's happening in hotels. And it's so moving forward with things like AI, which I don't want to go into because I don't really understand AI in great depth. But I also think of automating so many of those tasks which are quite mundane, but allowing the staff to focus on delivering sort of better service to their customers. 00;06;19;26 - 00;06;44;12 And just one thing that I was always intrigued by, when I was a trainer, I was at one hotel, top five star hotel in London, and we had a training session and the training session was called Painters. I was going to line up with these trained painters on a computer system, and the reason why is because the painters would need to know that this really special access to touch up the gold leaf paint that existed on wood work and picture frames in the bedroom. 00;06;44;14 - 00;06;57;22 And then these are artists, the painters by trade, no knowledge of hospitality. But to do that, to deliver their job, they had to be able to use a computer system and know that Mr. Smith has left room one or one. They can go in and touch up that paint. 00;06;57;24 - 00;07;09;06 That's so fascinating. So given that Oracle is a technology company, we have micros, which is for hospitality, how does MICROS kind of fit in to hospitality? 00;07;09;09 - 00;07;44;14 Okay. So Microsoft, as we know, is now Oracle hospitality. But Marcus was the original company that Oracle purchased. It started back in the late 1970s, early eighties, when technology was still evolving. And we provide pretty much everything that you need to run a hotel. So if it's taking that reservation, checking customers in, managing all the housekeeping, the financing, paying travel agents, commissions for their bookings or the other bookings on websites, all of that's done by a microsoft or Oracle hospitality system and right through to what you see in the bar. 00;07;44;14 - 00;07;59;25 So we go into a coffee shop, it might say Marcus Oracle on the tell all of that is our equipment. And so taking orders, managing stock and operating that whole business as if it does one property right through to an entire rate or entire brand using our systems. 00;08;00;04 - 00;08;19;17 I've actually been to many hotels and seen the Oracle Microsoft branding on the hotels that I've stayed in. So it's really great to see that Oracle is involved in this space as well and how this kind of fits in. So my next question is why does hospitality become so addictive as a career? 00;08;19;19 - 00;08;45;00 It really gets into your blood. It's I think the thing is everybody is working long shifts and it's hard work, but you get to work with so many different people. And some people stay with these businesses for years, others come in for a few months. There's always a change of people. You get to know different people, but it's because it's such a great bond of people all collaborating together to deliver a good guest experience. 00;08;45;02 - 00;09;04;00 But it really gets entwined in your whole ethos and your way of working. And as people now I work with 25, 30 years ago in hotels, we still in contact on Facebook, still meet up occasionally. And it's it really is, as I said before, it gets right into your blood work in hospitality. That's part of the reason what I'm doing now. 00;09;04;03 - 00;09;12;08 I'm not directly in a hotel, but we're still working with all these hospitality organizations, making sure that they're delivering excellent customer service to their guests. 00;09;12;11 - 00;09;24;03 So my final question is, if you could give one piece of advice to faculty, your students, that are interested in pursuing a career in hospitality, what would it be? 00;09;24;05 - 00;09;45;18 Definitely don't rule it out. It's a great place to start to gain exposure into so many different skills you could then use in other industries. If it's just dealing with customer service operations, finance, engineering. There's so many different things that happen in a hotel that you can then take to other industries. And there's people I've known it started in a hotel. 00;09;45;18 - 00;10;12;22 They went off to work for a completely into hospitals, so almost the same, but different lectures at the end work in hospitals because it was the same sort of thing. It's dealing with deaths or patients. This scenario, but it's still things are operations, managing something to deliver an end result. And it's a really is a great place just to get grounding on how to deliver and make sure things are done in a certain timeframe to a certain service level. 00;10;12;24 - 00;10;39;15 You know, I think that that's a really great piece of ice. I remember I was flying back from a business trip from Toronto through Atlanta back to where I live, and I remember we got stuck up in a hurricane and just the great customer service skills at the reservation desks gave us to make sure that we were taking care of the we're on time and we just had another one not that long ago, same kind of thing where our flight was canceled. 00;10;39;21 - 00;11;10;14 Speaker 2 We were rerouted immediately. And just the wonderful people skills and customer service skills that you build in working in a hospitality industry or in a travel industry that are so important as you're, you know, they can be transferred over to any industry, which I think is really one of the most important things to have, is is learning these really great frontline personal and customer service skills that I think hospitality probably teaches better than almost any other industry. 00;11;10;16 - 00;11;25;01 But definitely a big thanks to Richard for giving me some more information about hospitality. To learn more about Oracle Academy and our resources, visit Academy dot Oracle dot com and subscribe to our podcast. Thanks for listening. 00;11;25;03 - 00;11;31;21 That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.
In this episode, I’m joined by Cathye Pendley an Oracle Ace and Business Intelligence expert. Cathye and I talk about all things Business Intelligence or BI. We talk about what BI is, and the skills students need to pursue a career in BI.
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Episode Transcript: 00;00;00;00 - 00;00;34;22 Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders. Of the Future. Let's get started. Welcome to Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy helps prepare our next generation's workforce. 00;00;34;23 - 00;01;02;10 I'm your host here appears in this episode. I'm joined by Kathy Pendley, an Oracle AI's director and business intelligence expert. Kathy and I talk about all things business, intelligence or buy. We talk about what the AI is and the skills students need to prove and see. You'll see where I get messed up and I start over. So in this episode, I'm joined by Kathy Penley, an oracle AI's director and business intelligence expert. 00;01;02;13 - 00;01;29;01 Kathy and I talk about all things business, intelligence, RBI. We talk about what be AI is and the skills students need to pursue a career in by. A little bit about my guest. Kathy is a business intelligence program director at Roseann and has 30 years of experience working with Business Intelligence analytics technologies. She brings strong project management skills and a clear methodology focus to each project. 00;01;29;04 - 00;02;02;05 Kathy has rounded experience in all areas of business, intelligence and analytics, including product project management. Sara backed up their project management of analytics projects to valuations and selection for business intelligence tools, analysis, design, development and implementation of analytics solutions. And she has developed both large and small analytic application patterns and systems. Welcome, Kathy. So to start off, can you please tell me a bit about your background and your job role? 00;02;02;07 - 00;02;41;05 I am a 1992 graduate of the University of North Texas. I have a B.A. in business computer systems, and it's very similar to what most colleges would call a BBA and management information systems. I currently am a business intelligence program manager at ROSENSCHEIN, and I've been there for about a year and a half. I focused at and is to understand the nature of our business and the latest technology and then determine how the technology can best assist our businesses and make informed decisions. 00;02;41;07 - 00;03;09;12 My professional career has been focused on business intelligence. Some call it decision support back 30 years ago are you might call it also analytics today. So it has many different names, but it has been in the business intelligence area. I work for Rosatom, which is an electrical contracting company. The majority of my career it's been in consulting, focused on analytics and beer across many industries. 00;03;09;12 - 00;03;40;11 So I have experience in many industries. I would say all but about four years of my professional career has been in consulting. That is quite background. You are an expert in business intelligence. So to start off, can you give me a high level overview of business intelligence or buy business intelligence and B, I can be thought of as a superpower of turning data into actionable insights that drive better business decisions. 00;03;40;13 - 00;04;06;23 It's not just about collecting and storing information, but analyzing it in a meaningful way to understand your business performance, identify trends and make informed choices. The steps to do that. The first step in be AI is to understand your business needs. You need to know what is important to the business, and then you can start gathering the data. 00;04;06;25 - 00;04;32;09 So what kind of data do you get and buy? You can have what we call internal or external data. Internal data is something that is within your company. Like sales could be payroll, could be h.r. An external data is something that you're getting external from your company. That's like social media, maybe even weather data. And then there are also different types of data. 00;04;32;11 - 00;04;57;07 You have a structured data that sits within a database, and that's something that you'll hear where you put them in tables and you join your tables together. But then there's also unstructured data, and that's like text documents, emails. Those are kind of some unstructured data where it can be in any type of format. Now you can do your analysis in an Excel spreadsheet. 