Note: No dogs were actually kicked in the creation of this column.

 Oracle's Mid-Term Report Card

Well, folks, it's mid-term time. Time for a report card on Oracle's acquisition of PeopleSoft. There hasn't been a take-over this large (or troubled) since HP bought Compaq. As far as I can tell, the only difference here is that Larry isn't about to go the way of Carly, no matter how badly things go.

 The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

"Performance on the Cheap" got me thinking about the not-so-cheap aspects of PeopleSoft project. And the most egregious offenders are easily identified: next to the PeopleSoft Support Contract, the biggest waste of money is consultants. Here’s how some of my clients have run their implementations.

Years ago, there was a PBS series called The Day the Universe Changed by James Burke. Each show was about a single technical innovation, and the long-reaching (and sometimes unintended) consequences of the invention. I’m an engineer, so I was enthralled with the show and its conclusions: with one single invention, I could impact people’s lives for generations to come! Awesome. Scary.

 Another Upgrade Column

I wasn’t very happy when the publisher told me the subject for this issue: Upgrades. I was like, "I already did a column on Upgrades". Then I realized – that’s the point. Upgrades are as frequent as columns about upgrades – one every eighteen months.

 The Big Lie

The check's in the mail. You don't look fat in those jeans. Microsoft Office dominates because it's the best software. PeopleSoft's only criterion for supporting a database is SQL-89 compliance. You get the point.

 Report Not Found

It’s interesting how reporting is often viewed as an afterthought by IT folks. OK, it’s not glamorous, and it’s not exciting, but to a large number of users, it’s often their only view of the system. To them, the system is the report. My light-bulb moment came conducting interviews at one client. The user was asked to describe their job. “I call up the 314 report (published on-line to save paper), and look for my projects. They’re usually somewhere around page 1200. I print of that page, then cross-check those numbers with the ones on the 420 report. My projects are usually around page 220. If the numbers don’t foot, then I look at the detail behind the 314, the 942.” This person actually defined their job in terms of the reports.

 Unachievable Perfection

There's an old joke from Great Britain about "the National Health" (their system of socialized medicine). A hospital administrator is being interviewed about the challenges of his job, and he says: "the effective and efficient administration of this facility would be ameliorated if it weren't full of sick people". That's the feeling I get from PeopleSoft Security Administrators sometimes: Security would be much easier if no one had access to anything.

 PeopleSoft, Show Us Some Love

In my article Enlightened Performance I discuss some of the techniques for set-based processing, and how PeopleSoft does it in a platform-independent manner. Now, the horror stories.

 CI and Portal Under your Tree

My theory is that the web and the ERP groups are separate warring tribes in most IT shops. The only thing they agree on is that they're both higher in the IT food chain than Desktop Support.

 The Case for a Technical Summit

Ever wonder why the executable for Application Designer is called PSIDE.EXE? Well, the "internal" name for Application Designer in the Tools group was Integrated Development Environment, hence IDE. Then, the marketing folks took over, and we ended up getting something called Application Designer.

 Death, Taxes, and PeopleSoft Upgrades

Well it's May, and I still haven't done my taxes yet. I filed the extension, which bought me four months. It's crazy too, because I have another big refund this year. Thanks to TurboTax, it isn't really that hard to do them either. It's just getting the time to sit down, collect everything together, and actually do the work. Sound familiar?

 Getting Fat off PeopleSoft

I must be getting old. I'm starting to get nostalgic for the way things used to be. I start sentences with, "When I was a lad". Yes, I use the word "lad". Remember the good old days when we had client-server computing? What ever happened to that?

 Bring Back Client/Server

When I first started in the PeopleSoft consulting space, it was 1994. The scandal was Whitewater and greed was all the rage. Tools was 3.2, Financials was 2.2, and the icon for Record Editor was an LP.