On March 7 Financials Support Services (FSS) and Finance and Accounting (F&A) hosted a discussion with Rebekah Jackson from Oracle Corporation. Jackson is vice president of Strategy & Product Management for Oracle. After attending the Higher Education User Group Alliance conference, which was held in Orlando this year, she graciously extended her visit to address some of the group’s questions. Topics included the following:

• What happened to Oracle’s development of the Fusion application as a best-of-breed combination of Oracle and PeopleSoft products? Jackson explained that even as Fusion was being developed, technology was moving rapidly towards cloud computing and a software as a service (SaaS) model. Oracle made a strategic decision to develop its own cloud offerings in lieu of continued development of Fusion.
• Does Oracle plan to create a reporting layer of standard financials data? The FSS team has observed a significant burden on end users who consistently report that it is time consuming to gather and compile financial data to present to decision-makers. Jackson responded that Oracle has provided pivot grids and other tools to help ease the reporting challenge but acknowledged that those tools may not be sufficiently robust to satisfy the most demanding financial reporting requirements. The ultimate answer is probably a financials data warehouse that increases user access to financial data.
• What is Oracle’s perception of the adoption rate of the Fluid interface? Jackson noted adoption rates approaching 50 percent and highlighted Advent Health here in Orlando as a local Oracle customer who has successfully implemented the new interface.
• The team reported end-user challenges dealing with PeopleSoft pages that do not efficiently accept data entry. This, in turn, causes delays in routine processing of vouchers, for example. Jackson asked to be sent examples of pages that exhibit that data entry problem and indicated her team would review them.
• Some of the navigation collections in UCF Financials have a bug that prevents related content from displaying. Because FSS uses related content extensively to provide helpful information, the issue is significant for UCF Financials users. Jackson promised to have her team evaluate the problem when she returns.

Jackson’s visit to Finance and Accounting was a valuable opportunity for the FSS and F&A teams to meet and interact with a senior Oracle executive who is directly responsible for the product that they use and support. The teams appreciated the time she took to meet with one of her customers as she visited the Orlando area.