00;04;57;09 - 00;05;23;21 And and that's okay for small individual type analytics, but for more complex enterprise wide analytics, something that you're going to push out to your entire company, it's best to create a model. And a common model that is used is a star schema. And all star schema is is just some tables joined together and you have what you call a fact table. 00;05;23;23 - 00;05;45;20 A fact table is nothing more than something that has a fat sales productive. What what is the key metric that you're looking at? Then you have your dimension tables and that's basically how you want to break out your data. So you're going to break it out by time or by location. You have a dimension table for each one of those with the attributes by those dimensions. 00;05;45;23 - 00;06;10;17 A good way to think about a dimension tables. If you're looking at something and you all look at sales and you want to see it by somebody says, I want to see it by product, by time, by location. Anything after the buy is going to be a dimension, a location dimension, a time dimension, a product dimension. So that's how you kind of build a model amongst the model is designed and built. 00;06;10;19 - 00;06;34;02 You need to then load it with data and put data into the model, and that is called data preparation. Some people call it ETL, some people call it BLT, but basically that's where you go in and you clean the data, get it organized, and you loaded into the model. This can be a long process. Once it's in the model, now you can start doing your data analysis. 00;06;34;04 - 00;07;02;05 There's various tools and techniques for years to analyze the data once it's in the model. This kind of generating report, creating dashboards, performing calculations are using data visualization techniques like charts and graphs. You get that built. Then you can start looking at the actionable insights. This this is where you have the analysis. It reveals pattern trends, hidden information that helps business understand what's working and what's not. 00;07;02;07 - 00;07;29;00 This knowledge is being translated into actionable recommendations that can be implemented and improve performance. As you look at this, we talk about building this and building the chart data visualization, don't underestimate it. There are classes. There are books. If you are going to be working with the users and working in building analysis, understand and learn a little bit about data visualization. 00;07;29;08 - 00;07;56;27 A quick note is people read left, right, top to bottom. So whenever somebody looks at a dashboard, the first place they look is in the upper left hand corner, their eyes drawn up there. So you would want to put your key metric in the upper left hand corner of the dashboard that makes it stands out that allows your executives to quickly get the information without having to spend too much time digging through tables to get it. 00;07;56;29 - 00;08;23;26 I had actually never looked at it that way. That's really insightful. I just had an moment thinking about the tables and graphs and charts that I built that I was really a wonderful nugget that you just gave. So now on to my next question. What are some of the different industries that are used by different industries for actually every industry and every department within industry uses by for example, you have your construction things. 00;08;23;26 - 00;08;54;02 COLONISTS All right, look out. I'll go a little, maybe a little bit more about install rates. Retail has sales and inventory, higher education. They're looking at enrollments and salting my look at staffing. But then even departments in these industries like your h.r. Might be looking at the retention of employees, and that would be across all industries. So there is pretty much within every organization, within every department, in every industry. 00;08;54;05 - 00;09;24;08 I'd like to go over a couple of examples of how it's used differently at a couple of organizations. I want to start with the construction installer right? This is a metric that many construction companies use to determine how long it's going to take to install a particular product. Say, for example, a conduit in our electrical contracting company, we have conduits and we have an estimated rate of say, 5.2, five feet per hour. 00;09;24;10 - 00;09;43;09 And that is saying that an individual, a worker should be able to install 5.5 feet of conduit in the hour. So what happens when a given project goes down to five feet per hour? And that's just a reduction of about 10%. Not horrible, right. 00;09;43;11 - 00;10;11;22 Talking about multiple projects that we have with hundreds of people working on these projects and this rate starts going down. If you had to put in 2.1 straight, the conduit at a rate of about $50 per hour, the cost alone at 5.2, five feet per hour is $20 million. If you go down to five feet, that could cost you $1,000,000. 00;10;11;25 - 00;10;35;01 Just in revenue. And then if you ever to take into consideration if you're if you're not installing as fast, you're going to have to put people on overtime to meet deadlines or you may have to pay a fee on your contracting. This million can easily double to $2 million. So it's important for our executives to look at the install rates and making sure that across our projects we're running it correctly. 00;10;35;07 - 00;10;56;24 But also it also filters all the way down to a foreman who might be managing a couple of employees or a couple of workers, because if they want to make sure they're doing their 5.5 feet per hour, if everyone does it at the lower level and at a higher level, we won't be making our money and we will be making our numbers. 00;10;56;26 - 00;11;16;18 And it's also important to look at this weekly so you can quickly address it and we will look at this in trends over time as well. So you can see how are we trending up or down on our list? All right. This is good analysis and this is some ways that our company uses analytics to help run our projects. 00;11;16;21 - 00;11;39;11 Now, another one that I think is more fun, and I did it. We had a customer, mine as several years ago did a prototype on this. And this is really very interesting and kind of fun. Look at the billboard. There are two main parts. You have a large sign that has the advertisement and the pole that actually holds that sign up. 00;11;39;13 - 00;11;58;06 So for thinking about hurricanes, if a hurricane hits the sign and it's attached to the pole, it's going to put pressure on the pole and possibly bring it down. If it's not a sign that it's not going to be as much pressure on the pole and it has a higher likelihood of staying up. So why do we care? 00;11;58;08 - 00;12;18;20 Unknown First off, there are ordinances that change over time. So a lot of times cities, counties are going to say, okay, you can't have a billboard up in this area anymore. It's become too crowded, can't have a map. But if you already have one, they'll let you keep it up. But if it goes down for any reason, you're not going to be able to put it back into the ground. 00;12;18;23 - 00;12;56;18 So that would be crucial. We would want that to go up. Also, what is the impact if we had that, if we have one that's completely down? What's the revenue impact? Is it one that's enough in that area that's visible, that brings in a lot of revenue, or is it one that doesn't bring in much revenue? So while it's expensive to take science down prior to our time, it might make sense to bring some kid some key signs down based on the fact that, hey, is there a new ordinance and are we going to be able to put it back up if the pole comes down? 00;12;56;20 - 00;13;18;07 The loss of revenue, what is the impact of the loss of revenue? Is it is it is it a sign that gives us a lot of revenue because it's on a major highway, or is it one it doesn't bring in as much revenue. What's the likelihood that it's going to get destroyed by a hurricane? So is it in the path of a hard time? 00;13;18;09 - 00;13;51;01 So internally, the company had data on the billboard, its location, and they were able to put it on an analytic map and an analytical tool on a map. They then downloaded the National Weather Service data for an upcoming storm. It's coming up National Weather Service data and it plotted out where the storm was going to be and the strength of the wind coming through that overlaid that where their signs were, where they had signs. 00;13;51;03 - 00;14;16;05 So then they could take it and say, okay, we're going to have extremely high winds going across ten of their sites. Two of them have an ordinance restrictions and they're not going to put the sign back up if it comes down. One of them is in a very highly revenue area, so they get quite a bit of revenue off that side. 00;14;16;05 - 00;14;50;06 So you want to make sure that sign comes down because the last thing you want to have happen is the pallet is going to the ground and not be able to put it back up and they are lost revenue forever. So these are some ways that people use it and are able to take the data from the billboards that they have, the attributes of the revenue, the ordinance that on all of that, on the billboard, and then take the external data of what's going to be the what's the likelihood that that that billboard is going to be taken down with the path that the storm is going to be going. 00;14;50;08 - 00;15;13;01 So those are two ways that you can two different ways that you can use analytics at different industries. I think that that is so interesting. Like, I never thought that you could actually use, you know, weather and RBI to predict weather patterns and billboards. I just think that is so interesting and a really unique way to use it and and very valuable, quite frankly. 