Examining the ongoing challenges of delivering high-quality, value-added ERP services in Higher Education.


Monday, December 31, 2012

2012 in Review

Another year ends; time for the obligatory re-cap. (The equally obligatory preview to arrive here later this week, once we change the calendar over).

I set a lot of personal and professional resolutions this year and on the whole I'm pretty proud of the year I had. Blew past goals related to reading (30 books; the best probably George R.R. Martin's A Dance with Dragons and cooking (30 new recipes; no grand victories this year) and running. Fell a bit short of some other fitness goals... But there is always next year!

In terms of professional goals, with this post I will have reached my somewhat pathetic resolution of 26 blogs... Not a great showing, though I did better on Twitter, posting around 750 tweets and adding 100 followers (roughly... I misplaced my starting counts). Enjoyed four highly productive conferences and established many new connections; also experienced the wonder that is the Gaylord Opryland, learned that Indianapolis is a solid conference venue, and commuted to/from the Moscone Center using cable cars and a Muni pass.

My group accomplished amazing things--for which I claim little credit. We upgraded to PeopleSoft Enterprise 9.1 in April and Oracle E-Business Suite R12 in November. Completed two software selection projects in the research compliance space and went live with one in November. Delivered hundreds of new features and enhancements across all our systems and did our best to support the Harvard administrative community (and by extension the teaching, research, and learning mission. I am extremely proud to say that we executed every major initiative we planned for the year! Remarkable stuff.

I personally spent much of the year on Business Intelligence. With my hands on OBIEE, building reports (and blogging about some findings), training my team, installing VirtualBox demos, defining strategies, securing funding, interviewing stakeholders, running demonstrations, reading literature, buying accelerators, and evangelizing, proselytizing, selling. Everyone in this business needs to get on the analytics train or get run over by it--having realized that, I decided this was a place for me to immerse in 2012. It has been fun.

In lock-step with BI, we made aggressive moves into Agile principles and techniques. We are far from being mature enough to call it "Scrum" though we throw the word around a lot. Big investments early in 2012 were followed by big experiments later in 2012, with a small BI team cranking through four sprints in the fall, delivering nearly 50 reports and dashboards! Not bad for our first try!

It has been a tremendous year; I look forward to spending the rest of the day reflecting on all these successes before plotting another slate of resolutions!

Happy New Year!

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