My Top Picks at ODTUG Kscope17

With ODTUG Kscope17 only a few short months away, it’s time to start looking at the schedule. I'm also wrapping up my second (and final) year as EPM/BI Content Chair, a role with which I’m privileged and grateful to have been entrusted. This means that I did already review every single session on the schedule, but that was back during content selection (late 2016) which seems a long, long time ago. So now I get to rediscover a lot of content that caught my eye the first time around. As always, I’ll realize that I want to attend many more sessions than there are session slots (thankfully, I’ll have the Kscope17 recordings). My top picks this year fall into one of several different categories:

The “What’s New” Topics.

I like to catch all I can, especially those in my primary areas of expertise. Sometimes this means sessions given by Oracle Product Management. The involvement of the Product and Development teams is one of the things I have always valued most about ODTUG Kscope. This year, it especially means Essbase Cloud - I’m speaking on this myself, but I’m also looking forward to sessions from Ronnie Tafoya, Glenn Schwartzberg and John Maloney, because this is so new that I’m fascinated to get a second (or third, or fourth) opinion.

Then there are the “That’s Really Neat” sessions.

These sessions cover either something I’ve never seen before, or doing something that I didn’t realize was possible with a tool that I do know, or otherwise pushing boundaries in some way. To give some examples (definitely not exhaustive!): Ron Moore will be talking about the officially - currently - unsupported use of Hybrid Mode with Planning; Martin Neuliep will present his technique to perform elimination calculations in Essbase, and Michelle Kolbe will be giving a session on R that sounds like it’ll significantly advance my currently limited understanding.

The Real-World Problem Sessions. 

Sessions that relate technical challenges to a real-world problem are perennially popular, and the third set of presentations that really jumped out at me this year are the ones where the actual use-case of the technology is unusual or interesting. Jerome Francoise will be talking about a system in use at Eurocontrol (the European agency coordinating air traffic control), combining ODI, OBIEE and D3 for visualization. Jerry Ward and Kevin McNelis will talk about predicting future asset values (coincidentally, also airplane-related) with a system that includes data scraping, R, Oracle Data Visualization. Elizabeth Ferrell will be discussing Kroger’s gigantic 25,000-user Essbase implementation, including drill-through to source systems via Dodeca. And who could resist the opportunity to relive the halcyon days of the 2016 US Presidential election, as Michael Rainey analyzes related social media activity with GoldenGate, ODI for Big Data and Kafka?

Finally, to Get a Little “Meta.”

There are two sessions that relate back to Kscope itself in different ways. First, Danny Bryant and Natalie Delemar will host a panel discussing how to put together a compelling abstract that will appeal to the Kscope audience and get through the incredibly competitive content selection process. Whether you have previously had sessions accepted or declined, or are considering (and you should!) sharing your experiences next year, this one should not be missed. And second, Tim Young is giving a presentation entitled “How to Succeed in Planning Without Really Trying: Practical Application of Past Kscope Sessions.” No one can come away from any Kscope without something they are going to find practical application the can use. I love the concept of a presentation that shows how the ideas and inspiration from conference sessions translate to real value “back home.”

 

 

 

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