00;15;13;03 - 00;15;35;05 Now, I'm going to move on to my next question. Now we kind of understand what buyers and we've seen a couple of examples. What are some job rules that are actually used by. I might go down two different paths and I'll use the I'm going to use the parking data, the Hurricane project example to kind of help submit talking about. 00;15;35;07 - 00;16;04;01 So you have first area is your business analyst or you're more of a business requirement gathering type. Some people might call it soft skills and those are the people that will go in and they will need to understand the technologies like like in this example, the graphing technologies, the mapping capabilities of of analytic tool can emerge different data. 00;16;04;01 - 00;16;28;06 And how easy is that going to be? So kind of get an understanding of the technology that you have. And then you also need to understand the business needs that the business wants to protect their key billboard drive. They want a high revenue Billboard said that if they go down, they're not going to be able to replace you want to make sure you focus on that and then you need to try. 00;16;28;09 - 00;16;59;06 So translate these requirements onto the technical resource team. So in this example, so what we had and I wasn't as involved in it, but you have a key analyst here that says, Hey, we have all this new technology. It's really cool. I knew that their business really was concerned about the billboard, so they took the knowledge they had worked with the business community and actually came up to design something and come up with these ideas. 00;16;59;08 - 00;17;24;08 They're usually the ones that manage the projects, keep timelines, make sure that they're not over promising or over delivering. And because people will come in with requests and they've got to be one that's and can politely say, we need, you know, this can't be done or this is going to delay the project and manage projects. And then you have to report and dashboard developers. 00;17;24;10 - 00;17;57;12 Unknown Many times it's the same person as analyst. They'll come in and they'll get the requirements and then a lot of times of build the analytics behind it. If I call it as a front end type scale, soft skills kind of analyst skills, and the project manager skills that are better is one way you can go the next crowd is more of a technical route and this person needs to understand how to build a data model to support the analysis so they'll be the one that will come in and say, Hey, we've got we got the data. 00;17;57;12 - 00;18;19;24 We want to know the wind speeds, expectations of this hurricane. So that's going to be kind of your fact. And you want to know where the wind's going to be the happiest. You're going to want to know about what time is going to hit. Right. So so is it going to hit around noon on Thursday or is it going to hit at midnight on Friday, about the time the location? 00;18;19;24 - 00;18;39;26 Of course, that's very important because, you know, when you had to deliver, where is it going to exactly going to be? And then, of course, you also have to have your billboard information in there as well, because that is telling you what is the contract type that you have. Why is a rental revenue? Are there any ordinances on this billboard? 00;18;39;26 - 00;19;05;26 So that's all your billboard information. So they're gathering all that information and they will build a model around that. And then there are also the ones who locate and claim the data, the ETL process, that they actually take the data, clean it, load it in there, will get they will go down and see where they can get the external data, like the data Weather Service, the National Weather Service, get the data and bringing them to the tables. 00;19;05;28 - 00;19;29;25 So that's more of a technical skills depending on the skill set of the analyst building the data model is where the two might meet, so the analyst could help build the data model. And also the technical person says we might see kind of an overlay of the two roles, but one of them is definitely more technical. And to be honest, you're usually the people that are more technical. 00;19;30;01 - 00;19;49;22 They will struggle with timelines. They really want to overdeliver because they see something super cool, Let's just do this so they're not as good with time management and not maybe not as good, but with people skills on it. It's important to have it there more. When you think of the back end and coding piece of it. So let's go actually go on to skill set. 00;19;49;22 - 00;20;11;00 So what are some of the skill sets that someone pursuing a career in the eyes should have? As you look at this, as you go down the different route, you may want to focus stronger in one area than the other. But I will tell you in every instance, you're going to need some type of analytic skills, some types of gathering information. 00;20;11;00 - 00;20;34;25 So if you have an opportunity to to work on team projects where you're gathering information and you're building some kind of right, you get requirements and you're building something that would be very helpful no matter which route you want to go. Of course, if you're going more into the analyst type role and getting the information, then you may want to take more classes in that focus more on that. 00;20;34;27 - 00;20;53;05 Definitely. If you're building the analytics, some visualization in there, that will be very helpful. In all cases, you want to kind of get a feeling for the industry. If you're going to be interviewing and meeting with companies, just get an understanding of the industry in which you're going to be applying for jobs or working in. That kind of helps you understand a little bit things. 00;20;53;05 - 00;21;12;28 You also need to have the technical skills to learn a couple of programing languages, and that's always helpful to couple. When I was in college, I will tell you I used neither one of them in my professional career ever, Although he might never use that programing language at your company, it does help you get into the mindset of what programing is about. 00;21;13;01 - 00;21;31;28 I know a lot. I would say I would take a skill class if you if you have the opportunity and I know a lot of a lot of big boardroom python now as well, but just get into a couple of good programing classes. If you're wanting to go down the more technical route, maybe take a few more programing languages and some more technical classes as well. 00;21;32;01 - 00;21;53;19 That is really, really helpful to kind of spread it out like there's two different pathways, but we need to know programing languages. I know through Oracle Academy we do offer sequel and and and database courses as well. So I do think that I'm glad that you mentioned sequel because that's, you know, one of the primary database languages. So now onto my final question. 00;21;53;21 - 00;22;14;00 If you could give a one piece of advice to faculty or students, what would it be? I can probably some this up in one word, and that is respect and this is respect of others and how you can do this various ways. But the key is one is time management. Be sure you make your meetings, your interviews on time. 00;22;14;06 - 00;22;36;07 Don't be late. I think in the world of texting and instant messaging, people go, I am running 5 minutes late and I might think that's okay. It really is. It because somebody has set their time aside to meet with you and now you're delaying them 5 minutes. So and which it makes meetings go over. So be sure you're on time. 00;22;36;12 - 00;23;06;11 I will tell you as an interviewer, if you are late to one of my interviews, I will probably have you come back two or three more times to make sure that was a one off case. So those are key lesson to others in the meeting. When you're in an interview, listen to others what they have to say. Repeat what they have to say, Make sure you understand it, get clarification, but make sure that you listen to them and then understand the needs of others. 00;23;06;18 - 00;23;25;18 So you may have you might be in an interview. I may be talking to someone, maybe a little bit frustrated. Maybe they have something going on, either personally and professionally in their life. But I understand their needs, understand what they've got going on, work with them and say, okay, I understand how I can help you. So focus on that. 00;23;25;21 - 00;23;46;17 To do this, you can start practicing this now in your personal life and it will just become a habit in your professional life. So if you worry, if you make sure if you got a meeting with a friend, make sure your you meet with that friend on time and it will become a habit. Secondly, be a motivator at is think of ways to bring your team up instead of down. 00;23;46;17 - 00;24;15;09 So it's really easy when somebody starts talking active thoughts. It's really easy to to spiral whole team down. But if you can find some positives out of it, that's really helpful. I know that there's something that I had a job and they were getting rid of the technology I had and I was experienced in. They wanted to keep me because I said I had the most motivated team in the company who cared about each other. 00;24;15;09 - 00;24;41;08 And we were always positive. So I can't underestimate how much motivation to have a positive attitude is important at companies. A big things to Cathy for talking to me about business intelligence or BI It's been really helpful and insightful to learn more about Oracle Academy and our resources. Visit Academy dot Oracle dot com and subscribe to our podcast. 00;24;41;08 - 00;24;54;23 Thanks for listening. That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.
Oracle Academy is Oracle’s philanthropic education program. In this episode we chat with Alice Goodchild, Head of Oracle Women’s Leadership for Europe, Middle East and Africa. She shares her views on how to inspire girls and women to follow STEM studies and careers, why we need more women in tech, how diverse talent is important to the economy and IT and how Oracle is investing in developing, engaging and empowering current and future generations of women leaders at Oracle.
