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Siebel – Why Upgrade? – Part II

Nitin Jain — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 20:03:20 +0000

This is a continuation of the post, “Siebel – Why Upgrade? – Part I”.

Here are some more..

3) Talk about Performance and Efficiency. Though I agree that the new software generally runs with a higher efficiency with most of the old bugs closed, the higher performance almost always comes at a cost of higher Hardware Configuration as well.

The new softwares are, however, seen to be efficient to handle larger volumes of data, or to churn out decisions on the basis of the humongous data store. Maybe, the old system didn’t support it in the first place to make it possible, forget about efficiency!

4) With each higher version, I have personally noted that Siebel Data Model becomes more and more complex. This in turn means more and more universally agreed standards now form a part of the Siebel CRM Installation. This helps a Customer become more aware of the global standards that he may introduce in his organization, if not already there, or to align his Business Process accordingly.

Another fall-out of this, is higher Regulatory Compliance. Now, how many times have I heard Customers going in for implementation of packaged Applications owing to requirements to map to the local Regulatory Requirements?!

Ask yourself the following questions whenever you are pondering over a Software Upgrade:
1) Do I really need an upgrade?
2) What is it in my business that my current implementation is not able to solve?
3) What are the clear Business benefits that the new system brings to the table? Are they relevant to me?
4) If I must upgrade, is my existing IT Infrastructure upto the demands of the new version Installation?
5) How much time do I have before my IT Support for my current version runs out?

Plan ahead, to be ahead.

Feel free to add, or suggest. I am leaving the ground open. Cheers!

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Siebel – Why Upgrade? – Part I

Nitin Jain — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:13:39 +0000

Hi all,

I am back to Siebel Technical Stuff after a long time. I recently worked as a part of a Siebel Upgrade Project for one of my clients.

Siebel Upgrade is a version update methodology supported by Oracle. The Customer can easily upgrade from an older version of Siebel to a higher version.

There is generally a very wide range of reasons as to why people may decide to upgrade. These may range from the obvious, to the obscure, and to truly blasphemous to some CRM Consultants. But, I guess this is one very important aspect which keeps the IT Industry rolling!!

Well, amongst many others, following are some of the popular reasons for which Organizations may decide to upgrade their existing Siebel, or other IT Software Installations.

1) This particular customer of ours very serious about the system running as smoothly as possible. Following this methodology, he banks on a lot of support from Microsoft and Oracle to avoid any issues in Production going forward. The issue is, Microsoft is phasing out support for Windows Server 2003 soon. To make matters worse, Siebel 7.5 is not certified to run on MS Windows Server 2008, the next logical step.

Solution: Upgrade to nearest higher version of Siebel which is supported on the new MS OS. The one you are using is on fire right now.

2) Generally, there is a whole lot of new functionality that Oracle introduces with each new version of Siebel CRM. The customers may want to make use of some of these new functionalities. The Business Benefit may imply a case strong enough to justify the extra cost of moving up to the new version.

Who knows, a Customer may just be able to eliminate a buggy Custom Module altogether by making use of some new functionality provided OOB in a higher version!

Wait for the remaining part of the post. What do you think could be the other reasons?

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Managing Intellectual Properties

Nitin Jain — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:24:45 +0000

hmmmmm.. Interesting!! Tell me honestly, have you ever thought of this aspect?

A very warm Hi to all the readers of my blogs here. I am expected to move in as a Business Analyst for an upcoming opportunity in NY State shortly. As a normal practice, I sat with the existing Technical/ non-Techie people of the team today trying to understand the application. Mark my words, it’s a complex maze of views, screens, integrations, lots of known / hitherto unknown IDs, and definitely, very colourful. I am sure it must be as per the client requests and a baby of the pretty abused term, the “Agile Methodology”!!

All in all, the application seemed very interesting. A thought struck my mind when going through this magnificent piece of art. I could see so many non-vanilla features in the application that I got thinking, “hey, are we tracking these anywhere?”. My point is, any application successfully going live (;-)), has an entire hive of people breaking their heads over it. The requirement could be as absurd as, hey, we don’t like the colour of the default application. Can you just make it just a little more greenish towards the top right?!! Don’t get me wrong, some really interesting and useful ones too!!

There are a lot of people working all through the chain, the developer’s slogging it out and making it technically possible in the end, the solution designers coming out with innovative solutions, the Business Analysts painting all kinds of rosy pictures to grab more and more business, totally unmindful of the poor people behind him when he is making wild commitments, or the business himself, who doesn’t really understand the technicality, but demands just out of intuition and his expected ROIs. Everyone is adding value to the entire process somehow at each step, one way or the other. In the process, they are coming out with some really nice features in the application which could be added as resouces in a separate repository, and pulled out to benefit the next implementation (yeah, I know. This is the shoddiest part of all. After all, this is the part which doesn’t add revenues in the short term to the company’s bottomline!!).

Well, if it is really innovative, and you really follow it up to lodge patents or something similar, you have actually created an Intellectual Property for the organization on the whole. So many of such innovations and IPs come forward everyday in an IT savvy organization. My question is, do you track them? How? What help do you take from IT for IT related IPs?

I understand that GAAP still doesn’t recognize them as Assets in Advanced Accounting, but all the same, the Reported and Actual Accounts are always differentiated.

A simple Googling brought up so many options for Software Solutions to manage these,
IP Menu
Decipher
Mindmatters
Protecode
Anaqua

In fact, a new term, IAM, or the Intellectual Assets Management has been coined for a broader coverage. I guess this is enough food for thought for the day. I will follow this up with my closing comments on what I feel of the entire subject.

Meanwhile, do feel free to put in your thoughts if there is anything you do in your workplace to build up such resources.

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