Whenever friends and family talk about a bad day they had at work, I recall the most exhausting day of work I ever had.
Back in April of 2007, my teammates and I ran conversions from one inventory management software to another, executing scripts, testing, writing, and rewriting, for what turned out to be 33 consecutive hours.
We eventually decided to roll everything back, get some much-needed sleep, and do it again a couple of months later. That time it ended successfully.
My kids hate this bedtime story, but it makes for a great icebreaker with IT veterans, who always understand what I'm talking about.
The truth is that every organization has these battle scars. Sometimes they’re from a paper cut and sometimes from a compound fracture. It all depends on which system was impacted, how badly, and who’s still around the IT espresso machine to tell that particular story.
I can tell from experience that the most devastating stories came from ERP systems, which are usually the heart of the organization, most notably the financials, procurement, and supply chain modules.
As with all these cases, we just didn't test enough. Not broad enough, not deep enough.
Nowadays, however, everything is different.
We live in another era. An era that promises “five nines” (99.999% uptime), and every service outage or bug in production has a much more profound impact, from both an operational and a public relations point of view. In B2C products, it takes a single mistimed minute of downtime to make a customer look into a competitor and potentially churn.
But why am I writing this in an Oracle blog?
The transition to Oracle Cloud SaaS promises many advancements and continuous innovation, as long as you’re implementing it right, testing it end-to-end and reevaluating which new opt-in features you want to enable in the upcoming release. You also need to make sure that your end users and key users conduct thorough user acceptance tests (UAT) in a system that they still do not fully comprehend.
There are no two ways about it: Cloud migrations are greenfield projects. Re-implementations. And a heavy majority of end users and ERP business analysts will need to learn the new system from scratch, as this is also an era of best practices, when customizations are few and far between, developed separately in PaaS.
Another symptom of this era are the new standards of collaboration. You can no longer fill up a meeting room with computers and end users, slap a "UAT" sign on the door, and have them run through the entire business process in one fell swoop. Today’s remote work trend means much less travel and much more working from home, sometimes hand in hand with off-shore teams.
Organizations today need SaaS-based test management tools that enable better collaboration, improved traceability, defect management, and real-time test monitoring.
Not just for the cloud migration itself, but also for ongoing changes that are being requested everyday by the business users, and for Oracle's quarterly updates.
Some of these tools, such as Panaya's platform, also have built-in automatic documentation of test evidence, that can be leveraged as user manuals for training and onboarding new users. Or testing workflows, where different business users collaborate on testing the same business process. This methodology removes testing bottlenecks and make sure no one person needs to learn the entire business process beforehand.
In closing, Oracle’s Fusion applications suite contains great value for organizations, but the migration itself should be geared towards business process simplification and taking advantage of the vendor’s ongoing innovation.
And CIOs know this. They prefer to avoid customizations entirely, as those are expensive to maintain and entangle the organization to a specific solution. Today, CIOs want to stay nimble and flexible with their company’s application stack. They also want to be informed, so focused real-time reporting and dashboarding is crucial.
In their day-to-day activities, organizations will need to make sure their configurations, localizations and tailor-made reports are not being broken by new or changing configurations or quarterly releases while also enjoying the latest features Oracle has to offer.
Sure, telling someone that you worked for 33 hours straight is a nifty little anecdote, but I'd still prefer if that didn't happen at all.
The story about the time I was mistakenly sent to a proctologist for an ingrown toenail is a better icebreaker anyway.
About the Author:
Roy Kidron is an 18-year Oracle e-Business Suite veteran, with experience as a project manager, development manager, tech lead and developer. As a product manager in Panaya, Roy leads the Oracle domain product portfolio, including all inbound and outbound product activities.