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Episode Transcript:
00;00;09;03 - 00;00;28;02 Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders. Of the Future. Let's get started. 00;00;28;05 - 00;00;54;27 Welcome to Oracle Academy, pictured where we discuss how Oracle Academy helps prepare a next generation workforce. I'm your host to Oracle Academy Program manager for Greece, Cyprus, Malta, Albania. Crushed by North Macedonia cluster in just a few days. We are celebrating International Women's Day, but numbers don't lie. And that is definitely true when it comes to the number of women in tech. 00;00;54;29 - 00;01;25;05 Globally, we see a low percentage of women selecting STEM studies and the percentage drops when it comes to the actual number of women graduating, women entering the market, climbing the hierarchy ladder and becoming tech leaders. How can a company like our approach help women develop their leadership and skills? My guest today is Alice Goodchild, head of Oracle Women's Program for Europe, Middle East and Africa. 00;01;25;08 - 00;01;47;00 Alice joined Oracle seven years ago with more than 15 years work and experience as a senior aides or business partner in companies of the IP and investment banking sectors and is currently based in UK but has a long living and working experience in countries like Japan, France, Spain and Australia. Alice, welcome. 00;01;47;02 - 00;01;50;15 Hi. Thank you so much for inviting me to join you today. 00;01;50;17 - 00;01;55;21 Thank you. Please give our audience a bit of out of your background, then your role at Oracle. 00;01;55;24 - 00;02;27;09 Absolutely. Thank you. So I am the head of Oracle Women's Leadership for the Europe, Middle East and Africa Region, a hugely diverse region with over 50 countries represented at Oracle and Oracle women's leadership. Well, it started as a grassroots initiative in 2006 and has now grown organically into a global strategic program dedicated to the leadership and professional development of Oracle women across the world. 00;02;27;12 - 00;02;59;23 And we started off with a few communities in certain countries, and now we have over 120 Oracle women's leadership communities across the globe, which is quite incredible. And in AMEA, the region I represent and we have 40 communities across 35 countries. And in terms of our team structure, we are a global team of eight. And we also have an executive steering committee for Oracle Women's Leadership. 00;02;59;23 - 00;03;26;11 So we have very strong support from our senior leaders. And I remember when I saw this role advertised, I was working as a business partner in a telco organization and I saw the role and I was like, I can't believe they've got a program dedicated to Oracle or to women's leadership. And I honestly think that I've got the best job at Oracle. 00;03;26;11 - 00;03;29;29 So that's a bit of my background for you. 00;03;30;01 - 00;04;00;03 I have to say that Oracle is one of the leading IP companies that they invest a lot in, in diversity and inclusion and of course in the women's development program. But if we want to go a bit back, how would we attract more women and girls to to study STEM subjects and to pursue careers in the technology industry? 00;04;00;06 - 00;04;20;13 Great question. I think there are a number of different ways in which we could do that, but I think I'm going to focus just on a couple of them, if that's okay. And I think for me, the first the first way that we could could attract more women and girls to study STEM subjects is through more. Having more role models. 00;04;20;13 - 00;04;47;25 And I guess if I take girls first and we can talk about role models, but they could be in terms of, you know, the school children, in terms of toys or books or literature, you know, making sure that there are resources for young children to show that there you know, there are roles and opportunities and leaders for you know, for women. 00;04;47;27 - 00;05;24;28 I think that's really important. And we we need to think about all curriculums across the globe as well. So to have a broader digital curriculum, which is relevant to everybody and I think also for girls in in particular, it's very important to show that there's such a, you know, there is such a huge variety in tech jobs. So and it could yes, it could be coding, but it also there are, you know, user experience or, you know, lots of different roles within tech that mean a different different skill sets could be used. 00;05;24;28 - 00;05;59;19 So actually an ad or at Oracle, we have a program, a Spanish Oracle women's leadership team have created Oracle for Girls. So that's really about getting girls aged 4 to 16 really excited about the cool technology that there is and building kind of a sense of community amongst those girls that, you know, and seeing these role models that they can consider that tech might be somewhere where they would want to explore further with their studies as they get older. 00;05;59;22 - 00;06;36;14 And then I think role models, you know, from a from an organizational point of view, I wonder many of the people listening might have heard of the term the only. But there are so many examples where women are still the only woman in their team, in their company, potentially in their organizations, or part of a project team. So it's it's it's really, you know, for those women in particular that serve all women, it's really important to have role models in the organizations to be able to see someone who looks like you. 00;06;36;14 - 00;07;04;03 That's been successful, that's faced different challenges. But you know that, you know, you can progress and will be supported and have the right environment to progress within that particular organization and have the right culture to enable you to do that. And that comes down also to organizations having the right policies and practices really to ensure that their, you know, their environments are inclusive. 00;07;04;05 - 00;07;37;29 And I think you know, tying in to this as well is this sense of fostering a community and belonging and community is extremely important in terms of attracting anyone to to work for organizations or to study particular subjects and enabling a culture, an environment of belonging is really important to attracting more women and girls to study and to pursue careers in the I.T. industry. 00;07;38;02 - 00;07;52;15 So talking about the community and ecosystems, corporate ecosystems, why do we need more women than we think need this approach? 00;07;52;17 - 00;08;20;10 Well, you know, Eleanor, I think, you know, overall, we need more people in tech, as you outlined at the beginning, this massive skills shortages and the tech industry is shaping our world and shaping the future. So, you know, we really need to think about that. But the as we know, the proportion of women working in technologies is going, moving, increasing, but at a very glacial pace. 00;08;20;10 - 00;08;50;09 So we do we do really need to consider how to get more women into tech. I had I read the other day a recent report published in the UK by the Professional body for computing, and it said it was going to take 283 years before women make up an equal share of the workforce in the UK. And we need the gender gap in I.T. to close much more quickly. 00;08;50;12 - 00;09;20;09 The pace of technology, the pace of change. We we just can't be moving that slowly. So I think, you know, for organizations, we need our emerging tech like artificial intelligence to reflect the society that we that we live in. And we you know, the tech helps our industry innovate and rise to the needs of society in a meaningful and responsible way. 00;09;20;11 - 00;09;59;20 So and I think for for women, it's really important. The tech tech, there are brilliant career opportunities in the tech industry and we need women in the and much more kind of diverse employee bases to bring different perspectives to help teams work differently, to empower them to solve problems differently. And, you know, we need it's all about kind of ensuring that our workforce and our people with expertise are reflective of the societies that we live in today. 00;09;59;20 - 00;10;12;07 And there are 51% of women across the globe so that, you know, we should we should be reflecting their needs in the tech industry because that is what's shaping our future. 00;10;12;09 - 00;10;37;29 So being already almost seven years with our women's leadership and talking about the need for the community and for the things and for the companies, what would you say are the benefits of having a strategic program like Oracle Women's Leadership. 00;10;38;02 - 00;11;17;11 That many benefits actually. And I think if I start from the level of business support. So as you mentioned, this is a strategic program and we have buy in from all CEOs, suffocates and active support of our senior executives and the impact of that on the organization is is critical because it demonstrates that our leadership teams are invested in increasing the diversity and inclusion of our organization and creating an environment where everybody can belong. 00;11;17;14 - 00;11;53;03 And when you create that environment for an organization, the benefits are huge. You do become a place where people want to work. You want to attract more diverse employees, you retain more diverse employees. And through that, you know, we we can deliver to our customers, which is really important. You know, we can be more innovative because we have more diverse thinking in our organization, more diverse perspectives, and we're better placed to meet our customers needs and expect exceed their expectations. 00;11;53;06 - 00;12;28;19 I also think a huge benefit of having a program like Oracle women's leadership is that it increases collaboration. Oracle's a massive organization around 170,000 employees globally, and a program like Oracle Women's Leadership crosses all employees, all lines of business, and that gives huge opportunity for collaboration and for knowledge sharing, you know, for individuals developing their own knowledge bases and and increasing their skills. 00;12;28;21 - 00;12;56;15 I also think there's a huge benefit because having a strategic program like this is it's a data driven program. We we know we we can link in with external research such as the McKinsey Women in the Workplace study. And we can understand from that study of corporate America that there is still a huge challenge with this. What they class is the broken rung that first step up to manager level. 