The "clouds" continued to pour rain in San Francisco today, but that did nothing to dampen the spirit of Oracle OpenWorld. Our customers and partners continued to make their way to several sessions across Moscone Center. I was at an interesting session this morning, that was primarily customer-run. It was "Best Practices and Challenges with a Global Rollout of Siebel Sales" in Moscone West.
The customers present were Sabre Travel Networks, UPS, Agilent Technologies and CSL Behring, so 4 different customers from 4 different verticals, some had been customers for the past 7 years to one that just went live YESTERDAY. They had common suggestions for a successful implementation.
- Standardize on tools and languages across your geographies
- Keep customization to the minimum- your application the more successful it will be for you
- Increase user adoption by involving the users during the design process, that way they will be ready to embrace it when you do the actual rollout
- Find people to "help", like others who have been through the same process before, partner with the Oracle community-Oracle team as well as other customers
- Reduce the number of time spent on training, try to implement online or regional training, it is a big cost saving.
Now for Day 3 tomorrow hoping for fewer clouds...
