Oracle Diggs New Ideas
The "three amigos" of Oracle AppsLab - Paul Pedrazzi, Jake Kuramoto, Rich Manalang - have done Oracle a great service with their internally deployed "Oracle Idea Factory". (AppsLab is already required reading BTW, and not just for Oracle wonks. Thought leadership is in high evidence there.)
With this service, product managers across the org are suggesting new Oracle Apps features and functionality, rating other suggestions, and offering comments as well, with the whole enchilada being marked up for tagging. (Clarification since initial post: Idea Factory is specifically designed to gather ideas for building Web 2.0-like features into Fusion Applications.)
We of course have already seen similar customer-facing services from Dell and Salesforce.com, but in some ways, this app has even more credibility, because the role of a product manager is to aggregate customer requirements over a wide sample. (This is not to say that a single customer's input is not valuable; only that the Oracle approach may be a more efficient approach for the purpose of driving internal development.)
Looking forward to more results from the AppsLab skunkworks. In fact, I'm going to look into a podcast recording with these guys.