00;12;56;20 - 00;13;40;26 And we can then take those insights and look at the data Oracle and, you know, really develop programs that meet the needs and supports our employees and we I would say kind of the one of the biggest overall benefits is around our alignment with our diversity and inclusion strategy more broadly. And this offers so many opportunities to drive that sense of belonging that I'm, you know, I feel passionately about to to work together with other internal groups and organizations to truly create that inclusive culture, to help everybody to thrive. 00;13;40;26 - 00;14;10;24 And and I guess in a program like ARC, women's leadership, finally, you know, that helps create a pride in amongst so many people in the organization that you work for. You know, we recently received an award as one of the Forbes 2023 best Employers for Women, and that's helps create that sense of pride and commitment to diversity inclusion more broadly. 00;14;10;27 - 00;14;42;20 As you mentioned, the role is is part of Oracle's diversity and inclusion strategy. And next Friday we celebrate International Women's Day, and this year's theme is inspired inclusion. So what actions do you think we can all take to inspire inclusion to create a more gender equal world so that we avoid spending the next almost 300 years trying to catch up. 00;14;42;22 - 00;14;44;12 In the UK? It needs to go well. 00;14;44;15 - 00;14;47;19 It's pretty much the same in Europe as well. 00;14;47;21 - 00;15;23;01 International Women's Day is a massive day of celebration, sharing and reflection at Oracle, and each year we embrace the International Women's Day theme and create and deliver events across all communities wherever they are in the world. So I mean, this theme, the theme this year, Inspire inclusion, is is really saying that when we inspire others to understand and to values value women's inclusion, we forge a better world. 00;15;23;01 - 00;15;47;04 So I think there's a number of ways in which any individual could take action within their sphere of influence. And I'm one of those. And, you know, tying so well into Oracle Academies around education and really individuals to take that initiative to educate themselves about gender equality issues and experiences of women in the workplace, that's that's really important. 00;15;47;04 - 00;16;17;29 Every every individual is unique and everybody's experiences will be different. So ensuring that you talk to and educate yourself and understand different unique experiences, I would say it would be a really good action to take. We all have the power to be allies, so to be actively support colleagues who are women, to speak up against any bias or micro-aggressions that might manifest themselves, whether that is in our friendship group. 00;16;17;29 - 00;17;02;13 So, you know, our learning environments or in organizations as well, and to offer that support and understanding. And I think, you know, finally, it's really important. I think, to amplify the voices so actively listen to women's perspectives, to their experiences, and to make sure their voices are heard. And I, I talked about the concept of the only. So, you know, pay attention is that somebody who is the only in in one of the environments that you're presenting and how can you ensure that their voice is heard? 00;17;02;16 - 00;17;23;28 Paul I couldn't agree more. And definitely Oracle Academy is also focusing on making education accessible to all inspiring girls. So as a final question, if you could give one piece of advice to the faculty or students, what would it be? 00;17;24;01 - 00;18;19;28 You're making it difficult with one piece of advice, but I'll try and I think my advice would be to to take a look around you and in your faculty or your course in your team, your organization. Is it reflective of the society that you live in? And if not, what can you do within your sphere of influence to impact that, whether it is, you know, amplifying the voice of an underrepresented group or the only that's in the room, or whether that's taking the time to educate yourself or adding elements to a curriculum to ensure that you're showing more examples of women who have been successful within that particular field. 00;18;20;00 - 00;18;30;27 I Yes, that would be my advice. Take a look around you and we need our organizations, faculties to represent the society that we live in. 00;18;30;29 - 00;19;10;29 Right? So in a sector that faces a massive skills shortage, we definitely need more I.T. professionals and therefore we definitely need to increase the number of women in the sector, their presence, their leadership. It's crucial for the sectors, but also for the economy's growth. And we all can benefit from from the different perspectives and the huge pool of talent that women can bring into the sector. 00;19;11;01 - 00;19;55;12 It's certain that we need to go back into schools, into university colleges, adopt the curriculum, change the culture, make it more open, more inclusive, trying to inspire more girls and women through role models, through women that have already succeeded in STEM. So that we can see a more tangible and quick change in society and then, of course, companies need also to invest in developing women's leadership and skills. 00;19;55;15 - 00;20;05;22 So that's also the corporate ecosystems can benefit from from them. Thank you all for speaking on women's leadership. 00;20;05;22 - 00;20;09;07 Thank you, Linda. It's been my pleasure. And thank you so much for inviting me. 00;20;09;12 - 00;20;27;06 To learn more about Oracle Academy and Resources. Visit the Academy dot Oracle dot com and subscribe to our podcast. Thanks for listening. And don't forget to encourage girls to get involved and study computer science and support women who aspire to become. 00;20;27;09 - 00;20;33;28 That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.
In this episode of the Oracle Academy Tech Chat Podcast, Host Tyra Crockett Peirce speaks with Bill Mc Michael, Senior Director of Software Development from the Oracle Infrastructure group. Bill and Tyra discuss the construction engineering industry, what it is, and the tools students pursuing a construction engineering career need to know when they step into the workforce.
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Episode Transcript:
00;00;09;03 - 00;00;27;21 Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. 00;00;27;29 - 00;00;55;12 Welcome to Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy helps prepare our next generation's workforce. I'm your host, Tyra. Today, I'm joined by Bill McMichael, senior director of software development in the Construction and Engineering Industries Group at Oracle. Bill directs product teams responsible for application development and product documentation for portfolio management software applications, including Premiere Therapeutics. 00;00;56;05 - 00;01;18;27 Bill has held various development and management positions at Converse Systems prior to its acquisition by Oracle in 2009. He's a B.S. MBA from Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Bill is a certified project management professional. Welcome, Bill. So a little bit to start off, and you give me a bit about your background and your role at Oracle. 00;01;19;20 - 00;01;45;11 Yeah. Thank you, Tyra. I have a diverse background that encompasses project management and technical ability. My journey with Oracle began through the acquisition of Primavera Systems, a company that specialized in project and portfolio project management software. And currently, I serve as the senior director of software development for Primavera P6, a well-known project management solution in the construction industry. 00;01;45;23 - 00;02;11;03 So I've been helping construction companies solve their project and resource planning needs for 35 years. As you mentioned, I hold a PMP certification reflecting my commitment to project management. So my role at Oracle is a unique combination of my construction management and technology expertise. It's a role that's both rewarding and dynamic given the ever changing nature of technology and project management. 00;02;11;17 - 00;02;15;17 So my next question what exactly is construction engineering? 00;02;15;28 - 00;02;51;11 Well, construction engineering is a specialized field within civil engineering that focuses on the planning, design and execution of construction projects. So a distinction from the broader civil engineering discipline is that construction engineering is a subdiscipline primarily dealing with the on site execution and management of the project. It involves the application of engineering principles to ensure the successful completion of construction projects such as buildings, infrastructure, bridges and much more. 00;02;51;26 - 00;03;23;19 Construction engineers play a pivotal role in coordinating various aspects of a project, including cost estimation, project scheduling, quality control and the management of resources and labor. One of the key distinctions of construction engineering is its emphasis on the practical aspects of construction. Construction engineers translate architectural designs and engineering plants in reality. They're responsible that the project is executed safely and within budget. 00;03;24;07 - 00;03;52;21 So they're managing issues that arise throughout the project. They're managing the risks. And at the same time, ensuring the quality and integrity of the structures that are being built. In essence, construction engineering is all about applying technical expertise to transform a vision on paper into a working structure, all the while adhering to best practices, regulations and engineering standards. 00;03;53;02 - 00;04;01;29 So the field requires a thorough understanding of both engineering principles and construction management, making it a crucial part of the construction industry. 00;04;02;09 - 00;04;17;17 That is actually interesting to me. I always thought that civil engineering and construction management are separate, so I. I learn something new, so I'm very grateful for that. So my next question, what are some of the software tools used in construction and sharing? 00;04;18;00 - 00;04;47;29 So of course at Oracle we make software tools and my division specifically makes tools for the construction industry. So in the area of construction engineering, Oracle provides a comprehensive suite of software tools designed to optimize construction project management and enhance collaboration. These tools are widely trusted by professionals in the industry, but we offer integrated solutions for various aspects of construction engineering. 