Issue #54 – 21st August 2013
News and Latest Developments
Queensland government locks out IBM 
As a result of the ill-fated Queensland Health Payroll system – which will cost taxpayers AU$1.2 billion and needs to be replaced – IBM has been banned from entering into any new state government contracts.
PeopleTools 8.53.06 patch released
Oracle have released the .06 patch of PeopleTools 8.53. A quick scan of the release notes shows that it contains a lot of fixes for PUM (Update Manager), IE10 and PTF (Test Framework) in particular (Support Login Required).
Open World
Oracle OpenWorld 2013 Visualised
Yury Chadour has posted an infographic on his blog which gives an idea of the size and scale of Oracle’s flagship annual conference.
Technical
Change Assistant Crashes after Entering Passwords
The Smart Panda has a blog post that starts off sounding quite niche – about a particular set of circumstances in Change Assistant – but the resolution is a good reminder of one of the stranger limitations in PeopleSoft.
Merging PDFs in BIP results in Blank Pages
There’s a useful post on the Capital-IT blog detailing a scenario (and it sounds like it would be fairly common for PeopleTools 8.53 clients) where merging PDFs results in all pages beyond the first being produced blank.
PeopleSoft and the Leap Motion 
Succeeder Duncan has tried navigating PeopleSoft with one of the new Leap Motion controllers.
Reading
Has two decades of outsourcing cut costs at HMRC?
Succeeder Jacki spotted this analysis of whether the massive program of outsourcing embarked upon by the UK Inland Revenue has delivered the cost savings expected.
That’s just a hack someone put together… 
We love Seth Godin, and some of us were lucky enough to hear him speak during the CX event at last years’ OOW. This is probably one of the shortest blog posts I’ve read in a while, but it’s certainly one of the most inspirational.
The Secret To Unleashing Genius
How do you unleash inventiveness and creativity at work? An interesting round-up of how to encourage it, which companies do it well, and why having an innovative CEO might not be good. It includes some great quotes from two of the most innovative leaders in the IT industry currently – Jeff Bezos and Marc Benioff.
Training
Yury Chadour pointed out the above link on his blog. Over the last couple of years the advisor webcasts had tailed off a touch, but Oracle seem to be regularly providing new recordings now (Support Login Required).
Watching
The NSA Prism scandal will have some executives questioning the wisdom of putting data in the cloud, however this article adds some perspective. Also, Larry Ellison has no doubts on its merits. (Scroll to the bottom for an interesting 7min video interview with Larry on the subject).
We’re quite excited about this at Succeed Towers as this is the first time – to our knowledge – that recently acquired Endeca has been used within PeopleSoft. It’s a peek into the near-ish future, where we have access to both structured and unstructured data from within our data query tools.
And Finally…
A great post with some staggering charts. As a British company Map 3 is a shock to us, whereas some are just strange (Map 39).
It seems that one of the oft-cited benefits of working for Google – the 1 day a week of ‘side project’ time – is no longer easy to get. Whilst it sounds wonderful in theory, and did spawn some great products (eg. gmail and adsense) we did always think of this Dilbert comic when it was mentioned.
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