Rob Smyth's Blog

In Public Sector, there seems to be a common thread brewing in requirements.  Good governance requires that any documents that are handled should also have some "chain of custody" applied to them.  This idea seems to have taken off in light of the work done in the Finance industry and Sarbanes Oxley.

It is an area that Oracle is well placed for due to two recent acquisitions:

Siebel Public Sector vertical record all tasks and activities against service requests or cases or contacts (or even evidence for investigations) and any changes are listed in an audit trail.  This can then be integrated with a document/content management system.  With our purchase of Stellent, Oracle has full Content Management solutions available as well.

These two components put together create a good solution for showing compliance to auditors on what papers (digitized or physical) have been moved by whom and any changes to the associated data.

I am often asked, what exactly does a Sales Consultant do?
This question comes from friends, my children, my wife; and rather scarily from colleagues.

Well today, I have just finished for the week and I thought I would reprise the type of activity I have done:

Monday - Early train to London

• Meet with a partner to discuss Siebel CRM in the context of a larger SI programme.
• Internal discussions on upcoming release of software
  
• Debate on whether I should be going to Kazakhstan
• Discussion on best method for modelling a customer's objects in Case Management

Tuesday - Customer Recruitment meeting cancelled.  So I am free to:

• Review notes on an internal training course
• Discuss my accounts with Sales Consultants in Technology and Enterprise Applications
• Determine last minute scope of solution for a customer across CRM, ERP and Technical Product plus Consulting Implementation and possible use of On Demand
• Produce revise cost models for a proposal

Wednesday - Off to Birmingham

• Follow up from costs discussion of the previous evening
• Brief team member on three customer opportunities
• Take a handover of an integrated web service demo for the following week
• Prep for Thursday meeting in Liverpool
• Check expenses have been paid
• In the evening off to Chester to see another team member appear in his new Band

Thursday - Liverpool

• A customer meeting to discuss Case Management and Call Centres.
• Beforehand a couple of technical questions were raised.  So a few calls around my old team (I used to work in technology for years) to get the up to date answers
• Drop a colleague off somewhere close to Liverpool Lime Street Train Station
• Off home, continue to work on cost proposals

Friday - Manchester

• Into my local office (first time in February - lucky it was a leap year)
• Set voicemail.
• Catch up on all actions that I haven't managed to get done.
• Preparation meeting for next week's customer meetings
• Book travel.
• Check I have been paid - it is the end of the month.
• Fill in my time sheet, making sure I record the write type of effort against the right account, hopefully with an opportunity.

Reading this back, it is obvious I like to work for my company!  The variety is quite clear.  Next thing I need to do is clone myself so I can get some free time.  However here is some of the things I did in my free time:

Delayed watch of The Last Enemy (Identity Conspiracy Theory)
Read a few chapters of Willliam Gibson's Neuromancer.

So even with my leisure time, I failed to get away from work as I look after the Home Office and work with computers.