00;04;48;14 - 00;05;26;18 So let's start with the first class tools I'm going to discuss and that project portfolio management and we have Oracle proof of our P6 and Oracle Primavera Cloud. So the value these tools bring to construction engineering is effective project management, project portfolio software like or Oracle's of P6, allow construction engineers to efficiently manage multiple projects concurrently. It's a centralized platform for project planning, scheduling resource allocations. 00;05;28;01 - 00;06;12;17 It helps teams stay organized to meet project deadlines. Another benefit of Primavera is resource optimization. Construction projects often involve a complex web of resources from labor to materials and equipment. So project portfolio software helps optimize that resource allocation, ensuring the resources are used efficiently across all projects. Another benefit includes budget control, risk management and collaboration communication. So in summary, project portfolio software is instrumental in streamlining construction project management. 00;06;13;14 - 00;06;46;01 The next tool, it's really an important tool in construction engineering is construction collaboration platform. Construction Collaboration platform such as Oracle connects Oracle EC and AX offers a wide range of capabilities that cater to the specific needs of construction engineering projects. One of them includes document management, so it connects is going to provide a centralized platform for document storage, tracking and version control. 00;06;46;13 - 00;07;26;07 There's a lot of documents and in construction, these documents include engineering drawings, specification actions, contracts and reports and other important capability. And it connects is workflow management. It connects, streamlines the approval processes and workflows, ensuring that documents and changes progress through the necessary reviews and approvals efficiently. And another critical capability is transmittal management. It connects simplifies the process of sending and receiving documents and drawings, tracking their status and ensuring they're reaching the intended recipients. 00;07;26;17 - 00;07;58;02 Those are just some of the key capabilities of EC can access in a cloud based collaboration platform. Another tool is building information modeling that's referred to as BIM. It's a digital representation of the physical and functional characteristics of a building or infrastructure. So it's going to provide a detailed, accurate 3D model of a project. It has not only the visual aspects, but other information about the project's materials, spatial relationships and more. 00;07;58;24 - 00;08;38;26 It connects, integrates with them tools, facilitating the sharing of 3D models and aiding with design coordination. Another tool probably you would want in your tool chest as a construction engineer is a tool to aid with payment processing. A software like Oracle Tech Store. It simplifies payment processes by automating pay application, Lean waivers and compliance management. In a nutshell, NEXTDOOR helps minimize payment disputes and delays so these Oracle tools cater to the unique needs of construction engineers offering integrated solutions for project management. 00;08;39;10 - 00;09;03;25 Document Management Cost control and leveraging BIM technology. Moreover, Oracle Academy partners with top universities to provide students and faculty with the opportunity to learn and apply these construction engineering tools in an educational setting. This partnership ensures the next generation of construction engineers are well prepared with the skills and software tools they need to excel in the industry. 00;09;04;06 - 00;09;11;05 That leads to my next question. What are some of the career options for students studying construction engineering? 00;09;11;18 - 00;09;40;06 Well, there's a wide range of career options available to someone who studies construction engineering. I'll describe some of the most common and promising career paths. Number one Construction Management. Construction Manager. Construction managers oversee all aspects of construction projects. From planning and budgeting to onsite supervision. They ensure the projects are completed on time within budget and in compliance with quality and safety standards. 00;09;41;18 - 00;10;17;25 Second, Common Career Path is a project engineer. Project engineers work closely with construction managers and they assist in the planning and execution of projects. Now they're all often going to focus on a specific aspect of a project such as scheduling, cost control or quality assurance. Another career path is an estimate. Estimates calculate the cost of materials, labor and equipment needed for construction projects, so they play a crucial role in determining the project's budgets. 00;10;18;09 - 00;10;55;08 And they help companies with contracts and your various engineering positions. I'll describe a couple of them. One is a site engineer. A site engineer is responsible for the onsite management, including coordinating with subcontractors and ensuring safety protocols are followed and monitoring the project progress. And you have a design engineer. A design engineer works on the technical and structural aspects of construction projects, creating detailed plans and specifications for buildings, bridges and other infrastructure. 00;10;57;01 - 00;11;20;28 And then you even have, you know, you have some other, you know, career, such as you could be a construction software specialist with expertise in construction technology, like the tools that we we just discussed a minute ago. Some professionals work a specialist in implementing and using these construction software solutions. So that's just a few of the career options available. 00;11;21;09 - 00;11;28;06 It's a diverse range of opportunities and that often depends on the individual's interests, their skills and their career goals. 00;11;28;24 - 00;11;37;03 So that leads into my next question. What are some skills that a student pursuing a career in construction, engineering or construction management should have? 00;11;37;14 - 00;12;10;20 Well, students pursuing a career in construction engineering should develop a combination of technical, soft and project management skills to be able to excel in the field. So here's just some key skills they should focus on. I would say the top three are technical knowledge project management and communication. So let me talk about technical knowledge. You would want proficiency in construction techniques, methods and materials. 00;12;11;12 - 00;12;50;03 You want to understand structural engineering principles. You want to be familiar with construction, soft wear and building information modeling tools. So a lot of the book knowledge you're getting at the universities, you need that strong base of technical knowledge. Second skill set is project management skills. So this includes planning skills, schedule management, resource management and allocation budgeting, cost estimation, risk management, problem solving, exposure to improve and and training to improve. 00;12;50;03 - 00;13;18;10 Your project management skills are are very valuable skill to have. And I talked about soft skills. Communication skills. Clear and concise. Written and verbal communication. Being able to effectively collaborate with poly disciplinary teams. Being able to effectively communicate with clients and stakeholders. So there are the top three, but there's some others that I'd like to point out. 00;13;20;13 - 00;13;57;24 I think one of the emerging skills you're seeing is environmental and sustainability awareness. So any that you should develop knowledge of green building practices and sustainability principles and just, you know, an overall great skill to have is client customer service. Understand understanding and meeting client expectations, excellent customer service, relationship building skills. So developing these skills will help students become well-rounded construction engineers capable of successfully managing and executing construction projects. 00;13;58;03 - 00;14;06;22 Additional continuous learning and staying updated with industry advancements is essential for long term success in this dynamic field. 00;14;07;03 - 00;14;12;28 So my last question would be if you could give one piece of advice to faculty, your students, what would it be? 00;14;13;12 - 00;14;46;12 Well, Tara, if I could offer one piece of advice to both faculty and students pursuing careers in construction engineering, it would be to embrace lifelong learning and adaptability. The construction industry is constantly evolving with new technologies, sustainable practices, changing regulations. So to excel in this field, it's crucial to stay curious, keep a curious, an open mindset. Continuously seek to expand your knowledge, explore emerging trends in the construction and construction engineering. 00;14;47;00 - 00;15;17;16 You need to embrace technology in there. Be comfortable with technology. It's going to continue to play an increasingly significant role in construction. Familiarize yourself with the construction software that we discussed earlier building information, modeling and other technological advancements. You want to network. You want to build and maintain a strong professional network, collaborate with your peers, industry professionals and other experts to gain insights and stay updated. 00;15;17;17 - 00;15;49;19 Like listening to podcasts like this. You want to be environmentally conscious, be mindful of sustainable and environmentally friendly construction practices. Sustainability is becoming a key focus in the industry, and the last thing I'll say is just remember that learning is a lifelong journey big by continuously seeking knowledge, adapting to change and remaining committed to professional growth. Both faculty and students can thrive in this dynamic or rewarding field of construction engineering. 00;15;50;06 - 00;16;01;09 A big thanks to Bill for giving me an overview of construction engineering. To learn more about Oracle Academy and our resources, visit Academy dot Oracle dot com and subscribe to our podcast. Thanks for listening. 00;16;01;17 - 00;16;10;02 That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.
Artificial intelligence or AI is everywhere from movies to healthcare. In this episode, Tyra Crockett Peirce speaks with Oracle database expert Ace Director, Jim Czuprynski, about how AI is changing the jobs of database administrators and the skills that students need to learn if they want to pursue a career as a DBA.
