Review of 2012

As the new year starts, I thought I'd just review a few of the highlights (well, for me anyway) of 2012.

In March I was invited with 2 colleagues to go to Redwood Shores to learn all about Fusion HCM.  The plan was that we could then return to the UK and begin to assist Oracle University with training students in some newly released Fusion courses.  I wasn't sure what to expect, but came back inspired by the new application and eager to begin delivering training.

I didn't have to wait long as within a couple of weeks, we were straight out to Paris to train a large consulting firm which had won one of the first Fusion HCM implementation projects in Europe.  We spent 3 long weeks covering all aspects of Fusion HCM and had tremendous help from Oracle product managers and developers.  This was to be the first of an ever increasing number of courses to deliver.

In April, I went to Collaborate 2012 and was intrigued by the number of people talking about Fusion Applications but not really showing much understanding of the subject.  As a consequence, my colleague Richard Atkins and I set up a LinkedIn group (Fusion HCM Interest Group) with the aim of promoting articles about actual facts on Fusion HCM!  This turned out to be more successful than we anticipated and by the end of 2012 we had nearly 500 members.

In June I was back in Las Vegas at OHUG.  By now, Fusion HCM was becoming a much hotter topic and there were many good presentations on the subject, particularly from Oracle.

Following the conference theme, I was back in the US for OpenWorld in October and followed the announcements about Fusion Applications with much interest. 

All the time, we were delivering more frequent Fusion HCM courses, and by the end of the year we had more than 30 under our belts both in the UK and EU.  It was interesting to see the course membership change over time, beginning with internal Oracle people (yes, they needed training too) on to big consultancies and now seeing more customers.

In November, I was at the Oracle European HCM Summit and learnt a lot about the progress of the project in PAris I referred to in an earlier paragraph.  It was fun to see who the 'theory' we taught had been put into practice. 

Finally, December brought the UKOUG conference where I spoke about Fusion Functional Setup Manager and attended many really useful presentations on Fusion HCM. It was good to see the numbers of people interested steadily growing.

Of course, I mustn't forget the UKOUG HCM SIGs which we run 3 times a year.  During 2012, we began to see more Fusion topics coming forward and Taleo too.  More to come in 2013.

So what might 2013 bring?  Well, I'm already booked to go to Collaborate in Denver where I'll be delivering 2 presentations on Fusion HCM; OHUG in Dallas in June (presentations submitted)  and OpenWorld (presentations being formulated in my head!).  So, looks like another interesting year!

Happy New Year!