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Episode Transcript:
00;00;09;03 - 00;00;27;21 Welcome to the Oracle Academy Tech Chat. This podcast provides educators and students in-depth discussions with thought leaders around computer science, cloud technologies and software design to help students on their journey to becoming industry ready technology leaders of the future. Let's get started. 00;00;27;29 - 00;00;57;02 Welcome to Oracle Academy Tech Chat, where we discuss how Oracle Academy helps prepare our next generation's workforce. I'm your host, Tyra Crockett. Artificial Intelligence, or A.I., is everywhere, from the movies to health care. In this episode, I speak with Oracle database expert and ace director Jim Czuprynski about how it is changing the jobs of database administrators and the skills that students need to learn if they want to pursue a career as a DBA. 00;00;57;14 - 00;01;24;03 Jim Czuprynski has been an Oracle DBA for 20 plus years. During that time, he's taught 2000 plus students in the finer points of Oracle database administration. As an Oracle University instructor coauthored four books on Oracle technology and has spoken dozens of times at user group conferences around the world. During that time, he's seen plenty of dramatic changes to the DBA role, especially after autonomous database was introduced. 00;01;24;14 - 00;01;25;09 Welcome, Jim. 00;01;25;19 - 00;01;27;05 Thank you, Tyra. It's great to be here. 00;01;27;11 - 00;01;32;15 To go ahead and get started off, can you give me a little bit about your background and your current job role? 00;01;32;26 - 00;01;56;08 Absolutely. These days, I'm more of a technology advocate, but to be honest, I'm still at heart an Oracle DBA, as I have been for over 20 years. I go back all the weight. Oracle 81723. So as you might imagine, I've seen quite a few changes in the Oracle database and the hardware that it runs on over that time. 00;01;56;18 - 00;02;20;18 These days I'm actually kind of back into some of the really neat features that are built into just about every Oracle database. Especially Oracle 23. See our latest release that's almost ready for general availability. And most platforms. And I really enjoy delving into things like graph and spatial and machine learning and analytics. 00;02;21;18 - 00;02;31;27 So my next question is kind of a little bit along those lines. The Oracle Autonomous Database was launched a few years ago. How does it differ from previous versions? 00;02;32;15 - 00;02;59;12 Wow. The autonomous database, or most of us call it ADB for short. It has features that are already present in the most stable release of the Oracle database. That's typically on premises right inside an organization's local data center or maybe even an on premises data center. But the big difference about autonomous database, first off, is that it runs inside ORCL cloud infrastructure. 00;02;59;19 - 00;03;27;25 And best of all, it runs on, in my opinion, the best hardware ever built for Oracle database workloads. Oracle Exadata, which is an extremely robust environment. It eliminates a lot of performance bottlenecks that are inherent in traditional on premises database hardware and I speak from experience. I built servers back in the day to run Oracle 8 and 9 even 10. 00;03;28;19 - 00;03;35;22 It's not trivial to build a robust database working environment. 00;03;36;09 - 00;03;44;00 So let's kind of go on to AI a little bit. So how is a I used in an autonomous database or ADB? 00;03;44;27 - 00;04;20;19 That's a great question. EDB uses A.I. in many different forms underneath the covers, and it really automates a lot of tasks that a typical DBA doesn't necessarily have the bandwidth to perform everything from something called automatic indexing. We'll talk about that a little bit later, I hope. Things like automatic scaling of CPU's based on demand that it observes automated database patching, and even the ability to automatically identify. 00;04;20;19 - 00;04;47;01 And this is really cool, a poorly executing SQL statement and essentially quarantined them so that somebody from the DevOps slash DB 18 can scrutinize them and go, Why are these things taking up so much bandwidth as the next release? Oracle 23 C rolls out for ADP. There are several new AI controlled features, including and these are really cool. 00;04;47;10 - 00;05;17;29 Automatic transaction rollback, for example, a transaction might be holding a roll lock and blocking a higher priority transaction. You can actually configure that so that that will happen within boundaries automatically. Another thing that's really neat is automatic generation of materialized view, and I worked with projects even in the last 12 to 18 months where materialized views are a tricky thing to build out. 00;05;17;29 - 00;05;50;01 You really have to kind of know what's going on when you build them. Now, in latest release, that's going to happen automatically. By the way, these features I'm talking about, you do have a choice as a DBA to go in there and if necessary, turn them off. I get that question a lot. So, you know, you can definitely deactivate them or essentially turn them down and make them advisors temporarily and then decide whether or not to turn them on in full for your environment. 00;05;51;04 - 00;06;29;04 Perhaps the most intriguing new ADB feature is retrieval augmented generation or RG or RAG for short. RAG employs several large language models or limbs that translate a request for information. For example, find the top five customers within a mere based on their average percent increase in sales for the last six months and simply by prefacing that with the words select a I, I hope you're sitting down as you're listening to this, it literally will build the skill statement for you. 00;06;29;18 - 00;06;49;03 You can even say, just show me what the SQL statement looks like, that you just built your ADP and it'll show it to you. So again, one of the ways people are using A.I. these days, right, is more of a helper. You know, don't don't write it for me, but show me what it would look like if you wrote something like this. 00;06;49;12 - 00;06;55;14 And now you can do that with Rack. That's to me, mind. And amazing. 00;06;56;07 - 00;07;11;16 Then kind of one of the things that always comes up is if we're using AI for all these other things, like, you know, writing SQL statements or like helping all in patch or data, how does it impact our security for our database? 00;07;12;13 - 00;07;35;27 Well, another great question. Like I said, I've been doing it for 20 years as a DBA for two years in all different angles. Right. And one of the first things that if I'm on a DevOps team and someone proposes something, the first thing I'd like to ask is, yeah, great idea. Sounds really radical. Sounds cool. How secure is that? 00;07;35;27 - 00;08;01;02 Right. I want to think about not just what's going to happen at that database level, but all the way up through that seven layer salad, if you will, all the way out to eventually our firewall. Right. Is this going to be solid and secure for application access layers? What if I have a special purpose database inside of my my firewall? 00;08;01;03 - 00;08;32;20 Right. Maybe something specific to spacial or graph or mapping or whatever it is I like to think about How easy is it for a bad actor to do something as simple as SQL injection to gain access to either the data insider databases or even the infrastructure. I mean, a day doesn't go by that we don't hear about some sort of hack or some sort of ransomware attack that has happened because of someone ignoring a business risk. 00;08;33;01 - 00;09;00;27 So one of the things I like about ADB and Rack is that I'm eliminating several possible attack vectors. Right. One of the things that I'm doing with using select a I, and then a question is I'm letting before called database write the query. It's a lot less likely that hopefully at least I haven't seen it do it yet. 00;09;00;27 - 00;09;40;03 I've been playing with it where Rand might go ahead and write some kind of weird thing that would do SQL injection inside my database. I haven't seen that happen and I don't anticipate that would happen. So I really like that aspect of API being implemented and if you will, really within the environs of the database itself. Also, one of the things that is evident to me, having talked to people about all the other kinds of databases, even open source databases, Oracle is well known within the industry as the most secure enterprise database. 00;09;40;20 - 00;10;08;13 That means that even if someone were to gain some sort of access, I have excellent tools at my disposal that will identify that access immediately. And this is a big advantage, especially for the concept of what we call converged database, which I've been talking with several other ace directors and other DBAs and developers for almost three or four years now. 00;10;09;01 - 00;10;44;02 The whole idea is more likely than not if you're building a graph. DB solution heck, even a vector database solution with some of the new things that are coming with the next release of Oracle and maybe even a spatial solution, all these things are already built in to my database environment. If I'm doing a spatial solution, a graph data property graph solution, a machine learning solution, there are dozens of machine learning algorithms built into an Oracle database. 00;10;44;10 - 00;11;05;28 Why would I want to take a risk of having something outside my environs that compose my database and even my computing infrastructure? So from my perspective, a I, especially an oracle, is going to be something that presents a lot fewer security challenges. 00;11;06;22 - 00;11;25;19 That is very comforting to know that. But then one of the things that I hear about AI is moving to ADP, and we've been working with it at least on our team for the past three plus years now has an autonomous database. And then I change the work of a database administrator. 00;11;26;04 - 00;12;00;13 Hmm. Great question. Again, let me go to one example that I kind of alluded to earlier for ADB. There's really two subsets, if you will, main subsets, one called Autonomous Data Warehouse, which, as you might guess, is aimed at data warehousing and data lakes and more very driven type activity. There's also an autonomous transaction processing ADB flavor. I have one up and running right now in the Oracle Cloud infrastructure environment for three years. 00;12;01;08 - 00;12;45;05 I've never had to mess around with all of the things that I would have if I was not running autonomous. So one thing I alluded to earlier, this feature called automatic indexing, it's really specific to autonomous transaction processing or ATP ADB instances. I actually did a test study with the transaction processing counsel's TPC e workload and built out quite a large database with that and then ran the query workload against my database with no indexes, no secondary indexes. 00;12;45;05 - 00;13;11;29 Right. To be more specific, primary key indexes and other things for referential integrity were there, but no indexes that would normally help a query perform better. And it was so neat that automatic indexing, once I turn it on within a very brief period of time, within about I believe 45 minutes had identified critical indices that needed to be added to my database. 00;13;11;29 - 00;13;38;09 And in one case, I remember I had one query that actually performed its improved performance, improved this performance by 1 million times by adding a single index. Now, if you're indeed one of the reasons that's important is we spend a lot of time hearing complaints from our DevOps team or even our end users going, Wow, it's running slow. 00;13;38;09 - 00;14;05;23 Why is it running slow? And one of the typical ways of solving that is slapping index on this particular table, right, to make it run faster. That could have amazingly deleterious effects on transaction processing. So one of the cool things where AI is actually being used underneath the commerce is this automatic indexing tool. It adds only the indexes that need to be index added to the database tables, which is mind blowing. 00;14;05;23 - 00;14;32;01 To me. It was really cool to see another one and this is relatively recent. We've had tools like this since early TNG, which is like 1518 years ago. There was a concept of automatic sequel tuning and this has been around for a quite a bit of time, but in more recent releases, yeah, like ten years ago, this has been around actually, and it's gotten better and better. 00;14;32;10 - 00;14;59;19 Automatic SQL tuning will look at a particular query or DML statement, even and go, No, there's a better execution plan that you should be using and it can either just give you the advice as a DBA and you can go evaluate it, decide to implement it or not or actually and this is really cool what you build confidence in it, right? 00;14;59;19 - 00;15;24;13 I said many of these things are actionable. You can turn it on when you have a certain level of confidence. So the stuff that I used to worry about as a DBA back 20 years ago, heck, even ten years ago, because of the learning algorithms and the AI that are underneath the covers of ADP, I don't need to worry about that stuff I haven't looked at. 00;15;24;13 - 00;15;46;19 And for my DBA colleagues, you'll know what I mean. I haven't looked at it a lot for my ETP database in literally three years because it just was fine. And if you were what I would like to call a helicopter DTA and always hovering over your database, you don't have to do that anymore. So what can you do instead? 00;15;46;21 - 00;16;16;18 Go help your team, build better systems, get in front of your DevOps, pick up efforts to build better systems, worry about things like better data modeling, worry about more efficiently written code from the start instead of, Oh my gosh, that's running terribly and then patching it later making that SQL statement or even application one better. So it's been quite revolutionary, to be honest from my perspective. 00;16;17;10 - 00;16;29;13 So then I'm going to transition to my next question, which is, if I'm a student, what are some of the skills that a student should learn if they're planning on working in a department database? 00;16;29;13 - 00;16;53;22 The one that I would advise for all students who are going to work anywhere near any kind of database these days, structured query language as well, Right? It's funny, I talk with younger people and their eyes kind of roll when I say that the same way my eyes would roll when someone said you should really learn assembler never worked in assembler, never worked in C courses like that was COBOL, right? 00;16;54;05 - 00;17;20;18 But the thing is, that school sequel is going to be around for a long time. Even for the Notorious not only or no SQL databases, you really do need to understand and if not, learn how to write SQL statements because you really need to understand what's going on underneath the covers. And that's just for manipulating and retrieving data from or inside your database. 00;17;20;28 - 00;17;51;14 And then the next thing I think that's really important is to think about how data relates to itself. As we talk about these days, especially things like graph databases where we're really mapping out not so much the fact that this invoice has a bunch of line items, right, but that this customer, because they purchased this item, influenced another customer who influenced another customer, who influenced another customer to purchase that same item. 00;17;51;23 - 00;18;16;17 So things like property graphs and vector databases, these things are really coming to the fore. So learn a skill for sure, understand it so that when you see it, you can interpret it and understand what's going on because it's simply not going to go away. There have been movements to try to kill it, but I don't know how much longer it's going to be around. 00;18;16;17 - 00;18;22;21 But from what I'm seeing, it's going to be around for a long time. Why not learn it? Why not master it? 00;18;23;07 - 00;18;42;29 I do want to add one follow up question to that is what about with Chat GTP and how it can write cycle statements? Should I still learn how to do SQL if I've got like my modern language processing skills or some of these language tools coming up, is it still really important to learn like the basics of sequel? 00;18;44;02 - 00;19;11;00 Absolutely. You know, sequels really simple that it's elements. It's about 20 verbs, and that's really it's super simple. And once you understand it and more importantly, that you understand it's set based, right, which is different. It's the Venn diagram stuff that all of us probably struggle from or through in grade school and even maybe even high school. Right? 00;19;11;04 - 00;19;38;20 But set theory is at the heart of effective processing of data, right? So it really comes in handy, number one, because that's one of the most effective ways to handle relationships between data. And secondly, I really hate to tell you this, sooner or later somebody's going to say, C'mere here, here's some SQL from 20 years ago, I'll fix it. 00;19;38;23 - 00;20;06;05 I'll figure out what's wrong with it and enhance it. You're going to end up having to look at it anyway minus will learn it now. Right. And as long as we're talking about Chartbeat and these other things, like I mentioned, us select a AI statement that you can use inside Adbe right now. You can use that if you want to learn how to build really good sequel statements, right? 00;20;06;05 - 00;20;30;18 So you can use it, if you will, as sort of a modeling tool so that you can see how a really good optimizer, a really good tool, builds well-written sequel statements. So I'm not saying throw it away, I'm just saying make sure you're using the right flavor of cheap, which by the way, the air to a rack is sort of built on. 00;20;30;18 - 00;20;42;28 Right? A good elements of it, many elements of it are built on, I believe Chachi beat 3.5. So you're not throwing away anything you were learning there. It's more synergistic learning, if anything. 00;20;43;10 - 00;20;53;25 That that was actually really helpful. And so now to my very last question, If you could give one piece of advice to faculty, your students, what would it be? 00;20;54;03 - 00;21;15;27 The advice that I didn't listen to when I was younger is the advice I'd like to give you. I spent my time believing that if I can master the code, that's all I'll need to be successful. And boy, was I an idiot because I had people, my mentor would go, You know, Jim, you're a really good coder. You're really good at what you do. 00;21;15;27 - 00;21;38;12 But to be frank, you're really upset. People don't interface with them very well. You're a little you come off as arrogant, you come off as mean. You don't seem to really care about people as much. You should really concentrate on making those things out, making those things better. What do you know? Oh, my gosh. I wish I had spent time doing that. 00;21;38;26 - 00;22;13;26 I really believe that. Secondly, what I found and this is an interesting piece, I mentor quite a few younger folks, even folks that are leaving the U.S. military in the Navy right now. My biggest piece of advice is network, network, network. You've got to build a network of humans because to be honest, almost every single opportunity that I've had, whether it's been within a company or maybe even a new job or a new opportunity, has come from 90% of the time. 00;22;14;04 - 00;22;44;04 Someone I knew it in my network. I wish I had built that network out much sooner. Again, you have a lot better tools these days. You've got social media and LinkedIn and all other kinds of tools. We didn't really have some of those 40 years ago, but there's no excuse not to build that network out. Seriously, that's twice as important, soft skills wise, than even learning how to write sequel. 00;22;44;12 - 00;23;00;10 I would actually say I agree with that. My very first job out of college was actually a neighbor that I knew that I, in fact said I was sitting next to him at a wedding reception and we were talking about how I just graduated college. I was looking for a job and he's like, Oh, I've got a job. 00;23;00;22 - 00;23;27;20 I might come apply for it. And that's that's exactly how I got my very first job out of college was through networking. So I wholeheartedly espouse that as well. So a big thank you to Jim for speaking with me on an autonomous database and the changing roles of a DBA. To learn more about Oracle Academy and our resources, visit Academy dot Oracle dot com and subscribe to our podcast. 00;23;27;20 - 00;23;28;16 Thanks for listening. 00;23;29;04 - 00;23;37;19 That wraps up this episode. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for the next Oracle Academy Tech Chat podcast.
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